One of the designs I recently had to work on needed a narrow width header in a sidebar with a large number on the left side of it and the header text vertically centered to the right.

If you've worked with CSS for awhile you've probably ran into the same issue as everyone else. Vertical alignment with universally supported css is not easy. There are multiple techniques you can use to make something vertically aligned but there are drawbacks to each.

For my use case I couldn't use any of the normal tricks I'd use. I didn't know the exact height of the number and I needed the header text on the right to wrap properly. So I couldn't use a typical technique involving line-height, absolute positioning, or padding.

You probably already know about HTML5's <input type="number">. Which if supported by a browser displays a form input optimized for inputting numbers. Whether that means an up/down spinner or an optimized keyboard.

However iOS' standard behavior for the number input isn't that ideal. By default iOS will display a standard keyboard slightly modified with a row of numbers at the top. This isn't ideal as you don't need the alphabetic keys and iOS already has a full numeric keypad it could use for the input instead. For reference, other mobile OS such as Android already display their numeric keypad when focusing a number input.

A html5doctor article article went over this, pointed out a trick by Chris Coyier using <input type="text" pattern="[0-9]*"> in which the pattern forces iOS to use it's numeric keypad, and also mentioned HTML5's inputmode.

Recently I re-looked over licenses and license related posts for a project at work. And after reading an old blog post on being sure to pick any license I thought about my blog posts. I've included code snippets in them sometimes for others to use and never declared any permissions for them.

Now the copyright of these simple functional snippets is relatively debatable and any license at all (even the tiny MIT license) is really too much for snippets. Frankly requiring attribution for any of them is relatively unwarranted.

So I've decided to go back and tag most of the code snippets on my blog releasing them as CC-0. You're free to use those snippets in any code you want and you don't even have to include attribution for them. ((;) Though if you feel like including a code comment next to your use of them pointing back to where you found them I'd be flattered.))

I've completely rewritten the back and front ends of my website.

My old website theme was based off of one of the first desktop themes that I used. I didn't have any other idea to base a website design for myself off of. And there is no way I'd ever use a stock website template. Unfortunately since it was based off a desktop theme it wasn't the best design for people to read posts from. Even after I dropped the 'wine' color scheme from the blog people still had trouble.

When I wrote the old website I also tried to keep programming and personal stuff separate in an attempt to separate a personal website from a portfolio for work. Unfortunately I never added much content and this lead to a confusing mess of multiple domains, broken analytics, and the inability to use my homepage as an authorship page.

I "have" a Facebook account, same with Twitter, Flickr, the various IM services, Wave, and Meetup accounts, I leave various IRC servers open, heck I recently signed up for Linked In. And of course I have this blog.

But I have a strong disuse of most of them.

• Twitter: My Twitter is sparsely used. Posting wise I consider it a technical outlet, or a connection to the public internet, I generally avoid posting personal things to it. I use it more like a business might use it than the random breakfast posting tweeter. In the end I don't post much.
• Facebook: I vehemently guard my Facebook friends list. My Facebook friends list is only for people I have a real personal connection of some sort to. I reject friends of family members I don't have something close to a personal dialogue with. I reject random people who make friend requests. I reject people who "might" be distant relatives but I don't remember ever actively talking to. Generally I try to avoid accepting anyone who might end up as a 'vanity' friend — someone who I'll probably never really talk to and just exist as a entry in a list of supposed "Friends". I consider Facebook a "private" social medium, I only connect to people I personally know, not people I connect with over the internet focused around topics. Only having around 20 people on my friends list is on purpose, the idea of having that list grow to 100+ disgusts me. In the end as well, I don't have much reason to open it up, and just wait for any e-mail notification about messages to pop in.
• Flickr: I signed up to Flickr because I thought that some of my photo galleries like my work gallery and projects didn't fit as Facebook galleries. I don't really like Facebook, And like I just mentioned I consider it "private", so it didn't make sense to keep them on Facebook. However after some use of Flickr I've been looking into setting up a private app just for posting image galleries of my own.
• LinkedIn: I'm not exactly looking for a job, but after some thought I decided I should probably start paying attention to the world of networking with people that open up potential job opportunities. So I ended up signing up on LinkedIn. Hasn't been that long so I haven't done much with it of course.