What I Learned Today

Today was some crazy learning. I figured out how to use Facebook Connect, which is cool, but not that interesting to talk about. I used this tutorial about using restful_authentication and Facebooker.

The cool things I learned:

  • Did you know that crontab has an easy syntax? You can use @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, and @yearly to have tasks run at those intervals. They usually run at when you'd expect - midnight for @daily, for example. Maybe everyone else knows this already.

  • Universal solvent for z-index CSS problems in IE: make the element you want on top a direct child of body.

  • Awesome jQuery event trick. I've been ripping click events off links when they require login, and making those functions fire on a login event. It's pretty simple, like this:

if ($link.data("events")) {
    var clickHandler = $link.data("events").click;
    for (var name in clickHandler) {
        $link.bind('login', clickHandler[name])
    }
    $link.unbind('click');
    $link.bind('click', function () {
      showAccountDialog();
        return false;
    });
}

This is kind of awesome by itself, but I ran into a problem today: Rails JS helpers love using onclick inline to make stuff happen, which doesn't work with the above. I used my jQuery chainsaw to remove the offending issue:

if ($link.get(0).onclick) {
    $link.bind('click', $link.get(0).onclick);
    $link.get(0).onclick = undefined;
}

Call the click -> login code after this, and it all works.

Published: 09 Apr 2009