I often open a new tab in my Terminal to run an Ant task in, and often as not I forget to CD into the correct directory first and so I am greeted with this error:

Nathan-Mac:~ nathan$ ant database.start
Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed

On my system, there’s only one main project that uses ant, so I almost always intend for ant tasks to be run against that project’s build.xml. So, I created a function that makes ant tasks “just work” no matter what directory I am in.

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I just finished a writeup on the necessary JS changes to support Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade, and then Hilary did a followup post on the server-side.

The upgrade enabled right now, but it gets forced out on October 1st. These two posts should give you all you need to know to get your site ready for Facebook’s upgrade:

Part 1: JavaScript - JavaScript changes for Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade

Part 2: PHP / Backend – Server Side changes for Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade

Also worth noting, there’s a lot of good information on Facebook’s Developer Blog.

Even though I’ve been happily employed with Sociable Labs for a while now, I still get fairly frequent calls and emails from people who want to know if I’m available or I “know someone.” The list of people I know is starting to run short, so this post is intended to remedy that.

If you are an individual Web Designer or Web Developer interested in work, please post a comment below.

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I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this lately, so I thought I’d make a quick writeup to explain how facebook does it. (I’ll also give a quick tip on how you can do it yourself.)

What Facebook Does

Facebook is in a unique position compared to many developers looking to set cross domain cookies: The user visits both facebook.com and the other website. (more…)

I’m working on a project that has a legitimate (non-spammy) reason to need cross-domain cookies, and we settled on flash as a good way to accomplish this.

However, I was surprisingly unable to find any complete library or how-to guide for connecting flash cookies to javascript. So I dusted off my flash skills and built one, and and now you get to enjoy the fruit of my labor:

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Most anti-spam methods used by websites today are annoying at best. They use impossible-to-read captcha images, or they make users jump through some kind of hoop to get the email address instead of just clicking on it. This can mean lost sales and opportunities for you, because each hurdle turns away more users.

This article looks at how to use some simple HTML, CSS, & Javascript to protect your private information without making your guests jump through hoops.

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Nearly every website on the internet uses javascript in some form or fashion. Yet very few people, even those who write it and teach it, have a clear understanding of how javascript works!

Logical Operators are a core part of the language. We’re going to look at what logical operators are, what “truthy” and “falsy” mean, and how to use this to write cleaner, faster and more optimized javascript.

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XSLT is a fairly well-supported technology. It allows you to take any XML file – including RSS – and transform it into a styled HTML document. It’s kind of like CSS on steroids.

Unfortunately, most browsers think they know better and go off and do their own thing on RSS feeds.

We’re going to look at how and which browsers can be brought into line, and how to use XSLT to improve the look of your RSS feed in those browsers.

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The twitter callback feature is nice – it makes it extremely easy to to add a twitter feed to a page. But to get the most benefit out of it, you really need to understand what it’s doing.

We’re going to look at how AJAX security works, specifically the Same Origin Policy, how Twitter gets around it, and the type of callback that twitter uses.

Note: the callback that twitter uses is entirely different from callback in the sense of passing a javascript function around as a variable. We’ll look at that in a future article.

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Javascript objects and arrays are both incredibly useful. They’re also incredibly easy to confuse with each other. Mix in a few objects that look like arrays and you’ve got a recipe for confusion!

We’re going to see what the differences between objects and arrays are, how to work with some of the common array-like objects, and how to get the most performance out of each.

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