Abdullah Yahya

Hyphen
You know how to type a hyphen and that’s exactly why you use it so often in all the wrong places. The hyphen is used to break single words into parts (like when lines of type break within a word) or to combine separate words into one single words.
I’m hungry in a get-in-my-belly kind of way.

En dash
The en dash is used in dates to replace “to” or “and”. It can also be used to indicate the relationship between two different words. In German it is also used for a break of thought, with a space before and after the en dash.
I lived in the United States from 1976–1978.
I have a love–hate relationship with San Francisco.

Em dash
The em dash is used for a break of thought that is stronger than a thought within parentheses. It is a break in the sentence in order to create attention or stress a thought. The em dash is uncommon in the German language and most common in American type setting.
I once had to replace 1,000 hyphens in a single document—exhausting.

For more related information, visit http://www.typogui.de/

There are several window management tools for Windows and Mac OS. I recently tested Divvy and have found it to be the best so far,

http://mizage.com/windivvy/

It’s $14 but it works very well and is simple to use.

When building a website with PHP, there are many frameworks you can choose from. However, they usually are very advanced with tons of features and sometimes a steep learning curve. If your needs are simple but you’d still like to build you site in a modular MVC-based fashion, PHP-MVC is a nice, light-weight alternative. You can learn more about it at https://github.com/panique/php-mvc.

Below is a screenshot showing you how simple the file structure is.

Update: another nice and simple PHP MVC framework is Simple MVC Framework.

which include some key plugins / extensions like PDO for safe, database-agnostic SQL and GUMP for form input validation.

Last night I came across a situation where I had 447 folders each containing many subfolders and with only one file in the last subfolder. I needed a way to move all of these nested files into one parent folder. Luckily, there’s a small free program called Suction that can do this very easily. A screenshot is below. It worked perfectly and quickly.

STEP 1: Purchase Domain at Domain Registrar

e.g. abdullahyahya.com is registered at godaddy

• GoDaddy
• Hover
• Gandi
• etc

How to find where a domain is registered?
Do a whois lookup, e.g. http://www.whois.com/whois/abdullahyahya.com

STEP 2: Set Domain Name’s Name Servers at Domain Registrar’s Control Panel

e.g. below is the control panel to set the name servers for abdullahyahya.com

Continue reading How to Set Up a Domain Name

When setting up a web server, if it’s one of the following

• Apache
• Google App Engine (GAE)
• Internet Information Services (IIS)
• lighttpd
• Nginx
• Node.js

you may want to start or compare  your config with some boilerplate configs you can find at

https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs

Many best practices and optimization are included in them which can save you a lot of time.

If you’d like to know which fonts are being used on a web page or in an HTML tag, Firefox Inspector has a tab called Fonts that will easily let you see this. Screenshot below.

As a website grows, you can find yourself with a ton of CSS that may or may not be needed. Cleaning this CSS is necessary to facilitate maintainability of your code. But how do you find unused CSS. A Firefox extension called Dust-Me Data does a decent job of doing that. Below is a screenshot show how many unused selectors there are from each source followed by a listing of each selector.

If you’re on Windows and you’re trying to delete a folder but you get an error like the following:

Folder In Use
The action can't be completed because the folder is open in another program
Close the folder and try again.

You can easily close / kill all processes / handles / DLLs that are using the folder by using a program called Unlocker. If Unlocker can’t find an processes in use, you can still have it delete the folder immediately or after a restart.