jQuery Textarea Expander Plugin

Ok, I love Ballpark, but the thing that I'd have to say annoys me the most (aside from no time tracking) is the fact that line item descrption fields are so small.

So instead of just complaining more, I took a few minutes and put together a simple solution, a jQuery plugin anyone can implement when the page layout simply isn't designed for a large textarea box, but one is neccessary.

Essentially, it just creates a new textarea that floats on top of the selected one on focus. Pretty novel, but hopefully some people can make use of this... Ballpark? Please?

You can find Textarea Expander on Github.

Demo

Sample Usage

Load the jQuery library, included style.css and then on document load run the following.

jQuery, Tables, & Show / Hide

So maybe I'm just an idiot and this would be obvious to others, but it completely confused me for a large portion of the night, so I thought I'd share in hopes of helping some other unfortunate soul.

The Problem

I was using a jQuery function to show / hide elements, first on a table row, then when that didn't work, a table column. The problem is that jQuery's show method sets an element's display attribute to "block," completely ignoring that it should instead be "table-column." This causes some issues to say the least.

The Solution

Well this is where you've got some options... what I ended up doing was just creating a div element within the td and running the show / hide on that instead. You could as an alternative to this, create a custom show method that would simply set the display type correctly to table cell, column, or whatever.

My .gitconfig

It's no secret, I love Git (more and more every time I use Subversion, but that's an entirely different story altogether), but one of the things I enjoy most about it is the fact that configuration options are made to be portable and because of that, easy to share. And while a configuration file may seem entirely boring, Git's configuration file is a bit different, allowing for such things as default editor and aliases. I know these are things you can set globally for your system and in fact, I'm aware that some people might prefer this, but... I like having these things contained within my Git install when they in fact are wholly related to my Git install. So now that I've gotten all that out of the way, here's my .gitconfig file (you can find yours in your home directory) in hopes that it might be useful to someone else.

ProjectPlus, Making Textmate Even Better

I don't know how I ever missed this Textmate plugin, but now that I've found it, I can't live without it.

What makes it so great you ask? Well it implements more native OSX features, like color labels for directory, sort options for the project drawer and replaces the project drawer with a panel which will stick to whichever size you choose (I always hated the project drawer randomly sliding out on a side I wasn't used to it being on). But my favorite feature is definitely SCM badges for just about every popular version control system (although what kind of lunatic uses anything but Git?). Overall, ProjectPlus is a welcome addition to my Textmate install, and I think everyone should at least give it a shot.

ProjectPlus homepage.