Category: Web Development

The One Where I Read The Mule Blog

I stumbled across the Mule Design blog yesterday. It’s good. I had a minor epiphany (is there a word for that?) when I read this:

When a client says, “I don’t like green”, most designers translate the sentence into “You must change the green.” But no one asked you to, did they? They merely made a statement about their subjective dislike of a particular color. Your job, as a designer, is first and foremost to listen. And then to gather data. Don’t jump the gun. How, if at all, does the client’s subjective taste enter into the success of the project?

~ I Hate Green

My Overly Simplified Take on Responsive Design

31% of American adults who have cell phones use their phones for the majority of their Internet access.
~ via LukeW

The case for responsive web design is a no-brainer! Only a few years ago stake-holders would absolutely insist on IE6 compatibility with much much smaller user-base. 2.5% or higher was the threshold I’d commonly use cira 2010. What’s different about RWD?

MySQL Full-Text Search Is Broken!

…and has been for 8 years.

I came across MySQL bug #2095 today:

full-text search for words containing hyphens won't work
Submitted: 11 Dec 2003 6:15
Hyphen '-' characters break literals at the moment.
A search for something like "GATA-D22S690" finds
all entries containing GATA and not the full 
hyphenated text.

~ Link

MySQL disputes the fact that this is a bug.

But in reality – as the submitters points out – there are many cases where hyphens are part of words. The example I ran into tonight was product model numbers (eg. “00-17” or “j-35”).

The MySQL docs recommend recompiling or modifying one of two system files.  None of these options are feasible in a shared hosting environment.

I can’t believe this bug exists. As far as I’m concerned this is a complete and utter deal breaker for any application that needs to search non-word strings containing hyphens. I’ve been exclusively using MySQL for my entire career and I now know that a bunch of sites I’ve worked on in the past 10 years were launched with this bug.