I’ve just had my first patch accepted on an open source project. Quite chuffed with that! As of this weekend, the Rails calendar_helper plugin is now at version 0.21. My changes are very minimal, and only really to do with the markup.

Firstly, the default table markup’s had an overhaul. The date now goes into a %lt;caption> tag, outside the <thead>, as is appropriate. The <th>‘s in the thead now have scope="col" applied to them, again, as is appropriate.

The only other change is optional. If you pass in an option of :accessible => true, any dates in the grid which fall outside the current month will have <span> class="hidden"> monthName</span> appended to them. It could be reasonably inferred that plain numbers are dates that relate to the caption of the table, but the numbers outside the current month should probably be clarified.

You can come up with your own method of hiding content marked as .hidden; at NPG, we use the following:

.hidden {
	position:absolute;
 	left:0px;
 	top:-500px;
 	width:1px;
 	height:1px;
 	overflow:hidden;
}

but really, use whatever you’re most comfortable with.

You can get the plugin from Geoffrey Grosenbach’s subversion:

http://topfunky.net/svn/plugins/calendar_helper/

via the usual Rails plugin installation method.

To cut a long story short: the slides for the talk I gave earlier this week are now available. You can find out more about the talk on the talks page of this site, or you can download the PDF (1.5mb). It should be fairly self-explanatory.

(A brief summary for those of you unable to scroll or click: it’s a client-side-developer’s perspective on Rails, and how to integrate client side development into the build process).

I’m going to be speaking tonight at LRUG. The talk is called “Ruby on Rails from the other side of the tracks“, and it’s about how client-side developers fit into Rails, and how you (as a back-end developer) can work with them rather than against them. If that sounds interesting (or, more to the point, you want to hear Tiest talk about Domain Specific Languages, which should be great), do come along.

So apparently it’s Naked Day today. Strip away your CSS, show off your white bits.

It’s only right I join in, given that my day-job now is writing the leanest, most accessible XHTML/CSS I can, and that, more to the point, I spent a fair while trying to make this site vaguely accessible if you can’t see the stylesheet. So here we are. Raggedy-bits and all. The stylesheet will automatically switch back to its “International Klein Blue” look on the 6th April.

(The site is, of course, now back to normal)