Boris Masis

One of my favorite features of Google Sheets is the ability to use the IMPORTXML function to pull in content from anywhere on the web. It’s like having your own little Google-backed scraper to conveniently pull data into your spreadsheet. For example, if I wanted to get some data about my Google Play apps, I […]

I just open sourced my “send to calendar” chrome extension. I got tired of re-typing event info all the time, so the extension allows you to select text on any webpage, and send it to google calendar (with some smart parsing in between). The whole thing is super simple, and pull requests are welcome (particularly […]

Sometimes you want a nice clickable HTML button in your emails – something that looks great and that your users see even if images are disabled when they view your email. Here’s a bootstrap-inspired button that will render well across email clients: I am a button! <a href="" style="text-decoration:none;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;display:inline-block;padding-top:4px;padding-bottom:4px;padding-right:20px;padding-left:20px;margin-bottom:0;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;background-color:#4ba1db;*background-color:#4ba1db;background-image:linear-gradient(top, #5CB1E4, #2693D5);background-repeat:repeat-x;border-width:1px;border-style:solid;border-color:#2693D5 #2693D5 hsl(201, 93%, 54.5%);*border:0;-webkit-border-radius:4px;-moz-border-radius:4px;border-radius:4px;filter:progid:dximagetransform.microsoft.gradient(enabled=false);*zoom:1;-webkit-box-shadow:inset […]

If you use Rally, you may be familiar with the joys of trying to make it even slightly useful. Here’s my small contribution: this is a script that formats stories for easy copy/paste into update emails, etc. You can select any iteration to get a nicely formatted list like the one below: The script uses the Rally […]

If you export from Fireworks into clickable HTML prototypes, you’ll find that your exports are always left-aligned – even if you select center alignment during the export. This seems like a bug to me, luckily there is a fairly painless workaround. Note: Tested in Fireworks CS5 on Mac, but should work approximately the same in […]

Git pulls are a fairly easy way to deploy your code, and we’re doing just that at my new event promotion startup. We wanted to take our release process just one small step further by tagging our releases so that we know exactly what is running in production and when it got there. Instead of […]

A common web development concern is the www subdomain. Do you host at http://www.site.com or http://site.com? Which ever you choose you want to be sure that visitors who type in the other get re-directed properly. If you use IIS you can setup a new website to do such a permanent redirect, but that solution doesn’t […]

We recently completed work on AuPairVideos.com. The site went from concept to launch in just over a month, in part thanks to its lightweight single-page design. We ended up writing ~150 lines of code in each layer: 152 lines of HTML 165 lines of CSS 159 lines of JavaScript 147 lines of PHP 88 lines […]

Tools such as Quick Ribbon are great for generating simple and effective ribbons such as this one: A small problem though is the potential to block content underneath the ribbon transparency area. For example, that “About Us” link is obscured by the large square ribbon image. A simple workaround is to split the ribbon image […]

If you’ve never played with Yahoo Pipes, you should. The innovative interface alone is worth it. Here’s a simple yahoo pipes example: lets say that you have a blog that you want to syndicate differently to different audiences (for example we have a Tumblr blog and we want to exclude some of the content from […]