The blog of Jakob Persson – consultant and entrepreneur

Anyone who’s worked with text has been in the situation where something needs to be changed but the changes are too complex for the standard search and replace function to do any good, resulting in hours of manual work. For these situations, learning regular expressions is a worthwhile investment. Though regular expressions may look scary, just understanding the basics will save you hours of time.

You can’t believe it. Your friend. Confidante. Colleague. Yes, your laptop, is gone. Your chances of seeing it again hinge on the kindness of strangers. But they won’t be able to help unless they know that you are the rightful owner. In cases like these, it’s useful to have set a lock screen message on your Mac.

So it turns out you have a Saturday available and it’s unplanned and you wonder what to do with it. It’s a perfect opportunity to pick up new knowledge and skills. In this series of posts, I’ll introduce technologies and tools that save time and that you can learn in a day. Some of these tools are useful for web developers and some will be of benefit to people who just use computers a lot.

There are some tools that are so powerful that you can do really stupid things with them. Used the wrong way, they allow you to create behemoths of unmaintainable code and co-dependencies. JQuery is one of those tools. On the other hand, used wisely, you can also do infinitely useful things with it. Five minutes will show you how.

I’m doing more and more writing in Scrivener, including blog posts, and I use Markdown for formatting. Working on a longer post, I had to find a way to integrate tables nicely and still get Markdown output. Luckily, I’ve found a workflow that works.