An intranet site facelift recently called for a table with a translucent background. Firefox, my preferred browser, has supported PNG’s optional alpha channel for some time — a feature that assigns an opacity to each pixel, from fully transparent to fully opaque. A quick google search revealed that Internet Explorer has offered PNG alpha support since version 5.5, so I got started. (more…)
Page caching is the simplest form of caching that Ruby on Rails offers. When invoked, page caching saves output to Rails’ public directory where it is subsequently served along with the other static pages. Of course this is advantageous for high traffic sites or pages that are slow to render. In most cases, page caching works without any config file editing. I, however, encountered a minor problem that prompted me to investigate this simple mechanism a bit further. (more…)