Jennifer Grucza

Nerdy, maybe, but it’s cool to be able to pose your World of Warcraft characters from a webpage!

Not sure why, but lately nothing has been quite as good to listen to as the music of Rimsky-Korsakov. It puts me in a good mood, and at work it’s making me more productive. Maybe it’s the energy and the brightness, helping me out when I feel tired or blah.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Great Orchestral Works

I haven’t updated my blog in forever, but just thought I’d post that I’ve started a new job recently, at gather.com. My title here is “Web UI Developer”. I probably won’t be doing much Java coding at all - mostly HTML/CSS/Javascript in the context of JSPs. At least that’s how they’ve done it in the past. They’re hoping to move to using a better web architecture, like Struts. In that case, I might be getting into Java code a little bit more. Guess we’ll see how that goes. It’s kind of nice to not have to worry about the back-end much, though.

Gather is definitely a larger company than DigitalAdvisor (6 people at its largest), but it’s still considered a start-up, I think. There are maybe 40-50 people here, not sure exactly how many.

The site itself has a pretty large and loyal community, and they’re hoping to grow a lot more. The site is a little confusing to a first-time user, I think, but there are plans for working on creating a more intuitive navigation and working on the homepage and such.

The only drawback I’ve found so far is working downtown, because my commute is longer. I’ve been taking the bus to Harvard Square and then the subway from Harvard to Downtown Crossing. It’s been taking me around 40-45 minutes, and I’m more used to 15-25. I need to go to the library to stock up on books to read while commuting…

Keep informed on Gather.com! Content ranges from politics to cooking, and we earn Gather Points™ or cash for using the site!View my content here: jennifer76
jennifer76.gather.com

So JSPs have the annoying property of preserving all whitespace from the source JSP file and outputting it. As soon as your JSP gets at all complex, with conditional logic, variables being set, and so on, you’ll find your HTML source output gets filled more and more with blank lines.

JSP 2.1 to the rescue! Now there’s a handy page directive you can put at the top of your JSP file:

<%@ page trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true" %>

The only problem is that Tomcat 5.5 doesn’t support it, and that’s what we’re using right now. I guess Tomcat 6 is still in development.

So this blog posting is just to remind myself to use it in the future when it becomes available to us.

And yes, I know it has been forever and forever since I last posted.

document.location.hash = “#anchorName” does not do what you might expect. Looking at the addressbar, I see “http://mydomain.com/mypage.html#%23anchorName” instead. Apparently, you need to omit the hash mark for Safari. Luckily it seems to work on other browsers too. The O’Reilly book Javascript: The Definitive Guide states that location.hash includes the “#”, but I guess we’ll just go with what works.

Using jquery’s html() method for replacing the inner HTML of an element doesn’t work. I think it’s just using javascript’s innerHTML attribute, which is supposed to work, from what I found Googling around. But it wasn’t working for me. Oh well, I found a way to work in this case without innerHTML.

Well last night at around 11pm, we at DigitalAdvisor launched a new version of the site! The look and feel has totally changed, and we now have a new feature: Questions and Answers. We’re hoping that it will help people in their research of electronics they’re thinking of buying (or already own, for that matter). And if you help other people out by answering their questions, you can get points and recognition.

Even though I’m not a graphic designer by any means, I’m the closest we have, so most of the work on the look and feel is my doing (with plenty of input from the rest of the company, of course). The layout on some of the pages is not final, and there are plenty of improvements that can be made (there’s more functionality coming, too). But I’m still pretty happy with how it looks.

Go check it out, maybe even ask or answer a question yourself!