text-overflow: ellipsis; is great for text lines that may be longer then the parent element, eg. for shop article names or user names. But there is currently no solution for paragraphs that are longer than the parent. Of course you can set overflow: hidden;, but that will just clip the content/text.

Today I stumbled upon a blog entry by David DeSandro in which he show the use of -webkit-line-clamp which "limits the number of lines of text displayed in a block element". Sadly this is only possible within WebKit browsers (Safari and Google Chrome).

Entering Clamp.js. Clamp.js is a small Javascript that mimics this behavior in other browsers and sets the appropriate CSS for supported browsers. All you need is:

$clamp(document.getElementById('clamp-this'), { clamp: 'auto' });

Works. Nice. Thank you, Joe.

Ever wanted to count the lines of code you’ve written in a project? I guess you have and you may came to a solution that was build by yourself. It worked, but not more.

Today I stumbled upon CLOC — Count Lines of Code — that is a small Perl programm which does a fair good job at counting, recognizing comments, empty lines and so on. It also finds out in which language each file is written (by file extensions). There are also plenty of options to ignore folders (like .git or externals) or files by regex (like single Javascript libraries).

A simple check looks like this:

Check out this project on sourceforge and give it a try. Installing is painless: Just download the file and you’re done! http://cloc.sourceforge.net.

cpanminus is a script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN. Why? It's dependency free, requires zero configuration, and stands alone. When running, it requires only 10MB of RAM.

[...] For less experienced users (mostly from outside the Perl community), or even really experienced Perl developers who know how to shoot themselves in their feet, setting up the CPAN toolchain often feels like yak shaving, especially when all they want to do is just install some modules and start writing code.

curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --sudo App::cpanminus

After uloading all my Perl modules to github I switched a local project from svn to git. After that I had an odd tag named trunk that I wanted to get rid of. gittower wasn't able to delete it.

I came to this solution:

git tag -d trunk
git push origin :refs/tags/trunk

The remote tag trunk was successfully deleted.

Sometimes you are fetching static content like images, JavaScript code and CSS files from a different server that your Catalyst application is running on, let's say a CDN (content delivery network). For development, this often should not be the case because your local files may differ from the files on your CDN. Changing the URIs to the static content everytime you upload a new version of your application is not a solution and leads to mistakes.

Entering CatalystX::UriForStatic:

CatalystX::UriForStatic takes care of your static host name

CatalystX::UriForStatic either creates a local or production URI to your static files depending on your configuration! If your differences are that simple so you just can switch the host names, CatalystX::UriForStatic is for you.

sudo cpan CatalystX::UriForStatic