Facebook recently released a new homepage ticker which, for some, is not a welcome change. Well, you can hide the ticker by using a custom style sheet in the Safari web browser. By creating your own style sheet, you can override the tickerActivityStories class defined in Facebook’s CSS and hide the ticker.

Step 1: Open up a text editor like TextEdit, BBEdit, TextMate, etc. Place the following CSS code in the document:

.tickerActivityStories {
	height: 0;
	display: none;
}

Step 2: Save the document as a text file and name it, fb_styles.css (you can name it anything you want, just make sure it has the ‘.css’ extension.)

Step 3: Open Safari and go to Preferences/Advanced. From the Style Sheet drop down menu select ‘Other…’ and choose the fb_styles.css file. Quit Safari and then reopen it.

That’s it. The ticker should vanish from the sidebar the when you are on Facebook.

Note: This only works in Apple’s Safari browser. If your browser supports custom style sheets, then these instructions may work for you. Additionally, browser plugins exist that can do the same thing.

When it comes to running development software, I always fall victim to the time-consuming, software install cascade effect. It begins innocently. You download a software package then realize it depends on another, which depends on another and so on down the line. The software trip I took this morning was a textbook example of the cascade in action. It began with downloading and installing ColdFusion 9 then…

• upgrading to MySQL 5 (my Mac had an ancient 4.0 version since I’ve fallen for SQLite and haven’t used MySQL in a long, long time.)
• installing MySQL Workbench since the DB tool I had been using wouldn’t work with MySQL 5.x.
• installing ColdFusion on Wheels.
• making changes to my bash_profile to set the correct $PATH since I mucked it up weeks ago configuring Ruby Version Manager (RVM.)
• updating RVM to 1.2.8 (this had nothing to do with getting ColdFusion running but while I’m at the command line, might as well fix it.)

All set. I can start coding!

Not so fast. BBEdit and TextMate, my text editors of choice, don’t recognize CFML (no syntax coloring, text completion, etc.) So I next,

• fail to locate a bundle or extension that makes either editor CFML-aware*.
• install Eclipse instead.
• configure CFEclipse.

Great. But then,

• Subversion isn’t behaving so off to subversion.apache.org to RTFM.
• While skimming the Subversion packages, I end up at Apple’s Developer Tools area and discover that Xcode 4 is available today.

Xcode 4 is downloading now and I’m off to write some CFML. At five o’clock.

*A friend sent me a bundle for TextMate that added support for CFML. Thank you Louis.