Firefox Bug Fixed

So this was a stupid mistake. After I moved the tester to the "/tester" subdirectory, I removed some of the unnecessary CSS that no longer needed to be applied to the page.

I didn't even think to check the site in all of the different browsers again because I hadn't done much.

Apparently though I had forgotten something very important...

#silverlightControlHost {
height: 100%;
}

I needed to add that little bit of CSS back into the page. Without it Regex Hero was completely invisible to Firefox users. I am sorry about this problem. I wasn't told by anyone that there even was a problem. And I overlooked it because I rarely use Firefox. Anyway, it's solved now.

This brings something else to my attention. I'd like to be contacted if there are any problems. But perhaps the GetSatisfaction thing is too much of a hurdle for some people. So I think I'll add a Contact page to the site. That way you can email me directly or use GetSatisfaction -- whichever you prefer.

Regex Hero Becoming Popular?

Yeah, I guess it's getting there. The site was officially launched April 29th, 2009. Since then it's been blogged, tweeted, digged, dotnetkick-ed, del.icio.us-ed, StackOverflow-ed and made its way around the internet.

In that amount of time it's had a total of 3,191 visits, a nice round number. Sorry I couldn't have blogged at more of a landmark type of number. Maybe next time I'll plan that a little better.

Below is a graph (thanks to Google Analytics) of total visits from the past few months:


And perhaps even more exciting, here's the ever-growing number of returning visitors over that same time period:


To me the returning visitors is what it's all about. It just shows that people are indeed returning to use the online tool. Perhaps some people even come here because it has become their Regex testing tool of choice. And that's pretty awesome.

To continue this progress I have a lot planned for Regex Hero in the near future. I'll be introducing features that are common to some of the other testers out there:

Step Forward/Backward - This will allow you to step through each match one at a time, highlighting and scrolling to each match in the target string as you go. (This feature is now done and you can read about it here.)

Personal Library - I will be adding Regex Hero accounts where you can sign up so that you may save your favorite or frequently used regular expressions in your own library. The benefit of the online account is that you can access your library from any computer. And it enables certain community features that may be implemented later. I never thought I'd be talking about my own contribution to the "cloud computing" phenomenon but I guess that's what this is. (This is feature is also done and you can read about it here.)

Out-of-browser capabilities - With the release of Silverlight 3, I will soon be able to give you the option to run Regex Hero from your desktop.

But with all of this in mind, I intend to keep Regex Hero simple, lightweight, and incredibly easy to use. I still believe these are its strengths.