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A recent trend I’ve noticed on some Australian media websites has been evoking my interest for a few months now. Sites like The Age and Fox FM have started overlaying a lovely coloured banner with a caption over feature images. The great thing is, they’re not rendered but glorious SEO-friendly and accessible HTML and CSS. I’m not surprised, however, since The Age and Fox FM have always been trend early adopters. The ABC still beats them, though.

Unfortunately, this effect can’t be achieved without knowing and entering the width and height of an image - making it kind of tedious to implement. After deciding that I’d like to use it with wordpress posts, it was decided that a tool should be built. And then The Lovely Caption Maker was born. Here’s an example of Lovely Caption Maker’s glory: (more…)

In technology, there’s always the goal of making complex and difficult things more simple - this goal has brought about ‘clean URLs’. Clean URLs are website addresses that are easy for people (and also search engines) to read and understand. For example: An interesting article about the Bermuda Triangle might be at www.articles.com/article.php?id=23452 - That address tells us (and search engines) nothing about the article. Using a clean URL, the same article might be at www.articles.com/articles/bermuda-triangle - much easier, right? Well, here is how you can implement this on your website… (more…)

The Problem

While working on an update for Once Upon a Bride’s handmade jewellery website, I had to overcome a certain bug or problem in Internet Explorer that caused images loaded into Loader Components to render incorrectly and scale incorrectly, usually with incorrect width and height. This was occurring after loading about 12 - 15 images.

So instead of loading them all at once, I made it load only eight images, and let the users view a page of eight at a time. The only problem I had was clearing the old thumbnails before loading the new ones. (more…)

While working myLookAgain (the second attempt), I’ve had to use a little bit more AJAX through JavaScript. One of the reasons was that I needed to allow users to add as many ‘pieces’ to each look and delete them if they want - preferably without reloading.

In JavaScript terms, I needed to be able to add (or create) and remove (or delete) elements, within another element, the form. After a little bit of research on the internet, I had what I needed to do just that. See a basic example of javascript dynamically adding and removing elements… Here’s how to do it:
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We’ve all seen dropdown / popup menu lists on websites before, and generally they’re extremely useful because they save space, but offer extra functionality. Sometimes, though they’re tricky to implement. I remember doing a image-only popout menu for the Lonsdale Views, who offer accommodation in Point Lonsdale and it was more difficult than expected - First, there was Internet Explorer’s lack of support for “:hover” and then there was Internet Explorer’s z-index issue. Now that I’ve got a blog, I thought I’d publish a how-to guide for valid, accessible semantic HTML and CSS dropdown menus… (more…)

While making the YouTube Music in MySpace tool, I coudln’t find a function that reads an input URL then makes an array with the GET variable names and values. I needed this to get the video id from the YouTube video URL - so I made it, and now I’m sharing it. (more…)

Facebook announced that the Facebook application platform would be opened to all social networks, after Bebo announced support for Facebook’s very successful application platform. Unfortunately for Google, this the biggest threat to their open social network platform, OpenSocial. (more…)