Australian Made and Owned

Introducing the Lovely Caption Maker

Posted June 19, 2008

Lovely Caption Maker CSS Transparent OverlayA 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…)

Filed under: CSS, SEO, Web Design, tools — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Tim @ 7:35 am

Adding, Removing and Editing Elements Dynamically using JavaScript

Posted January 19, 2008

Using Javascript to Dynamically Add and Remove Elements 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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Filed under: Javascript, Web Design — Tags: , , , — Tim @ 1:54 pm

Accessible, Valid Dropdown Menu or Popup Menu using CSS and Semantic HTML

Posted December 28, 2007

CSS and HTML Only Menu - Using Suckerfish SolutionWe’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…)

Extract GET Variables from URL String to Array - PHP Function

Posted December 22, 2007

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…)

Filed under: PHP — Tags: , , , , , , , — Tim @ 1:25 am

MySpace - Convert Text to HTML

Posted December 4, 2007

Put in your text, choose MySpace Comment Color, MySpace Comment Font and MySpace Comment Size, click "Change to HTML" and we will style it and convert it into HTML for you :)

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Filed under: MySpace, tools — Tags: , , , , , , — Tim @ 6:31 pm

Choose MySpace Comment Colors, Fonts and Sizes

Have you ever seen comments with different colors (colours) and fonts left on your or somebody else’s profile in MySpace? Maybe you’d like to be able to change your comment color, too… If you do, it’s easy. All you need is a little bit of HTML code, and I’ll tell you how to do it

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Filed under: MySpace — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Tim @ 5:23 pm