31 May 06

Project Updates & Some Useful Tools

In VayaSites, Web Development

I’ve definitely been slacking blog-wise lately (how do the people who post every couple of days manage it?), there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I’ve got a ‘proper’ post in the works which will hopefully be up soon, but in the meantime here’s an update on a couple of the sites I’ve been working on lately and a couple of the tools I have used in developing them.

MadWeekends

was lucky enough to be able to do whatever I wanted for this design, so long as it ended up looking ‘fun’. In my book, a pretty good design brief. On the whole it’s the usual XHTML/CSS setup, but I did get to experiment with sIFR for the first time. At this point I should warn you that unless you are familiar with building websites, the following will send you to sleep (it may have that effect regardless).

Until now I’ve always opted for the negative text-indent method when trying to replace plain text with something more interesting. It’s simple, effective and pretty accessible. However if you’ve got more than a few titles you wish to replace, it’s also mind-numbingly boring and totally inefficient. Which is were sIFR steps in.

sIFR is an automated means of replacing unattractive, plain text with anti-aliased eye candy. Its only requirements are that the user’s browser supports Flash 6 or greater and javascript. According to Macromedia around 97% of browsers have Flash 6 or greater and according to w3Schools 90% of browsers have javascript enabled. Hardly definitive, but a useful indicator if nothing else. Even better is the fact that if these ‘required’ browser features are missing then no damage is done - the user just sees standard CSS formatted text and is none the wiser.

Once you’ve spent 10 minutes setting up the CSS, flash file and javascript the job is done and thanks to a little black magic your standard markup such as:

<h3>Example Title</h3>

... is automatically turned into formatted text.

Would I recommend it? Definitely, and I’m sure I’ll be using it again in future projects.

Treasure Art & Design

Not a site I designed, just one that I was asked to complete some updates on. An exhibition page was needed and in the name of avoiding one obscenely long page I decided to try my hand at some javascript tricks with the help of scriptaculous. I’m in no hurry to go back to 1995 (Clock mouse pointers, anyone?) but I do think a little javascript can be very useful in the right situation and that on that page it works pretty well. Who needs flash, anyway?

Incidentally, if anyone else is looking for a wordpress code snippet plugin then the imaginatively titled ’code snippet plugin‘ is what you want.

That’s it for today, but there’ll more posts up soon with any luck!

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