Archive for the 'code' category.
Jun 6 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 1 Comment
After benefiting from the site multiple times, I decided to start contributing to DZone Snippets, a source for useful source code snippets. There's not much there yet, but you can follow my snippets at http://snippets.dzone.com/user/jeffreybarke.
Also Webmonkey.com is having a re-launch party next Wednesday, 11 June, from 6 pm through 8 pm at Sweet & Vicious in Manhattan. There will be music, beverages and good cheer, and theMechanism will be attending.
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.
Feb 21 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
As I was perusing the glorious mess of code, bits and other fanciful nonsense we refer to as the “web”, I came upon some delightfully useless .js files and could think of no other purpose for it than to share them with the small, yet potent & planetary contingency that is our Readership…
Behold, disbelievers! A tutorial that allows you to change the favicon in your browser (on Opera and Firefox only) via a tickling of your keys…Have a peek.
Michael Mahemoff, a wildly talented London-based software & usability dude, as well as the author of Ajax Design Patterns, presumably came up with these scripts, so don’t for a second think that we’re slagging the cat. You will find it a worthwhile expedition to dig around his site.
But seriously, if you can think of a real world application of the mighty Favicon Demo, please let us know. Or perhaps, sometimes you just have to do stuff because you can, and ask the questions later…
Jan 28 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
theMechanism is excited to launch our newest podcast series: barKode.
While our other podcast, theMechcast focuses on group discussions, barKode (partially named after the last name of our Senior Developer in New York, Jeffrey Barke [note the wry use of his last name barKe in the title]) will be focused on educational web design and standards-based talks, including those delivered at the The New York Web Standards Meetup Group. The first episode of barKode is called, “Web Mapping Part One–Google Maps Tutorial” where Jeffrey Barke, Senior Developer at theMechanism, leads a two-part discussion on web mapping in general and Google Maps in particular. Part Two will be on February 21st at 6:30 at the New York Creative Bunker.
You can subscribe and enjoy future episodes of barKode at feedburner.
Dec 20 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
For the past three years, 24 ways has been the Advent calendar of choice for web developers. This year started off with an excellent article and script by Drew McLellan dealing with PNGs in IE5.5 and 6.
If you work with PNGs or plan to, this is a very concise and informative article. It quickly describes how PNG transparency works, outlines the problem with IE 6 and below, provides a solution, and details the limitations of this solution. I really can't recommend it enough.
SuperSleight
As if this wasn't enough, Drew then introduces SuperSleight, a JavaScript that automates support for PNG transparency in IE5.5 and 6. Based on sleight by Aaron Boodman and bgsleight by Drew McLellan, "SuperSleight adds a number of new and useful features that have come from the day-to-day needs of working with PNGs."
- Works with both inline and background images, replacing the need for both sleight and bgsleight.
- Will automatically apply position: relative to links and form fields if they don’t already have position set. (Can be disabled.)
- Can be run on the entire document, or just a selected part where you know the PNGs are. This is better for performance.
- Detects background images set to no-repeat and sets the scaleMode to crop rather than scale.
- Can be re-applied by any other JavaScript in the page—useful if new content has been loaded by an Ajax request.
Since we use PNGs quite a bit at theMechanism, SuperSleight was of great interest to us, particularly in the London office. When I looked at the code, however, there was one thing I didn't like—to change two of SuperSleight's properties required changing values hard-coded in the class. To change the third required a separate call to the limitTo method.
Enter theMechanism
To make SuperSleight easier to implement for my colleagues in London, I added three parameters to the init and run methods of the supersleight object. Our version of SuperSleight (which I'm calling 1.1.0) is available here and partial instructions on how to use it are below. The primary documentation on SuperSleight is still Drew's 24 Ways article. You can see SuperSleight 1.1.0 in action here.
How to Use
- Download SuperSleight and unzip. Upload supersleight.js and x.gif to your webserver.
- Add the following code to the <head> element of any page that contains PNGs:
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/supersleight.js"></script>
<![endif]–>
That's it! By default, SuperSleight will run on page load, look for a transparent GIF named x in the same directory as supersleight.js, apply relative positioning to anchor and input elements, and process every PNG on the page. To change any of these default behaviors, open supersleight.js and edit or remove line 17:
17. supersleight.init();
The init method of the supersleight object takes three optional parameters:
- String path to the transparent gif file. Note this path is relative to the actual document, not the JavaScript document.
- Boolean value to apply relative positioning to anchor and input elements. Pass false to leave the elements as they are.
- String ID of an element to limit SuperSleight's operations to.
To see these parameters in operation, plese view our SuperSleight demo in IE 6 or less.
To call SuperSleight from a script, use the run method of the supersleight object. This method takes the same three optional parameters as the init method.
Download SuperSleight 1.1.0
View SuperSleight Demo
May 10 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 6 comments
This plugin adds a checkbox to the post status box that lets one designate a post as "sticky." It was originally written by Owen Winkler and available at http://www.redalt.com/downloads/. Not only is it no longer available there, the latest version doesn't play well with WordPress 2.1. So I fixed it and am making Adhesive available here.
Simply follow the link below, unzip the download, and drop it into your WordPress plugins directory. Then activate it in the plugin administration panel.
→ Adhesive 3.3 for WordPress 2.1
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London.
