Boggle The Mind

That’s the question of the day - I finally managed to get my website back online after a few weeks (at least) of server issues. I still don’t have much to share….it doesn’t look like I’ll be making it to SxSW this year, which I’m very disappointed over. I was really looking forward to Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design with Cameron, Sally, Jon and Dustin.

I AM however, going to be going to An Event Apart, Boston - which happens to be the same month as SxSW, and one of the reason it’ll be hard for me to make Austin this year. The other is that I’m planning on heading to Universal Orlando in May for my one year wedding anniversary.

Hope everyone is having a good 2007 so far, and if I can my server situation straighted out (and reliable) maybe we can get a bit more activity around here.

So, it’s official - BarCamp Manchester has been officially scheduled for Saturday, November 18th.

We were expecting around 50 people, and we already have 65 registered people. If you are interested, head over the BarCamp Manchester page and register quick, as space will be limited.

We are still looking for one or two more sponsors to finalize some items, so if you are interested, please check out the sponsorship page.

I came across a fantastic article by Jeff Croft recently, regarding his feelings about accessibility on the web. He states:

More and more, I’m feeling like taking a hard-assed approach. “What’s that? You’re complaining because you can’t scale the text of my site in Internet Explorer 6?” That’s your problem. Get glasses. Get a better browser. I can’t account for the fact that you have low vision and have chosen a shitty browser. The tools are out there to make your experience better, so use them.

He’s simply proving a point there, and obviously folks should take that with a grain of salt, but I believe it’s a valid point to make. Browser makers are starting to include better tools (see Opera’s awesome Page Zoom feature). Maybe soon we can get back to using what we should be (like px)!

Read the full article: Has accessibility been taken too far?

So I’ve been at my new job for about 5 months now, and I’ve had the opportunity to finally use a lot of the fun things out on the web that I should have used a long time ago. Some of my new favorites:

sIFR
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is a tool to provide rich typography on the web. It’s a simple Javascript & Flash based tool to replace semantic text with a Flash alternative. Takes a few minutes to learn how to tweak it properly, but once you do it works fantasticly. Also, version 3 is coming with some great new features as well!

fleXcroll
fleXcroll is a script that provides custom scrollbars for your web sites. I went into this with a lot of trepidation, but this guy has really done a great job with this script. Since I first used it a few months ago, he’s released a few updates with some very needed functionality. It’s not perfect (I think it still has a few memory leaks) but it’s definitely one of the best options out there for custom scroll bars that I could find. If JS isn’t available, it defaults back to normal OS scrollbars, and the script can even handle dynamic additions or removal of content from the scrollable area.

S5
S5 is Eric Meyers Simple Standards Based Slide Show System. I was able to utilize this at work to do a small presentation.

Dustin Diaz’s Sweet Titles
A nice unobtrusive script to add customized tooltips to just about any element you can think of, I got to use them in a UI project for…..links. Not very exciting, but they worked wonderfully.

Yahoo’s UI Library
We’ve been able to utilize Yahoo’s new UI library a lot in some of the recent UI projects at work as well, especially the animation and drag & drop utilities, and the slider control.

Custom Form Fields
This was something I really wasn’t too excited about, but after starting with Aaron Gustafson’s faux select, I realized that custom form fields might not be QUITE as bad as I had thought they would be. Aaron’s script had some issues that I fixed in my version, and I hope to get the time soon to go back and document my version as well.

There was a recent question on Experts-Exchange asking for help to fade a table, so I wrote up a quick little script, and figured I’d throw it out there in case it might help anyone else.
fade = {
speed : 5,
finalOpacity : 30,
currentOpacity : 100,
elID : null,
init : function(el) {
fade.elID = el;
if (!document.getElementById(el)) return;
fadeInterval = setInterval(’fade.doFade()’,fade.speed);
},
doFade : function(obj) {
obj = document.getElementById(fade.elID);
if (fade.currentOpacity>fade.finalOpacity) {
var newOpacity = fade.currentOpacity - 1;
obj.style.opacity = “.”+(newOpacity);
obj.style.filter = “alpha(opacity=”+newOpacity+”)”;
fade.currentOpacity = newOpacity;
} else {
clearInterval(fadeInterval);
}
}
}


Just call fade.init and pass it the ID of the element you want to fade!

I went to the Apple site today, and was confronted on the homepage with a rather amusing new ad. It’s part of the new Get a Mac series. The pie chart line killed me. Enjoy.

I first heard of BarCamp at SXSW, and while I didn’t go to BarCamp Austin while I was in town, it sounded intruiging enough to pay attention when I found out that Ian was planning to organize a BarCamp here in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, I just missed BarCamp Boston this weekend because I only found out about it last week. However, there’s a movement to get one together up here in New Hampshire as well, so if you are reading this from the local area and want to get some more information, head on over to the BarCamp Manchester page and help grow the NH web community!

So I’ve been falling victim to the comment spammers, and I finally decided to try looking into some plugins. I looked on the the Nucleus plugin website, and looked at a few of the options. I tried the Expiring Comments plugin first, but it either didn’t work or I installed it wrong. Then I started looking at some of the others, and somehow ended up in the forums at this post. I tried the plugin mentioned, and so far (over the weekend), no spam. It looks like the next version of Nucleus will have some better built in tools, and some plugins that should be a step up in terms of moderation and configuration, but for now I’m just happy to be through the weekend without the normal amount of spam.

So, I know it’s been a few weeks, but I’ve gotten married (in the floods), gone to Mexico (the week the President decided to send thousands of troops to the Mexico border) and been swamped at work (reinventing form fields for custom UI apps). Needless to say, it’s been busy and I still have a ton of catching up to do. But everything went great, and now that I’m back and have deleted all the comment spam I received, I look forward to digging into some Nucleus plugins to help reduce the amount coming in.