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I’ve been asked by a few people how I did the latest news block at the bottom of every page on the TerraMedia website. It’s actually really simple when you get down to it, so here you go, all you need to know to do your own latest posts block, it could be used for anything from latest blog posts, latest images in an image gallery, new content, virtually anything.
Popularity: 28% [?]
I received a completely unexpected present from a good friend of mine a couple of months ago, a new Palm Treo 750 running Windows Mobile 6.
I am quite fond of the design of the Palm Treo’s as they manage to incorporate an (almost) full keyboard along with a reasonable sized screen (240px * 240px) without the need to use a sliding keyboard. Sliding keyboards are prone to getting broken much easier in my experience, especially when I’m using them.
Unlike it’s predecessors and most other Palm phones, the Treo 750 runs Windows Mobile instead of Palm OS, and there have been some interesting things implemented in Windows Mobile by Palm. To my understanding, Palm have an exclusive license with Microsoft, allowing them to actually modify Windows Mobile 6.
One of the things I find the most useful is how it displays SMS and other messages in the form of a conversation, similar to how Gmail displays emails, and how Palm OS displays messages received. The addition of a search box on the Today screen is also extremely useful. Simply start to type a number or name and it will search your contacts and make suggestions as you type.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Over at TerraMedia I’ve been quite busy over the past few weeks working on not only a new design for TerraMedia, but a completely new website!
It is now using Drupal instead of Joomla and the theme is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict along with being completely cross browser compatible. Developing it for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer 7 was really a walk in the park. Internet Explorer 6 caused me even more pain then usual due to the random portfolio image in the header that is on an angle.
I probably spent a good 50 hours just on that part of the design, not including the other IE6 fixes.
The reason it took so much work was primarily because I was using a pair of PNG 24’s for the images, one as the background image and one as the changing image. Using the PNG Fix module for Drupal fixed the background image fine, but because the image in the foreground was being called through php, the Javascript used in the PNG Fix module wasn’t picking up that it was a PNG, thus not filtering the transparency correctly.
After much fiddling around and trying to make this work, I ended up just combining the two images rather than having the background image seperate, and calling them randomly through Javascript instead. This is a little bit more tedious and doesn’t run correctly through a block like the PHP, but it does do the job. Unfortunately adding more images to the pool takes a little bit more than just uploading them, but I can live with that for now.
The left sidebar also took a little bit of fiddling around since it uses li:hover’s as well as a:hover’s and IE6 doesn’t render li:hover’s correctly and it renders li’s in general differently to the other browsers. So unfortunately, some of the sidebar functionality is lost but it degrades gracefully and that’s the important thing when degradation comes into play.
What do you think of the new “Web 2.0″ style design and the new website in general?
Popularity: 35% [?]
I have been asked a few times how to add a bookmark link within a HTML page, so that people can just click the link and the website will be added to their bookmarks.
This is pretty straight forward to do, here is the code you would need:
<a href="javascript:window.external.AddFavorite
('http://blog.stillaslife.com/code/bookmark-a-page-with-javascript/','Bookmark a Page With Javascript | Still As Life')">
Bookmark this page!</a>
This will create something like this: Bookmark this page!
All you need to change is the link to be the link to the page being bookmarked, then the second part ‘Bookmark a Page With Javascript | Still As Life’ is the title of the page being bookmarked. This should be whatever you want the bookmark to be titled.
Nowadays this is becoming less common as social bookmarking sites such as those below this blog post are becoming more popular, of course there are still plenty of people using regular bookmarks.
It’s probably also worth noting, to my knowledge, this only works in Internet Explorer. Enjoy.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Today while downloading the latest version of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for a computer at work that didn’t have it for some reason, I noticed that Adobe have started to bundle their new Adobe Media Player with it.
“With a broad catalog of videos and shows from the leading media companies and networks, you have endless choices. Pick the episodes you love to watch, and Adobe® Media Player software will track new episodes and download them so you can watch whenever you want.”
It’s the first time I’ve come across it and it sounds like it is intended to be a similar idea to Apple TV/iTunes Store, except that it is taking a slightly different approach by providing it as a software package installable on any computer, rather than using the specific Apple TV hardware component.
Popularity: 35% [?]