exscale.se

An Equally Small Update

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Ok, another small update here.

I've hijaxed the "Comments"-links in the article listing (which you already know if you read my post it). I've also animated the hijaxation of the "Contined..."-links. It didn't look good when they weren't animated but the Comments-links were.

I also sorted out a little problem I had with ajax-generated content (from the Continued...-links) containing images and/or code-blocks not getting the functionality that images (imgbox) and code-blocks (+/- buttons) have.
The reason is because imgbox() as well as the code-blocks' functionality is run onDomReady. If content is added after DomReady that content will obviously not be affected by what was run before.
I had to rewrite a couple of my functions so they could be run on a specific div (rather than the body-element) (just added a parent-parameter to all of them) and I now run them on the div with the newly added content.

I had to do this so that clicking "Continued..." would not make the "View/Hide comments" stop working.

I think it turned out quite cool in the end.

I've also removed an old blog-post called "My Travels" and moved that information to my about-page.
Under the "About Me"-section there's a new section called "My Travels". I've marked every location up with microformats (well, geo-data at least) and I use Javascript to display a Yahoo! Map with all the locations plotted on the map.

This was discussed in the 24 ways article Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery by Simon Willison, but I actually did exactly this a couple of months ago for a project at work :)

I'll be writing something proper soon hopefully, it's just that I enjoy working on the site more than I do writing :P

Latersss

Oh, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (cus I probably won't write anything 'til next year!).

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A Smaller Update

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Another tiny update here. First of all I've fixed up the old Rounded Edge-design for those who liked it.

I've also re-added the hit-count on articles. I haven't actually counted article-hits for about 6 months. That's why the "Most Popular Articles"-widget never changes. I remember it causing errors when viewing some (not all) articles on the live site (but not locally) but I decided yesterday to just stick it in there again and see how it goes.

Please let me know if you encounter any bugs (particularly articles that are nothing but blank, white pages).

I also went through my "Old Unfinished" 3D-stuff and stuck the ones that weren't absolute crap on the site. Have a look in the 3d-archives. The new ones are the ones at the top.
I also added some background-text to most of my 3D-projects.

That's about it part from some tiny markup-optimizations and other small bug-fixes.

Toodle-pip!

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WTF is the Start-Attribute Deprecated?

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

I make sure my markup is always 100% valid XHTML 1.0 strict. I hate it when my little Tidy-icon isn't green and happy but yellow, or even worse, red from use of invalid or deprecated elements or attributes.

I recently added pagination to most of my sub-content widgets which you may have noticed, but it doesn't make much sense that the first article in the list of top rated articles on page 2 has the number 1 in front of it. Here's where the start-attribute comes in.

The start-attribute allows you to specify at what number an ordered list should start. This is exactly what I need in this situation but for some fooked up reason the start-attribute is no longer valid in strict doctypes.

I decided to ignore the fact that it is not valid XHTML 1 strict and use it anyway. I only use it in the case where the list doesn't start at 1 (so you'll never see a start="1" in the code) which means the first page is still error-free. But should you navigate to page 2 of any sub-content widget with javascript disabled you will experience invalid (X)HTML. I say with javascript disabled, because if you have js enabled that content is fetched with ajax and inserted with js so your validator won't notice the invalidity of the code.

I've read that instead of the start-attribute you're meant to use CSS-counters. I've only played around with them once before and for the #top-rated-articles ol to be different from page to page I would have to add a class specifying which page the list is on. Why is that better than a real attribute that does exactly that? And what about user-agents that don't support CSS? Should they not get the same information? Of course they should.

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• Filed under (X)HTML, Semantics, Web Standards

A Little Update

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

If you've checked my "Post Its" lately you'll know that I've updated all my jQuery plug-ins and removed the need for the dimensions plug-in in all of them but full width navigations.
It could just as easily be removed there as well so I might do it in the future, just couldn't be arsed now.

I don't understand why jquery doesn't come with any outerWidth/outerHeight functions? All that's needed is to add border, padding and width together but it's a pain to do it every time manually.
At least offset() is included as of some later version... perhaps bundling the entire dimensions-plug-in would make sense?

I've also uploaded a couple of new (although they are old) 3D-images that were just lying around on my hard-drive: school house, el bano, x-wing and bloodcells, and I also added a couple more renders of both stugan and the one ring.

You may also have noticed a bunch of "previous"/"next"-links in my sub-content area. They're all hijaxed so don't be afraid to click them and vote in previous polls or whatever. I just wish the start-attribute wasn't deprecated cause it would really make sense to use it in all those listings.

That's it. Laterssss

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