Pixelbox » Blog

More Alps and Flickr

Rob — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:49:43 +0000

For those interested I have uploaded some more photos to Flickr you can see them on my photo stream here.

I have also added the standard Flickr photo badge to the side bar of my site, as I attempt to push more content through this blog. It’s only a start but I realised after playing with plaxo that it’s essentially what my blog should be. What is the point of having a blog but then also having lots of other micro blogs, photos, music, links in other places. I appreciate that if your blog is mostly your business then you may not want your twitters on it, but for me my blog is a place to muck about. So really everything should be here.

I like the way people like Simon Willison include everything in their blog. Sure you get a lot of update, but that’s the point of a blog right, that’s the point of categories… I aim to allow people to subscribe to my written blog (this) as normal, but then also subscribe to links I post on del.icio.us, my flickr photos, things I Digg, shared stuff in Google Reader and perhaps Last.fm summaries (if they update it for the iPhone!!!). I initially started doing this with Elsewhere and links although I don’t think anyone notices them or reads them, so giving them a prominent placing would make more sense.

Something that started bugging me the other day was a feature I think is lacking in Flickr. I realised I could send photos from my iPhone via email, although I don’t like the fact they appear in my photo stream. What I want to do is remove these photos from my stream or have one stream for real photos and one for mobile image blogging. I guess however I can play about with tags and groups, although it would be nice to have more control over the stream than editing dates :( Anyone have a solution for this?

Long time no updates

Rob — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:47:53 +0000

Recently I have been going through bouts of posting and then not posting. I find myself saying I shouldn’t post this now as I have already posted today, I’ll save it for tomorrow, and then suddenly I find I haven’t posted in 2 weeks…

So what’s been keeping me busy, well I have quite a valid point or two. Work as usual is rather hectic with lots of work going on in and around Ceros. Socially I am moving house at then end of the month, so have been busy trying to sort that out, although we have a friend that works for haart which has made the process a lot less painful, and we have found a loverly place to move just down the road.

Tonight I shall be heading off to the chinwag live summer party for some industry socialising (and free booze!), and will be updating all via twitter, which I think has made me feel less guilty in updating my blog as of late.

Pixelbox 2.0 (beta)

Rob — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:31:53 +0000

So here it is… finally… I have got the version 2 beta of this blog out! It all started a long time ago when I tried to make my own theme, and became utterly frustrated with the over complicated spaghetti code that riddles wordpress. Don’t get me wrong wordpress is great, a fantastic blogging tool, but the code is sooo confusing!

This I am sure is mainly because it’s not yet OO (so many hosts out there are still on PHP4, including mine) which means it’s not using any OO patterns. If you try and trace back functions you find them echo-ing stuff out all over the place, rather than returning stuff. I have noticed they are trying to improve with a lot more functions returning rather than printing but it’s still a mess.

So most of the time was spend trying to re-write these functions in my own code, (rather than editing the core code, allowing for updates). Perhaps I really should be giving this code back to the project, but I wouldn’t know where to start :(

Why the beta?

Most of the reason for the beta tag (naff I know) is because I was so sick of not getting it out there I decided it would force me to fix things and keep it going, rather than leaving it in development for ages. There is still lots to do, and some things may not work… but make sure you let me know if you find anything that you think I may not know about!

So what is next

Well after I have got all the features from the old blog into this one, I plan to do more of the same, but with a code base I am happy with. Expect a Hijax overlay, nifty CSS3 stuff, micro formatted goodness, flash image and font replacement and perhaps even some flex widgets. However don’t hold your breath ;)

UPDATE: I just did some nice CSS image roll overs, as I didn’t have time before. This has to be standard now doesn’t it?

Pixelbox is global

Rob — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:00:29 +0000

I noticed in my incoming links the other day that come chap called Chui-Wen Chiu has posted my Apollo custom chrome example in Chinese.

After fisihing around on google translate I managed to figure out he was just translating my comments and doing a bit of a walk through of my code (rather than criticizing my code… phew).

Nice to know it was helpful to someone out there, and now potentially a few billion more :D

Social Networking, the lesser of two evils…

Rob — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:52:33 +0000

Recently a number of my friends have started joining social networking sites, mainly myspace, as a way of wasting time at work I guess. Really there is no point in these sites other than meeting up with old acquaintances, who if you really liked you would have stayed in contact with anyway and seems only to serve as a way for people to boast about how many friends they have.

Strangely these sites seem to have become popular with my friends, and non content in communicating with me in the normal methods, they now have to do it over one of these sites (face to face, phone, email and instant messaging seem all too obvious somehow).

Really these sites are no different from say this blog, although I have various other reasons for setting it up, in the same way an artist would paint in their spare time. However as I am interested in the internet as a whole I feel I shouldn’t knock it until I have tried it… as much as it pains me.

MySpace being owned by Rupert Murdoch, written in ColdFusion and consequently one of the worst implementations of an idea I have ever seen, there is no chance I would join, however FaceBook seems to be a much nice implementation and far more up to date that it’s more popular sibling of social networking sites. So I joined…

New look…

Rob — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 19:00:24 +0000

When I started out on this blog I wanted to take my design from the ground up and develop it along the way. However with so much work and not enough time off I have finally decided that it aint going to happen.

So here it is… my new base of a design. It kind of feels like moving into a show house, it’s nice and looks good, but at the end of the day it’s just not mine. I’m planning on moving a few things around, changing this and that and where with the old theme I was planning on spending time styling block quotes, I can not spend my time fiddling with some prototype stuff and the PHP back-end.

So who predicts I don’t change anything for another 6 months???

New MacBook Pro

Rob — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:54:23 +0000

So I got a new mac book pro from work today. I converted everything across from my old work iMac (which took about 3 hours) and have to say its pretty splendid.

Most things are the same as before, remote, build in everything etc… just a great pice of kit.

Problems with setAttribute in IE

Rob — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 11:43:55 +0000

Whilst being Pr0 and trying to work around IE’s inability to understand the CSS :after class I used JavaScript to add a clearing element after the classes through the DOM, but only for IE. (I know browser sniffing is wrong but if it adds in a clearing element in Opera too there won’t be any ill effect).

Anyway I found that Internet Explorer can’t add style content through setAttribute and also can’t seem to set the class name and then apply the class from the CSS.

After a bit of digging on the web I found that you can use setAttribute(“className”,”clearAll”); to do the same in IE. This works fine but be sure to remember that if Opera or Camino are pretending to be IE they wont add the class name through className so it’s worth adding a class in too, just as a back up. (Why can’t browsers pretending to be IE not have another navigator element saying their true identity)

Thanks to quirksmode

for the info on this!

Truncating HTML elements through the DOM

Rob — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 15:55:56 +0000

After the launch of Monkey I have had time to (been forced to) do some other projects. Whilst being a nice change it’s also rather annoying not getting to polish something once you have got the first release out. However needs must and hopefully I will be back on it soon.

Being back on the front end train I have strived to gets some things perfect and armed with my new love for the DOM and Hijax I have started to seen new potential solutions to problems.

The one I had today was a design issue where by an ordered list on a website had the potential to contain an item that would wrap onto more than one line. Consequently breaking the nice look and feel of a page.

I found my self with potentially three options to solve this problem.

Do it back end in the CMS
Use CSS to limit it’s width
Use DOM Scripting to truncate the node content

Doing it in the back was a bad idea. Firstly its more work in the back end which is already overflowing with work and secondly we would loose content for something which is related to a front end style.

Therefore I decided to go front end on it and had to choose between CSS and JavaScript to perform the truncation of my text.

CSS has the advantage of speed over JavaScript, mainly because you need to wait for the DOM to load before you can edit it meaning that you could potentially see the content disappear before your very eyes.

With CSS we can set the list item in the ordered list to have a set width and no visible overflow. This works well but has no evidence that something has been truncated, and may lead to bad results. Also when you supply overflow: hidden; to a list item in an ordered list the item number is hidden… great! However my list items needed to be links, giving me an anchor tag to apply the overflow:hidden to.

The next problem was to add the … onto the end of the truncated item. This can be done with the CSS pseudo-element :after which can add in content. However there is no way to apply logic to say only apply the content if it has an overflow.

So the next way to do it was with JavaScript and the DOM, the advantage here was you could apply the changed with logic. You can vary the max size on elements through HTML attributes, apply truncation only when needed, move the full version into another element and if it doesn’t work you can still use the CSS to back you up.


function maxLen() {

    var toTruncate = new Array();

    var toTruncate = getElementsByClassName( document, "*", "truncate" );

    var length;

    var truncated;

    var content;

    for( var i=0; i < toTruncate.length; i++ ){

        length = toTruncate[i].getAttribute('title');

        toTruncate[i].setAttribute('title','');

        if(toTruncate[i].firstChild.nodeType == 3){

            content = toTruncate[i].firstChild.nodeValue;

            if( content.length > length ){

                truncated = content.substr(0,length);

                toTruncate[i].firstChild.nodeValue = truncated+"...";

                toTruncate[i].setAttribute('title',content);

            }

        }
    }

}

Here I used a construct function to call my script on page load, and also used a method to get elements by class name, there are lots on the web you can use!

Let me know what you think or if you have any other options!

iPod shuffle Reset Utility

Rob — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:23:29 +0000

Apple has released a reset utility for its first generation of iPod Shuffles aimed at correcting a number of problems that users may have encountered during use of their shuffles, including:

–With the iPod shuffle switched on, pressing the Play button will cause amber and green LEDs to flash for a few seconds, and the unit will not play any music, nor can you sync music to it from iTunes.
–On a Windows PC, iPod shuffle will appear in My Computer as a “Removable Disk,�? however the iPod shuffle volume will not mount correctly. The unit is listed in Device Manager under “Disk Drives�? as “Apple iPod USB Device.�?
–On a Mac, the unit will only be recognized in Apple System Profiler under Hardware -> USB and will not appear or mount in the Finder.
–When attempting to restore, the unit may not be recognized at all. However, if it is recognized, the restore may fail with an error dialog “Firmware update failure. Disk write error�? or another error. It may take 3 restore attempts before the error appears. Note: iPod shuffle may take several minutes to be recognized.

So finally I may be able to use my old shuffle which I though was ruined!