Latest news in Design & Coding
How To Remove The Digg Bar From Your Blog Using PHP
Design & Coding Last week I showed how you can remove the digg bar from your blog using javascript. Jonathan Bailey also wrote about this subject and he later emailed me about an article John Gruber wrote. As some of you may know, Javscript has some limitations. One of the biggest problems is that users have the option of switching javascript off. Thankfully, John has posted a PHP solution to removing the Digg Bar. By placing this code in your header template ...
Continue readingCreating a Drop Down Menu
CSS Horizontal navigation is quite popular however it becomes restrictive once you’ve got too many pages to list. Once you reach this point then you either need to convert to using a vertical navigation, or start using drop down menus. Drop downs used to rely on JavaScript however all modern browsers can now manage drop down menus with just CSS (IE7+, Firefox, Opera, Safari; note, JavaScript is still required for IE6 and below). The HTML ...
Continue readingHow To Remove The Digg Bar From Your Blog
Design & Coding I hate websites who place frames around sites I have built. What right do they have to stop a user viewing my site its entirety. It’s such a cheap 1990s scummy method of ensuring that the user doesn’t stay on your site for long and returns back to the toolbar owners site. So Diggs recent addition of a toolbar annoyed me. Infact, it pissed off quite a lot of people. I for one cannot understand why they have introduced this. Digg was ...
Continue readingCSS Image Replacement
Design & Coding The available fonts to a web designer is quite restrictive for making headings and menus look sleek and stylish whilst still maintaining usability and accessibility. We don’t all have the same fonts available, yet that shouldn’t stop us from using our favourite fonts. A lot of designers/developers will simply create the text they want and save it as an image, then place it on the page where they want it eg. a Logo, using an image ...
Continue readingExplaining CSS Selectors Part III
CSS This is the final part in this 3 part series (see Part I and Part II), and we’re on to Pseudo-element selectors. :first-line The :first-line pseudo-element allows you to target the first line of a given target, which must be either a block level element, inline-block, table cell or caption. So, for example, if you wanted to make the first line of a paragraph red then you could use [sourcecode language="css"]p:first-line { color: red ...
Continue readingPicasa Widgets and Plugins for your Blog
Design & Coding, WordPress Plugins Second to Flickr, Google owned Picasa is probably the most used photo-sharing service online. Blogger users in particular make great use of Picasa since all image uploads are hosted on their Picasa accounts. When researching the possibilities of developing a Picasa photostream widget, I realized that widgets to display Picasa photos are actually few and far between (especially when compared to the huge variety of widgets and plugins available ...
Continue readingExplaining CSS Selectors Part II
CSS See last weeks post for part one of Explaining CSS Selectors. Attribute Selectors Attribute selectors allow you to target a group of items on a page by matching a particular attribute. This opens up a whole new method of selecting your targets. Unfortunately attribute selectors are not supported in IE6 (which is why they’re not very commonly used), and IE7′s support is a bit buggy at times, however with IE8 out today, hopefully ...
Continue readingExplaining CSS Selectors Part I
CSS Now that we’ve covered a lot of information on HTML and some brief information on CSS, it’s now time to explore the power of CSS even more. Selectors Selectors allow you to target specific tags, ids, classes, attributes and more, on a page, ie. target a specific item or a group of items. We’ve seen and used these already briefly, to target type selectors (h1, div, p, a, etc), ID selectors (#idname) and class selectors ...
Continue readingHTML Forms III
Design & Coding The final installment of this series about forms, their usage and markup. You can catch up on the previous posts at Part 1 and Part 2. Last week we covered the main form input type which was, appropriately named, the input tag. This now leaves us with select lists, textareas and then a couple of standard layouts. Select Lists A select list is a cross between the radio buttons and checkboxes seen last week. If you force a select list to only ...
Continue readingHTML Forms II
Design & Coding Last week I explained the markup required for setting up the main aspects of a form. This week I’m going to explain the form input tag and its various uses. The input tag The input tag offers us several types of field depending on the value of the type attribute used. The different types available are text, password, checkbox, radio, file, hidden, submit, reset, button, image. The type attribute defines the type of input field we’re ...
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