It’s here! The new improved download monitor plugin for wordpress is ready for use, and ready for wordpress 2.5 which is set to be released soon. This new version, aside form the wordpress 2.5 support, contains many bug fixes and is now much more efficient.

Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. Version 1 had a total of over 6000 downloads, lets hope this new release proves just as popular. Read more for the download link, the list of fixes, and usage/upgrade instructions.

Continue reading “Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin 2 - Wordpress 2.5 ready” »

A new version of the rounded corners plugin has been uploaded, you can grab it here or see a demo here.

This version has improved background image support and is more reliable. File size of the packed version is around 9kb.

As you may or may not have been aware there has been controversy in the web design community lately about IE’s “opt-in” policy to IE8’s improved web standards rendering (see this post on ALA). Basically, Microsoft were going to make developers add a meta tag to their web pages to make them render in IE8 Standards mode; without it, IE8 would only render in IE7 mode.

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

IE Blog

Well, yesterday it was announced that Microsoft had changed their minds and made it an “opt-out” policy instead meaning sites will render in IE8 mode unless told not to. Good news in my opinion, as I believe it will increase the popularity of standards based design in the long term.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly

IE Blog

Eric Meyers has more information on this story.

Recently there have been too many support requests for me to keep track of (I’m only one person!) therefore in the next couple of weeks I will be launching a support forum. Please don’t be offended if I don’t answer your questions in the blog post comments in the meantime.

Pull quotes, lift-out quotes, or call-outs are a handy method of drawing reader's attention to a section of text. Recently, on a couple of client projects, I've seen the need to enhance large blocks of text so the user could skim read them without missing the really important parts. Pull quotes seemed perfect for this, so I created a small jQuery script to take care of them.

In this article I demonstrate an easy method of creating pull quotes from a block of text using jQuery (a JavaScript library), CSS, and the html span element. I hope you find this method useful.