Search boxes: integral parts of many websites but often neglected in terms of markup and style. When considering both accessibility and semantics, marking up a a search box can be a little awkward depending on the look you are trying to achieve.
In this post I will suggest some methods of marking up your search boxes, and show a neat way of styling it using css and a few images.
Last week I noticed something very odd on Blue Anvil when resizing the browser window; after some casual browsing I discovered it was not just my site with the problem and that it was quite widespread on many ‘web 2.0′ style sites.
The problem occurs when resizing the browser window; cutting off background images and potentially making text illegible. Worse still, the bug also seems to affect mobile browsers with a zoom function, such as opera mobile.
After some dabbling I found a solution, which I shall explain in this post.
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.
Recently I’ve been searching for a method of creating nice looking rounded corners with Javascript & JQuery.
First I found the “JQuery Corner” plugin for rounded corners, but was disappointed that it did not include smooth, anti-aliased corners.
I then did some more google-trawling and found this post, which contained a modified version of Curvy Corners for use with JQuery. Now this script was much much better.
However…the filesize was a massive 40kb, way too big for production use, and to make things worse the code was not compatible with packer so I could not reduce the filesize.
Well, I got busy, and fixed the errors. It is now fully packer friendly meaning easy rounded corners in JQuery at only 9kb 8kb 15kb 20kb 16kb 10kb. Excellent. Read more for the download link.
As promised last week, this week we are looking at fetching RSS feeds with Magpie RSS.
Magpie is an PHP based RSS feed parser; I.E. It fetches RSS feeds to display in other places, which gives it many uses.
Unknown to many, wordpress has the magpie RSS parser built in, this article will teach you how to use it, and also how to fetch and show someones del.icio.us bookmarks!
In this first edition of “WordPress development techniques” I will be talking about one of the most useful classes available for use in wordpress: wpdb.
The wpdb class (WordPress DataBase class) is based on the ezSQL class, and handles database connections and queries.
Why use it? You can make all sorts of custom queries, and pull information from the wordpress database, including posts! Read on for more information on this useful class…
Widgets are a cool new feature built into wordpress version 2.2, and allow you to drag mini plugins into your widget-enabled theme’s sidebars.
They have all kinds of uses, searches, polls, you name it.
This article will show you how to create a customisable Recent post widget for yourself.
This week Ive been trying out a lot of image replacement techniques in main headings, and their are quite a few available. If you have a graphical header logo on a website, with the sites name, often you wont want to have another heading as plain text. Yet, you should want to have the heading readable by screen-readers, and you also want the SEO benefits of the heading.
Ive rounded up my favorite methods, and this entry will show you how to use them, and when to use them.
When developing websites there is one thing I have never kept consistent; the method of clearing floats. It seems every project I take, I seem to do it a different way, well Its about time I sorted it all out in my mind.
For those with no clue about what I’m rambling on about, with CSS layouts, when you have a float inside an block-level element, it will collapse in most browsers, since floats have no dimensions. So for instance, if I had a div container with a blue background, and a float inside it, the blue background would not surround the float (and the floats contents), due to the div ignoring the height of the float.
To fix this you need to ‘clear’ the float, so the container recognises the fact the float is there, and adjusts its height accordingly.
There are many methods of doing this, personally in the past Ive used most of them, so in this article I will compare the main ones and rate them in terms of:
Recently ‘Microformats’ has been a major buzz word in the web design community, but what are they all about? If you are feeling lost then this article is for you. This article explains what Microformats are, the benefits of using microformats, and how to implement them.
This article focus’ on the microformats hCard, and hAtom; both of which are used on the Blue Anvil site if you hadn’t noticed.
Just posting to let current users know that I’m closing the forum on Blue-Anvil. This is mainly due to spam-registrations getting out of hand and being a general nuisance. I will be posting good topics as FAQ items within posts if applicable.
Please note that you can still post and get help for my plugins/themes by posting on the wordpress.org website.
Are you a user of the WordPress MiniCard theme? Its been downloaded over 14,000 times so far!
If you have used it as-is, made your own child-theme or done something creative with it, please show off your MiniCard’s in the comments, I’d love to see how the theme is being used!
My Spam Stopper plugin has been updated for WordPress 3.0 (version 3.1.3) – you can grab it here. Sorry this update took longer than my other plugins but this one gets less lovin’ – if you want to change that feel free to donate, spread the word, or rate it on the WordPress.org plugin page.
Just a notice to users of the brilliant http://www.sexybookmarks.net/ plugin by shareaholic – If you use tr.im (as I have on a few client sites) be aware tr.im has ceased operation so you may see errors on your blog or in your source code; it screwed up the background and headings on one of my blogs.
To fix, go to sexybookmarks options, switch services in the “Which URL Shortener?” box, and tick the box to reset all short urls. Once done, your blog should return to normal.
