I've moved! I've moved my online home to mikejolley.com, and thats where I'll be blogging primarily. This site will stay live for archive purposes :)
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…
The latest update to Download Monitor for WordPress has been released; this version comes with a many fixes and some new features, such as improved sorting. For full details view the readme; you can grab the plugin here.
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.
