Web Development

Over at Mike's blog awhile back, he posted about HeatMaps and I incorrectly assumed it was trying to map clicks from the site - something like what CrazyEgg does with their heat map imagery for visualizing statistics. As stated, I was incorrect in my assumption, however...today I just (just now) came across something that's OpenSource which will attempt to do a similar mapping for you. Rather than color heat generation, it is currently just placing little 'x's on the image, but even so...do you really need an oil-slick looking page, or just to see where people are focusing on your links?

ClickHeat: what's hot on your webpage?
(Navigate to clickheat -- direct linking sends you to the wrong place for some reason.)

Continue reading "Heat Mapping"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I spent about 6 hours today trying to apply the well-known PNG transparency filter to work with IE on a 1x1px background image. I had never tried it before, I always had the ability in my designs before to use other methods as a solution. This time I really didn't, and it was a poor place to spend 6 hours figuring it out (it was simply for aesthetics), but I also knew this was something I needed to add to my experience or else I'd have stumbling blocks later on in my more advanced designs.

So, after visiting over 80+ pages that covered Microsoft's proprietary CSS filter style for IE5.5+ and still not understanding (what-so-ever) why my implementation, which was exactly the same, wasn't working...I accidentally added a property to the wrong style definition and caused the problematic selection to give IE its hasLayout property. THAT FIXED IT. It's amazing that in all of the examples I had looked at, none of them stated that I needed hasLaout. QuirksMode said that IE's opacity filter required hasLayout, but I didn't read that until afterward (so I would assume any IE specific filter requires hasLayout). So, adding height or width (or any other property that forces hasLayout) will allow for the AlphaImageLoader filter to work. But, what else did I do (and other neat stuff did I find about PNGs)?

Continue reading "PNGs, Internet Explorer, CSS, and AlphaImageLoader"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Since others were having fun with it, I decided to show off a quick, poorly chosen framerate flash demonstration of Intype creating an XHTML/PHP file to do the all-famous Hello World script. Obviously, the point is not to demonstrate my coding knowledge (or mis-knowledge), but to show off the text editor's snippet control features, and how it can speed up development. In case you're curious how it interacts, for the first step I typed out the text xml and then pressed the TAB key, everything was automatically filled in for the XML header. I then typed in doctype and then TAB, but since there are multiple doctypes, it gave me a choice of which one I wanted to use, so I used the arrow keys to highlight the desired choice and pressed the ENTER key. To move through the parameter list within each snippet (fillable properties), you would also use the TAB key and enter whatever it is you want, or press the DELETE or BACKSPACE (I think) key to remove the entire property.

Please note the system clock window to know how long this actually took me -- you can clock it, heck you can even clock my hesitation since I'm not used to the tool yet.

Continue reading "An XHTML Strict, PHP Hello World from Scratch in Under 60 Seconds with Intype"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

The very first alpha public version of Intype has been released for testing. The developers are looking for feedback on this release - but do keep in mind it is the very first release. If you've ever used an editor or IDE in Windows, you will probably wonder what's so special about something like this...there seem to be no features!

Continue reading "Windows version of TextMate: Intype"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I've been reading a lot about internal turmoil within the ranks of different departments within the W3C, but other than the infighting and argumentative discussions, not much has been seen (by me) in the way of actual progress with things. Today, I have seen the light! The validator has a revamped look and feel, and a new design as well. Not only that, but errors and warning messages have been reworded to sound clearer! It will actually let you know that if you used a background: transparent; setting, that you may have done so, and just make sure it's legible. Awesome!

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski