Entries by Brendon Kozlowski

I was creating a replicated PDF form in HTML/CSS for work today and needed to get a portion of the form (signature field) to rest at the bottom of the page, whichever page it was. This was easily accomplished in CSS-friendly browsers by using position:fixed; bottom:0; ... however, IE6 does not support the "fixed" position with CSS. Not good...not all of our staff members in the building have been upgraded to use IE7 - most have, a couple have not.

Stu Nichols has found a way to "trick" IE6 in to allowing something almost entirely the same by way of using another CSS bug. It's a bit hackish, but it's not an actual hack. I used IE's conditional CSS to make sure it didn't mess up any other browser's rendering, but the link (and demo) is below in case anyone else needs the same functionality.

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/fixed.html

Ironically enough, this doesn't seem to work in Safari for Windows properly (haven't tried it with my Apple). Thankfully for me, I don't need to cope with that issue for this form on our intranet. I imagine it's actually a bug in the browser's rendering (only for print, it works just fine for online display).

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I had some fun mixing a couple different JavaScript technologies and web services together to create something "interesting", and helpful for our Children's Room.

Introducing the Saratoga Springs Public Library's Children's Room Photo Gallery!

For the services, I am using Google's AJAX API to serve up my jQuery library, rather than me having to deal with keeping it upgraded and gzip/compressing it. You can read more about it here. For the photographs, I am using Flickr, as many other libraries do. It was one of the easiest and quickest that I could use with a nice desktop-based management tool that also didn't hog network bandwidth while searching for new photos (ala Picasa, or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery). Now staffers in that department can create their own photo sets (or photo categories) and manage their own images.

For the JS effects, I am using two separate libraries. Since I'm using Google's AJAX API to serve up jQuery I'll start with that one... I'm using ThickBox to show a larger version image of a thumbnail when clicked on. The nice things about Thickbox is that (1)it integrates with the other script I'm using, (2)it automatically resizes the images to fit (if too big for the viewport), and (3)is very versatile in its use of modal dialog support. The other library I am using is something called "ImageFlow" written by Finn Rudolph, which is one of the best JS-based CoverFlow implementations I have seen. The Official ImageFlow website isn't as fancy as someone else's implementation, so you may wish to check out the version that also has YouTube integration, and automatic rotation/slideshow.

I know there's currently no way to get from that page back to our home page or other areas of our website. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned about that at the moment, I have many more pressing non-web-related projects of higher importance (at work) to work on, unfortunately.

Update: Apparently ThickBox is not being fired with the newest photoset, and I'm not sure why...it worked before a staff member updated the textual descriptions of the images, because I tried it. No idea why it's not working now - anyone have any ideas?

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

From my new subscription to the Twine (data?) service, I subscribed to the RDFa group to hear, and read about new (or interesting) technologies around the web. It's been quite some time since I had heard about Freebase Parallax (last read about in the Web4Lib digest), and when reading over the article in my Twine digest email, I took a second look. The video demo really showed its power. But, to understand the Semantic Web (RDFa), I'd suggest anyone interested read over that article first. It discusses ideologies on how one should be able to find information and data over the web.

A Good Data Browser Allows You to Navigate the Knowledge Space by Car
...and...
Twine, if you're interested - currently in private Beta.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

The title of this post is a bit misleading; I was trying to stuff it for SEO keywords without it being too long.

I ran into an issue with regard to the CSS property of "overflow" that I had set to "auto". When I set some test text of about 100 or so continuous "Hello " words, the scroll bars worked just fine. I then tweaked my node's height, and text and continued, but... The scroll bars weren't showing up, and my text was outside the bounds of the box (and therefore clipped)! Oh no! Tragedy of tragedies!

Through a little experimentation (in the end, this took me about 30 minutes to track down, and then test in all the browsers), I was able to determine what the problem was.

Continue reading "Browsers and minimum CSS overflow on Windows XP"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

An interesting question came up on the Web4Lib daily-digest today. I replied directly to the author (I think, never understand how listservs work) but I thought I'd share this anyhow as it's not a hugely sought-after solution. Note: there are probably other, better ways to do this. Comments and other solutions are welcome. I am under the assumption you are using Windows XP (if anyone wishes to make alterations for Vista or another OS, you're more than welcome in the comments - if Linux and not using the shell, please specify which distro).

The question:

Has anyone tried to network an internet connection that involves a Verizon PC card in a laptop. Ideally I would like to be able to have 2 or 3 laptops sharing that one connection, but I have no idea where to start!

Hopkins County - Madisonville Public Library

My response:

You would need 2 other components:
- 1 crossover cable (it's a CAT5 cable with slightly different wiring)
- 1 "splitter", so a hub, switch, or router.

If you use a wireless router, you'll only need the one cable. If you use a hub, switch, or regular router you'll need a standard CAT5 cable for the other computers to connect to.

1. Connect the crossover cable to the LAN port on the back of the laptop.
2. Connect the other end of the crossover cable either in to a single computer, or the "splitter"'s "INTERNET" port.
3. In Control Panel, go to "Network Connections".
4. CTRL+CLICK on the two network connections you want to be sharing (the Verizon, and the Local Area Connection).
5. Right click on one of the two, choose "Bridge Connections". (I can't verify what to do to finish the bridge as I only have one connection on my PC at the moment. A quick internet search could probably tell you.)
6. If the "splitter" you were using was powered on, you may have to wait a moment for it to get an IP address, otherwise you can always power cycle it to renew its IP. The same goes for the PCs if you don't know how to force it to get a new IP.

I *think* that should do it. If I missed something from memory of when I did internet sharing, you can just do an internet search for examples or tutorials on "network bridging winxp". Switch out "winxp" for whatever OS you might be using if otherwise.

I hope this can help someone looking for a solution - or at the very least, get them on the right track. I am assuming here that the cell provider is not using the LAN port (either a USB or PCMCIA port).

Update: I believe I've enforced some stricter SPAM filtering on my blog (i.e.: any at all). At the very least, I guess I'm now more popular? Sorry for any inconvenience. Comments are enabled once again.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski