MakeMineATriple

So I’ve completed my switch-over to Drupal from Wordpress. As I mentioned in my previous post, the content migration bit was actually pretty easy and quick (I used the wordpress_import module).

While I enjoy using Wordpress, I’ve been using Drupal more and more over the past couple of years. This is mainly because of the fact that we’re using it a lot at work these days.

Drupal has its quirks (as does any system), but overall I’ve found it to be an excellent platform, and I’ve therefore decided to move this blog to Drupal, in the process taking advantage of all the experience I’ve gained in theming Drupal sites, to give my blog a slight design refresh. I’m part...

I’ve been writing a few updates for my BBC style news ticker plugin, in order to add some accessibility features as well as working around an issue where in some browsers, links where the link text is being modified can’t easily be clicked.

In my job, I get asked every now and then: “Can we make links to other websites open in new windows?” The reason generally given is to avoid “losing” site visitors. The answer, in short, should be “No”. There are a couple of points to raise here: The target attribute is deprecated, and not valid in modern web standards (i.e. no ‘target=”_blank”’). However, the functionality could still be done using javascript and validating against web standards. So… why shouldn’t we just use javascript to do this?

My brother Rory Gullan is pretty handy with a camera. To tie in with his first exhibition I built him a website to showcase some of his photographs. Of course, I needed to give him a photo gallery. I first considered using Gallery2, which I implemented for Oscar Whicheloe’s site, but ended up building something a bit more individual.

When creating my news ticker plugin, I came across a slight complication when using setTimeout() to calling a function which needed parameters passed to it. Not having had much call to use setTimeout in the past, I simply put:

setTimeout(myFunction(parameter)...

Wanting to create a news ticker along the lines of that used on the BBC news site, I took a look around for a handy plugin to do it, but with no success. So… I created my own, as a jQuery plugin. A quick sample of how to use it follows, or you can see the news ticker in action.

$(document)....

I’ve been having a lot of fun with jQuery recently. One of the things particularly easy to do with it is write nice and unobtrusive javascript (a good start when looking at progressive enhancement). This is largely down to the fact that it’s very easy to find particular elements within the DOM - with any level of specificity - and attach behaviour to them. On the site I’ve been building at work, one particular example was to get jQuery to write in the “...