http://www.makemineatriple.com Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:12:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/11/gallery/ 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),myTimeout); but that doesn't work. An apparent solution (until tried in Internet Explorer) is: setTimeout(myFunction,myTimeout,parameter); It ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/10/passing-parameters-to-a-function-called-with-settimout/ 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, ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/10/bbcnewsticker/ 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 ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/09/progressive-enhancement-with-jquery/ Writing for the web is very different from writing for print. Key reasons for this are: Users scan web pages rather than reading every word. Users typically won't give a web page their full attention. For example, they may also be listening to music and using instant messaging. Web pages are interactive. The six ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/09/writing-for-the-web/ Here's a strange one I came across the other day. I'm posting this in the hope that I'll save someone out there some time in the future. I was applying a fade-out effect to a news ticker, and all was going well (thank you Yahoo! User Interface library!) until I was ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/05/opacity_text_issues/ Last Thursday I went up to Edinburgh for the first Highland Fling conference, on progressive enhancement. Firstly, a big thanks to Alan White for organising the conference, and of course to all the speakers. Jeremy Keith kicked us off with an overview of progressive enhancement, paving the way for Mark Norman Francis ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/04/the-highland-fling/ This one's pretty simple actually, so there's not much to say about good practice with link text. However, I do keep seeing it being done wrong, so here's an outline of the key things to consider. The first thing to remember is that the link text should "identify the target of ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/03/link-text/ Here's part one of three in follow-up to the Oxford Geek Night, to elaborate on the points I made about image alt text. A quick recap (or introduction, if you weren't there or haven't seen my slides!): An image's alt text is presented to a user if their "user agent' (the thing ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/02/image_alt/ Two nights ago was the first Oxford Geek Night. This was basically a chance for web developers and designers to get together in a mixed business and social context. I did one of the "microslots" - a five minute talk on "Avoiding accessibility pitfalls". This is of course a huge area, ... http://www.makemineatriple.com/2007/02/geeknight1/