4 Sep 2008
3 Sep 2008
2 Sep 2008
4 Sep 2008
Google maps, with all the dragging and zooming and satellite view and all, is my mapping service of choice. Google offers an free API for their maps so you can integrate them right onto your site. Set you own default location, zoom level, widgetry. Even add your own markers with custom balloons. Remember though, if a map and directions are vital to your site, nothing beats some “plain English” directions.
3 Sep 2008
You’ve all seen a page like this:
That’s when you are viewing a directory on a server (or locally), that doesn’t have an “index” page to show you, but does have permissions set to allow you to see the directories contents. Different browsers have different takes on it. Here is Fx3:
None of them are exactly shining examples of user-friendliness, but they’ll do. After all, chances are all you need to do is quickly scan the contents and click on what you are looking for or are interested in. There is a bigger problem at work here though, and that is when you don’t get one of these default directory views at all. This can happen for two reasons:
Leave it to the mighty PHP to solve this problem for us. PHP is able to scour a directory and return it’s contents, so many folks have leveraged that ability into creating some very nice “directory listing” scripts. I’ve looked at a number of these, but the nicest I’ve seen so far is Greg Johnson’s PHP Directory LIster script: PHPDL v2.
Check out a demo directory on CSS-Tricks
Just drop the “index.php” file into any directory you wish to view, navigate to that directory in your browser, and it’ll make your directory look like this:
So what’s so cool about Greg’s PHPDL v2?
I am already finding this immensely useful. Just recently I wanted to share some MP3’s with a friend. Just chucked them in a directory, threw this in there, and send them the link. You could do the same sharing photos, or really anything else. It’s like the lazy-man’s webpage!
If you are using this script and have trouble with it only showing the file extention and not the file name, try replacing the variables name and lname with this at around line 213
$item['name'] = str_replace('.'.$info['extension'], '', $file);
$item['lname'] = strtolower(str_replace('.'.$info['extension'], '', $file));
2 Sep 2008
The first post that was ever popular on CSS-Tricks was my tutorial on fading out the bottom of a website. Reader Pascal Moret wrote in with some suggestions for fixing it up for IE 6. I figured what the heck, might as well get it fixed up for those folks who might want to use it but are worried about that. The live demo is updated as well as the download.
I honestly never even thought of doing this since clearly inline styles are usually the ones doing the overriding, but it is possible to override inline styles from the stylesheet. The theory is that you use the attribute selector, and simply something like span[style] { color: black !important; } will do the trick. IE 7 and 8 even play nice.
jQuery got a new website. At first there was a cartoony guitar-hero like illustration and a slogan “Be a JavaScript Rockstar”, but the community freaked out and the illustration and slogan are gone. I think the new design is pretty slick, but I do echo some of the lingering complaints (like lack of current navigation highlighting).
The hippest new thing to hit the streets last week was Ubiquity from Mozilla. It’s like a super AJAX, natural language, quicksilver-like, API-lovin’, mashup-mashup. Of course it’s meant to “make life easier” by adding a complicated new thingy to your browser that you have to learn how to use. It’s actually extremely cool, but it’s clearly for uber-nerds, not every-day folks.
Preeti from Web Hosting Search interviewed me.