“Hemma hos” är hemma hos … Wednesday 2006-03-29
Borgholm har fortfarande kvar en skatt av gammal arkitektur från tiden som badort på modet. Mycket har dock skattat åt förgängelsen, ofta i form av brand. Därför gläder jag mig åt det som finns kvar av tinnar, torn och annan snickarglädje.
Ett av dessa märkliga hus är detta bakom kyrkan, där det sedan länge har bedrivits sommarrestaurang under namnet “Hemma hos”. Stället var flott att döma av matpriserna, men troligen har det ändå gått uselt med finanserna. Huset och restaurangen var till salu under något år till ett pris som motsvarade den på maten. Någon hugad spekulant tycktes inte vilja infinna sig.
Så under hösten kunde man läsa i bladet, att kåken skulle rivas för att ge plats åt, hör och häpna, ett smärre radhusområde mitt i sta’n. Det var med förskräckelse jag tog del av dessa tidender, och jag har då och då gått förbi för att se om vandalerna varit framme. Borgholm utsattes ju lyckligtvis inte för den stora galenskapen på 60-talet, då Europas stadskärnor revs, kanske inte för att ge ljus och luft, utan för att ge plats åt fyrkantiga fula köplador i glas och betong. Samt förstås de nödvändiga åtföljande parkeringshusen. En beboelig och småskalig miljö försvann och ersattes med öken under några decennier, tills ladorna flyttade ut och efterlämnade sönderslagna städer. Att Borgholm skonades, berodde nog mindre på klokare kommunpolitker, än på att ladorna inte fick plats.
Igår hände det, men inte på det sätt man kunde befara. “Hemma hos” rycktes upp från grunden och transporterade till en ny hemvist, hemma hos Bengt och Ing-Marie på Krutans Café och rumsuthyrning. En nätt liten friggebod. Några planer på vad som skall hända med huset har det inte sagts något om, men det får man väl veta så småningom. Dagens Barometern talar om en jättelik trailer och och många nyfikna.
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 3 Sunday 2006-03-26
Some progress is done on the stand in for the Flickr Badge, as we move on in the Petit Labs. In the tutorial “Building a Flickr Flash Display, Part 2“, we add some interactive dynamics to the image display. The beholder who’s eyes stare at the tiny thumbnails of our Flickered images, will be able to zoom in on any of them, to get a doubly sized version, by just pointing the mouse at it. As before, clicking an image will take the user to the Flickr page for that image. Come on and have some fun!
Global Tag Clouds on WordPress Dot Com
In the web 2.0 era tag clouds have become popular as a means of providing a semi semantic web. I say semi semantic, as we have humans rather than machines, making the relevant bridges between islands of information. The tag cloud or tag list is supposed to find connections between articles or posts, witin the same or neighboring domain of interest. Quite a few tagging services gather tags from blogs and web sites, to fasciltate this type of connections, and by visiting or subscribing to a service like Technorati or FeedBurner, you get freshly published information on your pet subjects.
There are some problems with this kind of syndication though. Do you really get relevant information links?
Well, as long as machines dont understand meaning, the only possible way to connect information in a meaningul way, is to use humans. The problem is that all connections that end up in a tag cloud are made blindly. That is, when you tag your article, you don’t know what other articles in cyberspace will get the same tag. Every contributing author adds tags, that he or she thinks are significant for the article or blog post. These tags are then automatically added to one or more centralized tag clouds. Not everyone will have the same idea on how to tag a certain piece of information.
I know this from my own experience. I’m farly good at creating categories for my own projects, but I often stumble when I add information to them. For a long time I had the distinct project types “Java” for Java programming and “XML” for my XML/XSL experiments. They resided in different directories on my hard disk. Then came the “Java and XML, a marriage made in heaven”, and I wrote every tiny XML handling software in Java. Where to place a new project? Is it about Java or about XML? Here tags comes to resque.
Tags are not categories, but have the advantage of connecting information over category boundaries.
That works for me, but how about sharing my tags with the world. First of all I have to specify by adding more tags to my projects, such as “java”, “xml”, “xsl”, “soap”, “web service”, “http”. If this covers my story, anyone searching for a “web service” will get a link from the tag cloud to my story, together with articles on certain wheater services, stock services, mapping services and so forth.
As there is no human supervision of the relevance of the interlinking, I’m sure the signal to noise ration will be very low on this centalized tag clouds. Contributing to this low ratio is the fact that the ranking of tags is based on popularity. Probably the most prominent tags are meaningless and yields the the longest lists of results.
So what’s the alternative?
A Google search does’nt give you the latest and hottest articles at the top, but the relevance of the results are normally high, because the ranking depends on popularity of the sites rather than the search terms ( comparable to tags ).
A search or a tag cloud within a domain/sub domain or directory/category would be more effective than a world popular tags cloud. If you are like Lorelle, read “The Problems With Tags and Tagging“, you don’t want to encourage people to leave your site, by presenting a Technorati or FeedBurner link to a central cloud of which you are part, but rather drill your own site local cloud. If you do this in a clever way, the relevance is inherent, as you have now added the missing survaillanse of interlinking.
Yesterday Doncha in “More WordPress Feeds” at WordPress Planet plugs for the new WordPress Dot Com new global tag cloud.
“When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!”
The new cloud in the WordPress.COM sky, was annonced by the “Unlucky in cards” chief developer of WordPress, aka PhotoMatt in “Tag Feeds and Paging” at the companies blog.
( My spell checker died, sorry about that! )
Tween Your Images With ActionScript Saturday 2006-03-25
Using the ActionScript 2.0 in Flash, you can have a lot of fun with the Tween class and the easing package. If you have some knowledge of ActionScript, and want to ease your work with your image transformations, you can have a ball with the classes in the mx.transitions packages.
Using only one frame and an external ActionScript, you can do almost anything you want by applying one or more of the transformations, accessible to the artistic programmer. After some thought on my road to a new Flickery Flash image display, I decided to take the Tween class on a ride.
Using others wisdom, I boldly set out to tween the transparency and the size of a JPEG image, and at the end combine the tweenings. It turned out to be a fairly easy ride. What you do is load the image of your choice into a MovieClip, and create a new instance of the Tween class. It’s constructor takes as arguments, the object you want to apply the change to, the property you want to change, the start and end value of that property, the duration of the tween and an easing function or class, that knows how a special type of tweening is done.
That’s pretty much all you have to do. Nothing fancy to the code, but the result is impressive. If you like to know how to create image effects in a fun and lazy way, read my tutorial “Using the Tween Class“.
All Columns Are Born Equal
Three column layouts are popular for web sites and blogs. At least among those among us, who want to present lots of widgets and ads along with our main content. A problem we encounter is how to make all columns stay equally tall in all browsers.
There are a few methods to make it work, using CSS and sometimes JavaScript. Here is a good solution, although somewhat complex, using negative margins to make the columns equal in height.
Here is a funny animated JavaScript solution for making 2, 3 or 4 columns equal: I’m not keen on using JavaScript, if I can avoid it, but the effect can be brought to good use in other DHTML situations.
If you want to really dig in to the multicolumn domain, the css-discuss Wiki lists an impressive collection of articles on ThreeColumnLayout
If you are lazy and want the basic layout automagically made, you can visit the ClevaTreva Piefecta Pagemaker.
Or maybe better, the CSS Creator’s CSS Creator
As an extra bonus for reading this I’ll give you marvels at CSS edge, like CSS menus and wrapping text around curved images.
Waddayaknow?
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 2
It’s all about including the Flickr Badge in an XHTML compliant way. As I have described in an earlier post, I thought I had succeeded. This proved very soon not to be true, and after a considerable amount of head scratching, I decided to craft my own badge.
If I could do that, I would gain two things. Firstly I would have full control of the behavior of the badge, such as the number and size of the images, the size of the grid and the timing of animations. Secondly, having direct access to the Flash Movie ( the “swiff” ) it would be much easier to look for embedding markup, that would validate as XHTML.
I have the Flash MX 2004 authoring tool or, if you are a programmer, the IDE on my computer, so making a Flash Movie from scratch is quite possible. I started to look for a suitable ActionScript Flickr library, to be able to communicate with the Flickr Service API. I found one at the Adobe/Macromedia web site, that looked promising, but I couldn’t find any documentation, so I dropped that. In my continued search, I found Kelvin Luck's flashr, version 0.4 Actionscript Flikr library, which contrary to Macromedia’s, is well documented. It is free for all to use, and comes with an introductory example, that runs right out of the box.
After some fiddling with the example, I realized that the example application only needed a few changes to look like the original Flickr Badge ( sans animation ). I decided to write a tutorial on “Building a Flickr Flash Display“. This is part 1, and further development will follow. Enjoy!
Windows Vista Delayed Wednesday 2006-03-22
It’s all too well known and recognized. Do you remember the Windows 95 operating system release? It was scheduled fro 1994, but delayed. The OC market nearly came to a hold waiting for the new OS from the Giant. It’s happening again. Software companies are preparing to adapt their applications to the new and maybe overly hyped next Windows version. Hardware companies are waiting to deliver new computers with OEM versions of the system or adapting drivers for it.
Today ZDNet refers to an announcement from Microsoft, that the Windows Vista, expected to be launched in the forth quarter this year, will be delayed until next year.
“The delay is the latest setback for Vista. Microsoft scaled back several key features of the operating system last year in order to try to ensure a 2006 release. The operating system, which has been in development for years, was delayed by, among other things, the fact that Microsoft had to put so much time and testing effort into Windows XP Service Pack 2, a largely security-oriented upgrade to the current version of Windows.”
Most probably this will mean that not only will the new OS be released later than expected, but will contain less new features than was planned. Just yesterday I read about all the different versions of Vista to be released soon. As always Microsoft is good at keeping expectation high between releases, but not so good at delivering on schedule.
I hear the marketing people moaning in the background.
Vintern biter
Efter en tio dagars sejour i Blekinge, har jag återvänt till Öland och min arbetsmaskin. Förutom att kolla upp mer än 250 mail igår, har jag ägnat dagen åt att beskriva mitt arbete med en blidvisare skriven i Flash. Den jag redan haft en tid på min blog, visar vackert upp de tolv senaste bilder, jag skickat upp till Flickr. Den animerar också bilderna så att en i taget förstoras upp, en mycket trevlig bildvisare. Tyvärr måste man ju numera bli lite petig med sina webbsidor och se till att de följer olika standards för webbsidor, såväl för struktur och stilar.
Jag beslutade att göra en egen Flashbildvisare som liknar den man kan få från Flickr, och tillverkade en sådan innan jag åkte ner till Eva. För att minnas hur jag gjort och eventuellt skriva en anvisning för andra som vill göra något liknande, har jag ägnat dagen åt att skriva en sådan - s.k. tutorial. Efter lite vidareutveckling skall jag presentera den för en intresserad omvärld.
Jag får återkomma med berättelsen om vistelsen i Karlskrona, när timmen är mindre sen. Under tiden fortsätter vintern att hålla oss i sitt järngrepp, även om solen så här i slutet på mars ger dagsmeja.
Image Upload in WordPress 2.02 Monday 2006-03-13
There are some complaints about image upload in the latest and greatest WordPress. In the Support forum one claims that big images doesn’t produce thumbnails, another that the path of the uploaded image is not correct, as if the blog has to be in the documetnt root.
Lets try it out! I’m uploading an image to my predefiened upload directory.
[Edit]
It worked as expected. Selecting the link and use thumbnail options works well. If you don’t use the options, it is possible to drag the thumbnail image into place in the editor. If you use the options, however, it is no longer possible to drag the thumbnail and you have to use “Send to editor”. It’s a bit strange, but this is how it works for now.
Test of the TinyMCE vs. (X)HTML Editor
Will the (X)HTML Editor pick up what’s written in the Rich Editor ?
It’s a test and I’m launcing the (X)HTML Editor here.
And yes, this time the XHTML Editor is populated with the contents from the Visually rich editor or TinyMCE. The first sentence written in the rich Editor is encapsulated in paragraph. Now I’m updating.
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