Our blog list does exactly what it's told

Controlling the blog list

Now that the evocore has stabilised a tad we decided that it was time we brought AstonishMe out of the stone age and upgraded it to 2.x. which means that we have quite a bit of custom work to redo. At the same time we decided to convert a skin we'd been playing with a while ago. In for a penny in for a pound and all that. One of the main problems we had was with the core bloglist widget, we needed it to do more than what it currently does .... so we decided to recode it and make it a tad more *flexible* and then we threw in some new bits.

The main problems we needed to overcome were :

1. The ability to display public blogs , no problem the current widget already does this
2. The ability to display members blogs to logged in members
3. The ability to hide certain blogs from everybody ( including ourselves )
4. The ability to add each blogs description to the blog list
5. The ability to re-order the blogs to suit ourselves

It's always good to abuse the evocore ;)

What does it do?

This is basically a direct replacement for the current widget except it comes with a fair few new settings. The main ones are the "Current Blog" and "Other Blog" settings which allow you to enter the html to use, either in the settings or from your skin, both settings have some replacement values to allow further customisation :

• $blog_url$ replaced with the blogs url
• $blog_shortname$ replaced with the blogs short name
• $blog_name$ replaced with the blogs name
• $blog_desc$ replaced with the blogs long description
• $blog_ID$ replaced with the blogs ID

What about the blog order?

Show members their blogs

To achieve the rest we decided it was time to abuse the blogs *notes* field .... mainly because we don't personally use it and it's one of the few fields that you don't end up fighting later. Ordering of the blogs is done by sorting them on the blogs notes field, so depending on what text you have in there depends on where they appear in your blog list ( ours start with "blogorder:1" "blogorder:2" etc ). If you happen to be one of the rare people that actually uses the notes field then just ignore the first line when yer reading them. Since we were abusing the notes field anyway we decided to abuse it a bit more. When the blog list is being displayed the plugin looks for the text "bloglist:hide" anywhere in the notes field. If it finds it then it skips ahead to the next blog in the list.

So where is it?

Until we finish recoding AstonishMe you can find the plugin here. Unzip it, upload it, install it, play with settings. As well as the other settings we threw a few in for Afwas although the rest of you may or may not find them useful. Once we have AstonishMe recoded you'll be able to find all our plugins on one easy page. As always, remember that this is a pre-release version of the plugin, so if you find any bugs or quirks let me know and we'll work at ironing them out.

¥

Photozoom 3s new GUI

Internet Explorer - wasting production time worldwide

Most people who know me will know my view of any/every version of Internet Explorer, hell most of them hold the same views. In fact, I'd imagine that pretty much every serious web developer out there would probably hold the same views. Internet Explorer is crap, and reminds us daily. Not only can it not understand the most basic HTML or CSS, but it usually can't even understand itself.

Today it hit a new level. I've been coding up a plugin for use on a clients site and, to improve the workflow, we decided to do some fancy shit with javascript seeing as the environment already required javascript to function. After a fair amount of thinking and tinkering I dived in and started coding away in a busy looking manner. After a fair amount of coding, quite a bit of which was spent beating my head against the wall with explorer and coding round it's *quirks* ... but that was expected .... I finally got the code behind the scenes done and started working on the GUI .... I wish I hadn't!

After finding some annoying little quirks ... like don't try leading/trailing whitespace in element title attributes ... ohhh and don't try and make it think to much whilst it's still trying to work out what HTML is .... I hit a deal killer. Internet Explorer couldn't add a radio button ( that worked ) via the DOM ...... a simple bloody radio button! .... if you want to try it yourself, copy paste the following code into notepad, save it as ie_is_crap.html and call it up in IE

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
	<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-UK" lang="en-UK">
	<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
	<title>Screen demo</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	// create an element
	function amCreateElement( elementType, elementAttributes )
	{
	  // create an element of the required type
	  var theElement = document.createElement( elementType );
	 
	  if( elementAttributes )
	  { // we have attributes for this element
	    var allAttributes = elementAttributes.split( '" ' );
	    var numAttributes = allAttributes.length;
	    for( i = 0; i < numAttributes; i++ )
	    {  // step though all elements
	      attributeName = allAttributes[i].slice( 0,allAttributes[i].indexOf( '=' ) );
	      attributeValue = allAttributes[i].slice( attributeName.length + 2 );
	      // the last attibute will still have trailing "
	      if( attributeValue.charAt( attributeValue.length - 1) == '"' ) attributeValue = attributeValue.slice( 0, -1 );
	      // check for onclick et al
	      if( attributeName.slice( 0, 2 ) == 'on' )
	      {// bugger now we need to play with explorer
	        if ( window.attachEvent )
	          eval('theElement.attachEvent( attributeName, function(x){ '+attributeValue+' } );' )// IE
	        else
	          theElement.setAttribute( attributeName, attributeValue );
	      }
	      else
	      {  // rest of attributes
	        if( attributeName == 'class' )
	        { // yet another piece of explorer crap
	          theElement.className = attributeValue;
	        }
	        else
	        {  // note : in iE everything else but style will work
	            theElement.setAttribute( attributeName, attributeValue, 0 );
	        }
	      }
	    }
	  }
	  // return the element we just built
	  return theElement;
	}
	 
	  theInput = amCreateElement( 'input', 'name="test" type="radio"' );
	  document.body.appendChild( theInput );
	 
	 
	  theInput = amCreateElement( 'input', 'name="test" type="radio"' );
	  document.body.appendChild( theInput );
	 
	 
	</script>
	</body>
	</html>

Inferior Experience brought to you by Microsoft

Great huh? I won't begin to tell you how many hours I spent narrowing it down to just that. So, this problem leaves us royally screwed, if I can't solve it then we have to revert back to a crap work flow and undo 3 days worth of my time ..... I am not a happy bunny ....... as a last resort I hit google, and for once I was impressed, it's first result leads to this post ( Problem with RADIO (created by DOM) in Internet Explorer ) on a forum, and more importantly, the answer ;) .......... notice the date of the post, July 2005.

Basically it comes down to the fact that IE wouldn't allow you to add a name attribute to an element created through the DOM, because nobody would ever want to create a form object huh? The bit that really pisses me off is that their new *flagship* and *compatible* browser IE7 is just as fucked up, so web developers world wide will still have to waste hours overcoming IE's various quirks and failures ......... I dread to think of the number of hours a day that amounts to.

Thanks to the answer given by Martin Honnen, and the microdoft page that he linked to, I managed to get radio buttons working ..... hooray only 4 bloody hours wasted huh Mr Grates :| for any of you that are interested, just add the snippet below into the code you saved from above and rerun the page ;)

	  if( window.attachEvent && elementAttributes && elementAttributes.indexOf( 'type="radio"' ) > -1 )
	  { // you REALLY have to hate IE :|
	    return document.createElement('<input '+elementAttributes+'></input>' );
	  }

A problem shared and all that

As you can imagine, with not being a happy bunny, I had to share my problem with Scott ...... the conversation went a tad like this :

tuxnus: it's ie6 ... it's high time to start penalizing them
yabba_hh: how the fuck do you penalise someone who's using IE6 ? they're ALREADY fucked :|
tuxnus: make it obvious to them ;)
tuxnus: most haven't a clue
yabba_hh: if they haven't noticed just from using ie then even a big red banner with flashing gif saying "Yer browsers fucked" wouldn't work :|
tuxnus: trouble is, most have nothing to compare it to
tuxnus: they think what they see, is what everyone sees
yabba_hh: there's probably a fair amount of truth in that

So ...... for all you IE users out that there that haven't a clue what we're on about, go install an alternative browser like Firefox or Opera ( google them huh ), and then go wander around the web and see what it *really* looks like. Not only will you have a better experience, and be safer because you're not using a browser that has more security flaws than MI5's headquarters, you'll also be helping web developers world wide save production time by not having to code out IE's ineptitudes.

Anyway, it's time I went and finished the GUI
¥