Generate loading animations for your lightbox
I’ve been using the beloved Lightbox for a galleries quite a lot lately. You can’t beat for ease of use, keeping the site tidy and beats using annoying pop-up enlargements. However, I don’t like using the default buttons and loading animation as obviously the effort should be made to brand it like the rest of the site. Buttons are no problem, they’re easily designed in Photoshop, but I’ve always had a problem creating animations in Image Ready, it seems to take me longer than it really should and it’s hard to come up with loading ideas. That’s until I came across this nifty site that creates loading animations for you on the fly, called AjaxLoad.
This is a great tool for creating custom loading animations and generates them in 2 seconds. Just select the type of animation you want and its colours and generate it. Saves a lot of flaffing about in ImageReady and trying to make a simple graphic. I recommend it.
Personalise your start page with NetVibes
If you’re anything like me whenever you logon to your computer in the morning there’s a million and one things to do and check; check your email, read your subscribed feeds, click the ‘inspiration’ tag on your del.icio.us page to get inspiration for the day, read the news and search for classic episodes of the Simpsons on YouTube. In the past this would mean opening up many tabs on my browser, but now I have came across NetVibes.
NetVibes is a personalised homepage. It allows you to add various widgets to your homepage including news feeds, weather, search engines and email therefore you have everything you need on just one page. You can even change the theme of your layout. This is the perfect site to get you started for the day and keep you organised.
NetVibes isn’t the only personalised homepage out there. NetVibes would be my personal preference but here’s some more you can check out:
Kit Me Out (my major project) deadline has arrived
Finally after months of research, prototypes and development the deadline date for my major project submission has arrived. This is the major project for my final year of BSc Hons Interactive Multimedia Design – an online sports kit designer intended for sportswear manufacturers.
Users can use the application to design and customise their sports kits by experimenting with different kit parts and colours. Once they are happy with their kit, they can submit it for a quotation, at which point their details along with the kit details are saved to an admin area that can be accessed by the manufacturer.
Free icons galore
Mark James of FamFamFam.com has designed over 1000 web icons and is offering them at no price whatsoever. The icons are issued under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License so you can use them as you like in your projects.
This is a great time saver when developing web applications or sites and thanks to Mark, by having these at your fingertips you are able to concentrate on the more productive aspects of your development without having to waste your time coming up with creative icons that look good.
Fixing the ‘Click to activate and use this control’ problem for Flash in Explorer
Ever since Microsoft released an update of Internet Explorer 6, users have been getting the ‘Click to activate and use this control‘ when rolling over Flash content. This is particularly frustrating when using Flash for navigation, as it means having to double click.
There are a variety of Javascript solutions to this problem, and in my mind the most simplest form of implementation is this straight forward Javascript function that should only take 2 minutes to integrate.
Javascript function
You need to declare this in an external Javascript file and then link the Javascript file to your HTML page like so (this goes between the head tags):
<script type="text/JavaScript" language="javascript" src="<strong>myscript.js</strong>"></script>
Within this external Javascript file, you then type the following:
function flashFile() {
document.write('<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="<strong>myflash.swf</strong>" width="<strong>750</strong>" height="<strong>220</strong>">\n');
document.write('<param name="movie" value="<strong>myflash.swf</strong>" />\n');
document.write('</object>\n'); }
Very simple script. All you are doing here is writing the flash code with Javascript. You should replace the highlighted words with your own values. Now within your HTML, wherever you want to place the Flash file, simply write:
<script type="text/javascript">flashFile();</script>
This is calling the Javascript function that you have already declared. That’s you finished, you should no longer get the ‘Click to activate and use this control’ border in Explorer.
Additional parameters
You can easily add additional parameters to the Javascript function above, for example, wmode and quality.
function flashFile() {
document.write('<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="myflash.swf" width="750" height="220">\n');
document.write('<param name="movie" value="myflash.swf" />\n'); <strong>
document.write('<param name="quality" value="high" />\n');
document.write('<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />\n');</strong>
document.write('</object>\n'); }
Drawbacks
If the user has Javascript disabled, the Flash file will not appear. Therefore I recommend if you are using Flash for navigation, you ensure that you have an alternative way of navigating the site, e.g. links in the footer of the page.
Vector illustration at its finest
I came across this website recently called N.Design. It’s the blog and portfolio of a guy named Nick La. I was taken away by the initial illustration, used as the background of the site, and by diving deeper into Nick’s portfolio you can see more fantastic art work.
Nick’s work has been featured in many issues of Web Designer magazine along with Computer Arts magazine. He offers fantastic tutorials on Illustrator and offers great downloadable resources that I would recommend to any web designers to take a look at. His blogs very interesting too.
Take a look and see for yourself.
Linton Solutions site goes live
Linton Solution’s website offers visually attractive Flash animated photography, a CMS for control of news, links and mailing list, an integrated Google Map and product search facility.
Linton Solutions
Linton Solutions provide Environmental and Economic Solutions for Agriculture and Industrial markets offering a full spectrum of consultancy, design, manufacture, installation, after-sales service and support. We supply bespoke solutions to meet our customer
New RSS feed – what is a RSS feed?
What is an RSS Feed?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and enables you, the user, to sign up to different blogs, news feeds and podcasts that saves you from having to visit all your favourite sites each time you want to check for an update.
The majority of large news websites now have RSS Feeds and they are usually identified by the following icons.
How does it work?
To start, you need a news aggregator (also known as a RSS reader), which will check and download all the RSS Feeds you sign up to, and will inform you if there has been an update. There are various aggregators available – I recommend using Newsgator as it’s free and takes 2min to register. Your browser may also allow you to sign up to RSS Feeds.
How can you sign up to my RSS Feed?
I have 1 RSS Feed available, which is my Blog. By clicking the link below, you will be brought to my feed. Your browser may allow you to sign up to it from there, alternatively, from Newsgator you can easily add a feed by entering in the location of the feed. In my case, the location is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LeeMunroeBlog
Portfolio site tops 2 of the major search engines
Check it out, go to Yahoo & Microsoft Live and search for ‘web designer northern ireland’ and as of 18th March 2007 you’ll see my name listed in the top spot. Okay, so we all know Google is top dog for search engines, but getting up there in Yahoo and Live is a start.
Yahoo search results for ‘web designer northern ireland’Since the second half of 2006 I have realised the importance of the combination of well structured markup XHTML and CSS. These, along with the key positioning of keywords within the site content, are the fundamental factors for my website moving up the rankings and these key factors are implemented in all the websites I design and develop.
About this site
This site was first developed for a University assignment in early 2007. Since then, I have developed it further into what you see today and now use it as my main portfolio site available at leemunroe.com.
The site has been developed Web Standards compliant. You can read more about Web Standards at www.webstandards.org. It is best viewed with the most latest versions of browsers:
If you do not currently have the above installed, I recommend you do as earlier versions of these browsers lack some CSS support and PNG support and if you are using an earlier version of Internet Explorer you will currently not be viewing the whole website.
(NB: the site should be viewable on all browsers but I still recommend upgrading as they are free and provide better web design support)
Throughout the day I have different website themes in the form of Day, Sunset and Night. Therefore if you view the site at 10pm, the night theme will be active.
As this is started as a University assignment, you may see references to my assignments and major project. You can just ignore this, or alternatively, you can browse and see what I am currently up to at University.
Enjoy the site.