David Ruppert

Ok, simply using this as a code toolbox again, I don’t want to misplace some of these links.

I spent the better part of a day trying to get Thickbox to work with some existing [and fairly outdated] style switching code. In an attempt to avoid a typical, blow my top, crap on everyone outbursts, I decided to try something else.

While searching around the little interweb for Thickbox issues, I found a post on a forum about Greybox.

After taking a couple of minutes to drop in the code, it worked like a champ. So . . I’m keeping it.

No knock on Thickbox, just simply didn’t have time to troubleshoot anymore. Greybox seems to provide about the same result [and of course it validates], but instead of linking to a url with a querystring of variables and adding a class of “thickbox”, you simply link to the page with ‘ rel=”gb_page_center[520, 500]“‘ in your anchor tag. This is for linking to html documents . . it’s slightly different to create an image gallery like Lightbox JS has mastered.

Plus, it’s about 10kb less than Thickbox simply because of the absence of the jQuery library.

Lightbox 2

Thickbox 3.1

GreyBox v5.53

A buddy of mine noticed that firebug recently stopped showing anchor styles when inspecting links. Typically he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in this case . . much to my chagrin, he was right.

Well since this was clearly an immediate issue for him . . and I was busy with actual work he did some research and found that this was a bug in Firebug. [Huh, what are the chances?]

According to this article about Firebug not displaying anchor styles, there is a bug that the beta version [Firebug 1.1] fixes. I’ve downloaded the beta version and things seem to be working swimmingly.

I ran across a problem at the office a few days ago where a client was complaining about my Son of Suckerfish menus sticking open on a particular page in IE7. The issue was only happening on pages they had created, using templates that we had delivered, so of course I initially assume they’d done something wrong . . you know . . cause I’m judgmental like that.

Turns out that, without the below css update, if you click in an input field on a page using Suckerfish, then open the menus, they will not automatically close on mouse out.

This particular client page triggered an onfocus for the login box [currently very popular . . and annoying in my opinion] once the page loaded. So, without doing anything, the menus would stick open every time.

The simple fix consists of the following addition to your CSS:


#menu li:hover, #menu li.hover {
   position: static;
}


The fix has been around for a while, but I only recently ran into this problem. For more information on the problem, visit Matthew Ratzloff’s explanation at his blog on Built from source below:

Son of Suckerfish fix for IE7

Firefox lately has been throwing me into a complete fit. It seems two or three times a day my laptop locks up and is totally unusable. Once I can get the Task Manager to finally load. I see the culprit. The same one every time. Firefox.

I never hear any complaints from my cohorts here in the office, so I assumed it was something specific to my machine, setup, extension selection . . . something. But after doing a little searching this morning, it appears I’m not the only one with a problem. This thread started in 2004 with version 1 of the product, but is currently 23 pages long and has had a post as recent as a few hours ago.

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Over the past few weeks at the office I’ve had a need for a couple of different XML Parsers; one for traditional ASP and one PHP. I’ve found a couple that seem to work well and thought I’d make a note of them before I lost them for good.

ASP XML Parser

Buster Collings only has one source code example out there, but it’s a good one. This code was used to bring in an RSS newsfeed from Thomson and display it on one of our clients’ home page. Fairly straightforward, but requires MSXML2 so you might need to upgrade your server if you’re running an older OS.

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So, since working at my current employer I have made it a personal goal of mine to infest almost every conversation with some tense of the phrase ‘cram it’ . . and I’ve been remarkably successful. I’ve even gotten my coworkers sweet innocent fiancé‚ to utter the phrase, proving that my efforts are strong enough to break out of the walls of this office, putting one more solidly in the win column.

A few months ago we decided to ‘post-it’ up a whiteboard with phrases of encouragement. You know, generic sarcastic things like ‘If you dream it, you can DO it’ . . and other optimistic drivel.

As we kept playing, the game evolved [somehow] into taking corporate taglines and strategically dropping our favorite two words into the mix.

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