OliJ » Whitenoise

Geotag test

oliver — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:09:18 +0000

This is a test for geotagging from my iPhone!

Posted from Camberley, England, United Kingdom.

MP3 Cue file splitting on a Mac (Snow Leopard)

oliver — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:18:26 +0000

I still run into one of these occasionally, although I cannot fathom why – what would you actually use one for? Anyway – it’s quite difficult to find a splitter program if you are using a mac – you’ve probably found that cue-splitter is no longer supported and you may have stumbled into MP3 trimmer; a horribly made program that also nags you to pay for it. Yuk.

I happened upon Max Mp3 Cue file Splitter this morning and it’s waaaay better! Easy to use and free – you can’t ask for more than that.

WordPress 3.0 + 1&1 = Error 500

oliver — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:33:50 +0000

I was having a few issues with my hosting from 1&1 last week where a new wordpress install would work fine, but when I imported a site directory and a db to work on it, it produced an “Error 500 – internal server error” message. This was frustrating and 1&1, although quite quick to respond (!), simply rolled out the ‘check your scripts’ advice. Not that helpful when the files and db worked fine on other hosting platforms so I thought I would post the remedy here in the hope it helps anyone else with the same problem.

It’s a very simple fix: In the end, I found a post (i’ve lost the link) that advised placing a ‘php.ini’ file in the root of the site directory and filling it with the line ‘memory=20MB’.

As soon as I ftp’d the file into the site, everything worked fine!

Embed flickr slideshows into your site

oliver — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:41:38 +0000

I’ve recently discovered the joys of flickr (yeah I know, but I had 12 giggs of photo’s with Fotki, it was hard to move!) and I’ve been looking to integrate my use of flickr with my blogs and for use in my clients websites.

First up is flickr slideshow using javascript – it’s nice and light and works well. On the downside it doesn’t look all that amazing and you can’t change the background colours. Oh, and it doesn’t work on iPhone’s either..poo.

Next up, Paul Stamatiou presents two ways of getting your flickr pics embedded in your site using iFrame or object tags – again, similar to the above, they won’t work on your iPhone but they work a bit better in other browsers as they are less clunky.

Still under development (and I couldn’t get it to work) is Flickrshow – it sounds promising and worth keeping an eye on for the future.

Pictobrowser is a nice flash based gallery that is very easy to set up as it has a configuration gui built into the gallery itself and you can tweak colours, positioning and other settings to get a look close to what you want on your site. It is flash though.. :/

Now for the official flickr slideshow – again it is flash, but being offered by flickr it should be better supported and it works really well, having a full screen option too. You simply navigate to a set or gallery in flickr, click the slideshow button and then click share to grab a link or embed code to post on your site. You may have to tweak this to get it to the right size, so it’s not perfect for newbies. See how it works here:official Flickr slideshow link.

So these seem to be the options at the moment – I’m waiting for a javascipt gallery that will just flick through pictures without any interface controls, so that I could add it as an icon or decorative piece in a website – so I’m a little disappointed at the lack of support for the iOS safari browser for this reason too.

Usefull Apple RSS Feeds

oliver — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:42:59 +0000

CSS3; beginner to advanced

oliver — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:06:41 +0000

With CSS3 on the horizon, I thought I’d post some good links to some basic and some more advanced CSS techniques which you can use to get your website looking sweet.

Return lat & Long for Postcode (use with Google Maps)

oliver — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:44:10 +0000

This has a really nifty bit of PHP for use with the UK Postcodes website API.

You could use this with google maps to load a map on your web page as specified by the user.

HTML5: Video and all that

oliver — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:59:09 +0000

It isn’t yet a standard, but I can’t wait for Firefox and IE9 to get properly on board – at the time of writing, Chrome and Safari both support a fair chunk, but this is likely to change when the standard gets officially signed off.

DOCTYPE

First, the new doctype is so much simpler!
The !DOCTYPE declaration.

HTML Video:

Again, so simple, no more huge chunks of flash vars and calls for scripts with divs for placing!
See Apple’s specification for Safari / iPhone and the iPhone Safar / Viewport configuration is worth a little mention..

The correct codec is needed (x264 is the most popular right now, but firefox uses the open source ogg codec).
You can use Handbrake to encode the mp4′s to the iPhone’s strict requirements and this should work for chrome/safari – Firefox does not yet support it (it uses the ogg codec, but may soon support x264) and IE9 will support x264 upon release.

There is also a fall-back method for using traditional video tools if html5 is not supported – so don’t worry too much about compatability – you can wrap your old video code in the new video tags (in theory, although we will see how well that works in practice!).

HTML 5 Tags

You may want to add HTML 5 tags to dreamweaver – it takes a couple of minutes, but worth it.

The big differences (besides audio/video tags) are the semantic tags for defining different segments of the page – it makes things start to look like a big XML document so that machines can process the info better. So now you have a ‘header‘ segment of the page, the ‘nav‘ segment, a ‘section‘ segment and nested ‘articles‘ within the main ‘sections’ of the page. At the bottom is of course the ‘footer‘ segment. You can also use ‘footer’ segments within each ‘article’ to contain the reply/comment/next navigational links or author/publication dates that might appear at the end of the article segment. All these tag can be styled with css too – which removes a few more div’s. See more on all these tags and there use here.
What about all those old browsers? Will IE6 Support it?
See the above link; note the bit towards the end about using javascript to allow IE6 to apply CSS styles to the new HTML5 tags – so all websites can move towards it.. when the W3C people actually sign it off as a standard!

More on the html5 specification / tags:

http://www.w3schools.com/html5/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

@font-face

oliver — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:13:29 +0000

Discovered this great resource of license free fonts AND they also provide the CSS code to embed your font into a web page! How much easier (or cheaper) could it get?

Font-Face resource

Web Slideshows in XHTML

oliver — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:15:15 +0000

I didn’t even know you could do this, let alone how, but it’s beautifully simple.

All you need is the JS file and some mark up in xhtml.

The ‘incremental’ class allows elements to be revealed as you press the right arrow or click to move forward.

You can specify a footer and number the slide pages etc.. all like you would in powerpoint.

XHTML slideshows tutorial (and yes, it is a XHTML slideshow – well what would you expect?)