Slinding Notes – 1.1 Series Withdrawal
I am terribly sorry to announce that I’m temporarily withdrawing the 1.1 series due to cross-browser problems. The 1.0rc5 version is now marked as the “stable version”, and it will remain so until I’ve found a reliable solution to the problem. (The 1.1.0 version is still available through “Other Versions “).
Again, I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, but I thought this is the only fair thing to do right now (next to resolving the issue).
Of Boiling Frogs And Chinese Whispers
When I wrote “Psychology Of IT Language“, I brought up the aspect of communication of principles, the implicit communication of values, and its possible psychological impact on an organization.
As I’m further contemplating about it, patterns begin to disclose themselves. Two such patterns are Chinese Whisper and Boiling Frog. But before I go into them, an example:
YouTube Inside A Sliding Note
I’ve just received an email asking whether Sliding Notes support embedding YouTube videos inside.
I’m happy to confirm that they do! Here is a cool video» that proves it!
I used the Insights plug-in to embed the video object directly between the slider tags.
But: Using a video (or any other) shortcode in a Sliding Note is currently not supported.
Sliding Notes Major Upgrade
Today I’m releasing version 1.1.0 of Sliding Notes. This is a major rewrite of the plug-in and the beginning of the 1.1 series.
Shortcode Shortcomings
This post requires a certain degree of technical savvyness.
When experimenting with various shortcode locations in the post content, I noticed that under some conditions the shortcode behaved a bit strange with regard to paragraph arrangement. So I implemented a couple of “diagnostic” shortcodes and filters to further investigate the problem. But before I go into that, follow me on a short tour through what the Shortcode API is. Read more >>
A Little Weekend Zen
How long should you stay at something?
However long it takes to get what you came for.
How do you decide what you came for?
You don’t, you discover it.
How do you discover it?
You notice what isn’t there anymore when you feel like leaving.
Sliding Notes HowTo – Centered Button With 1.0 Series
Dan asked me today how to accomplish a centered slider button/title, while keeping the note content left-aligned. While I try to work out a neater solution, I’d like to present to the impatient a way to do it right away, with the current version of Sliding Notes (1.0rc5), taking Dan’s example as a foundation. It’s a bit involved in the sense that it takes editing some HTML first, but it’s a feasible way to go nonetheless (and after setting up the HTML structure, the visual editor can be used as well).
Sliding Notes – Scriptaculous Caveats
Last Tuesday, Jörg reported a problem where Sliding Notes didn’t work on hist site. It turned out quickly that the problem was not with Sliding Notes, but due to a javascript exception thrown when jQuery was loaded. I analyzed the effect nonetheless, and I’d like to share my insights with you, as I believe they might be of general interest.
Sliding Notes use the jQuery javascript library. There are known conflicts between jQuery and Scriptaculous, another widespread javascript library. The conflicts are particularly dramatic with older Scriptaculous versions (1.7 and less).1. Scriptaculous versions 1.8.0 and later2 still have some conflicts with jQuery, but not at a scale that they would stop each other from functioning. Read more >>
- See for ex. this google group discussion or this post [↩]
- 1.8.2 is the current Scriptaculous version as of this writing [↩]
Sliding Notes – 8 Bits Full Of Downloads
Last night I noticed that the number of downloads of my Hackadelic Sliding Notes has reached 256.
To a software engineer, it is one of the “magic” numbers. It corresponds to 28 (2 to the power of 8), and is the first number whose memory representation exceeds the size of a single byte.
From now on, it’ll take at least 2 bytes to count the downloads.
O.K., this might not be as big an achievement as the moonlanding, but hey! – Why miss an oportunity to celebrate?1 😉
- Besides, the next byte boundary crossing is at 65’536 downloads, so I’ve probably got a planty of time until the next such occasion. [↩]
Freedom Must Always Be Conquered
… a fact that can hardly be better illustrated then in this cartoon by Bruno Bozzetto, the Italian master of satirical animation:
