Sliding Notes 1.3 – Hot New “Presidential Oath” Release
I haven’t posted anything to my blog in the last week, and I had a good reason: I’ve been preparing a brand new release of Sliding Notes.
Since I published Sliding Notes the first time, I repeatedly had the chance to witness and help with its integration into existing, real world designs. One essential insight I gained from this was that Sliding Notes are being used (or their usage envisioned) in a much wider variety of contexts, than I initially imagined: In the side bar, the content, floating with the text, or stacked, initially collapsed or expanded…[toc class=toc-right/]
As a result of that experience, and just in time for Obama’s upcoming Presidential Oath of Office, I’m releasing a brand new version of the plug-in, packed with features that greatly ease the integration into existing website styles and concepts, as well as the combination of different usage patterns on the same site. Read more >>
Getting Started With Sliding Notes And MyCSS In 4 Super-Easy Steps
[toc class=toc-right style=”max-width:50%”]Since I published my Sliding Notes plug-in, I’ve got several emails from people new to HTML and CSS, or blogging as such, who asked me for guidance to get them started with Sliding Notes (and the MyCSS plug-in for styling).
So I decided to write this simple manual. (Which doesn’t mean I’m unhappy with you folks contacting me 😉 )
Sliding Notes 1.2.1 Released
After much struggle with an annoyingly pertinacious cross-browser issue, and a thorough rework at both conceptual and code level, here it is, at last:
Sliding Notes 1.2.1
Download it as as usual, and see the plug-in homepage for details.
Sliding Notes Back On Air
I’m pleased to announce that my efforts to overcome the cross-browser issues have yielded a promissing new Sliding Notes version. I’m running it on this site alredy, and I’d be grateful for your feedback on how it works with different browsers.
Stay tuned while I’m running some more tests and prepare an official release.
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).
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.
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. [↩]
