Journal

Latest Photos Upload

4th June, 2010

I had bit of a backlog of photos I took of a variety of places mostly around Dartmoor, which are now uploaded.

HTML and CSS Fluid Transparent Rounded Corner Boxes

2nd May, 2010

That’s quite a lot to demand of a title, and a box on a website as well it seems. In my work I have had a couple of designs lately that have required me to think up a good and solid way of having four rounded corners in a box that is one of a couple of things:

• Totally fluid, as in it resizes in both axes in accordance with changing content size.
• Each corner needs actual transparency to sit on gradient backgrounds.

There are hundreds of methods posted online about how to do fancy corners on boxes using CSS, but quite a lot of them just don’t have transparency involved, or worse still use a hack here and there or use a sprinkling of absolutely positioned, empty divs.

So what to do about the boxes having exhausted quite an extensive Google search and not finding a method that really suited me? Make one up of course. For those of us still stuck supporting IE6 as well as a raft of other browsers and their various editions, while offering a text resizing facility on the site, this meant it has to be remarkably robust.

The following method is the one I made for four corners only, with no border fanciness. In fact the graphical requirements were so simple that actually all the corners are the same GIF file as a ball, used much like you would a sprite:

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Dartmoor Photos

23rd March, 2010

Moorland walks seem to inevitably result in camera shots where I take a few across a landscape and think “Yeh, I’ll merge these together when I get home” and quite often I eventually do. Here are a couple of the latest:

See all the older shots I’ve taken in the past in this group of Dartmoor shots.

Out of interest there are a lot of new websites appearing that make use of flickr’s APIs to display information but here is one that has been around for a while and seems to provide quite a few hits: http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/User/srjm. It also helps to remind me of old things.

An Update (Christmas 2009)

27th December, 2009

Here is an update on some bits and pieces I have been doing since starting my new job way back in October now.

Misty winter morning steps to work.

Arrival of the massive box for my new PC.

Because there was a video on YouTube of the PC game Witcher’s strange monkey creature, or Mamune which has subsequently been removed I decided to record my own and upload it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQlT8WVhVs

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Mamune

New Car

2nd November, 2009

New car for the purpose of travelling between home and work and more.

A Couple of Graduation Day Photos

13th October, 2009

These and several more have been available on facebook for a while now but here is a proper blog post with shots from my graduation day.

A T-Shirt for sale with everyone’s names printed on it!

New Site, Old Browser

30th September, 2009

Even though I started this new design with the feeling that I should just ignore Internet Explorer 6, I did realise that there were still visitors doomed to using this browser, either because of their hardware/operating system limitation, familiarity or their company’s refusal to update. I also had all the bits and pieces for adapting a site for 5 and 6 compatibility already in place, and had been adding them as and when I recognised old scenarios that needed them.

So I took this opportunity to start up my old computer, which is running a pretty much clean install of Windows 98 updated as far as it was supported, all on a Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM and the high-end Geforce 2 GPU: astronomical power compared to what 95 and 98 were intended to work with normally. And then there is Internet Explorer 6!

I was a little bit astonished to discover that despite my fears that the new CSS would collapse in a heap, everything was generally rendering exactly where it was meant to be. The only issues were superficial ones, such as transparent PNGs rendering as grey which were easily fixed. In the end I did make an effort to ensure that users browsing with IE6 do have a reasonable experience.

New Site Design Up and Running

22nd September, 2009

So finally I’ve switched my website to the new design, with a hefty number of new bits and pieces being added so you’ll have to bear with me for a little while as things get sorted out. Some of the bigger changes include integrating twitter (for which I have had an unused account for years) as a sort of microblogging tool, separating my university work from my professional portfolio and integrating a ‘Related Posts’ system which I have had in mind for a long time but have only just discovered a brilliant plugin that does all the hard work for me.

Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.

You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.