Happily working through my day as usual, I need to view an XML file so double click as usual to have a look at it, expecting our usual XML editor to load (no names - I don’t like it and its really expensive) but guess what, Safari has decided that for some reason it should handle XML files now!  What? Why?!  Its not as if XML is some little-known file type that hardly anyone knows or uses.

This is on top of the recent abuse Apple received over trying to sneak Safari onto people’s computers via an iTunes update. This sort of activity combined with stealing file associations (one of my pet hates) is pretty bad form - somehow Apple get away with it though; had this been Microsoft everyone would have been up in arms ranting about how awful Microsoft are!

• Bring back the old history side bar! The old history sidebar was incredibly useful in retracing your steps.  Now Firefox seems to have attempted to merged history and bookmarks together into some sort of “Library” concept and a single dialog.  Now I cant search my history (only bookmarks can be searched it seems), I cant sort it like I could before (i.e. into a tree), and even worse if I do try and search for a bookmark, I have to exit the dialog and open it again to see my history again! Madnes!
• Add an option to disable the “new” address bar history! Its kinda cool to just type in a keyword and get some history appear in the address bar … that is until you’ve been using the browser for a few weeks solid.  Once you’ve accumulated a fair bit of browsing history it goes from a “Hey cool!” feature that, although takes a little while to get used to (I think we were all used to just typing the first few letters of a URL then just hitting tab then enter…), was quite useful, to a feature that becomes a huge pain as it makes your computer grind to a standstill as it lurches through its database looking to related history entries.  Its a nice feature, but I want to be able to turn it off, or get more control over how it works, for example limit entry count or only search URLs/Title/meta tags etc

Curiously, I had found back in 2006 that when setting the “top” property in Opera and Internet Explorer 6 (and I can confirm the same is true for 7 too) , you could just do something like this to set the top property to 50px and all would be well:

divelement.style.top = 50

Firefox however didn’t like this, and instead needed you to do something like this:

divelement.style.top = 50  + "px;"

…i.e. the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a normal CSS style sheet.  Combined with a bit of a javascript hack to identify Firefox, this approach worked fine on 2.x.  However, when testing with Firefox 3 (betas 3 and 4) I found that the moving DIV no longer moved and that I got a new error from the error console:

Warning: Expected end of value for property but found ';'

This struck me as slightly odd - after all isn’t the semi-colon the end of value?  Looking at the generated source code for the page I couldn’t see anything odd.  After a bit of head scratching (although it seems obvious to me now!) it turns out that Firefox 3 just didn’t like the semi-colon in the above code, leaving me with this:

divelement.style.top = 50  + "px"

A quick regression test using Firefox 2.x showed that removing the semi-colon didn’t break anything there, so I was good to go.  Firefox still doesn’t like it without the “px” there though (unlike IE and Opera), which is a bit of a pain, but at least I know for next time…

But you know its funny - after the initial horror and feeling of OMGICANTSTANDTHIS, it started to feel sort of good to be cleansed … a bit like a choloronic irrigation (I’m told!)

But what really annoys with me with the current Firefox 3 Beta 3 is the bloody DNS lookups.  For whatever reason, it seems to stop being able to resolve all domain names after a certain amount of browsing and just sits there waiting for the lookup, only for it to fail.  Everything else can still find the addresses, only Firefox has problems.

Oh well - its beta.  Roll on Beta 4!

Update: Ok… it would seem that Beta 3 has managed to fix its look up issues when it cleared out all of my user settings.  Now it would seem that this was perhaps an issue with an extension.

I cant actually remember what extensions I had installed though, so its hard to find out what it might have been.  However, what I can tell you is that AdBlock Pro, NoScript, DownThemAll and BugMeNot are not responsible as I’ve added those back and everything is fine.

1. YotoPhoto.com YotoPhoto is probably my favourite copyleft photo site - it indexes a wide range of sites (including some of the ones listed here but also Flickr and Wikipedia), but its search has a real killer feature for me: search by colour! Just pick the colour your looking for (e.g. to match your design), and it will show you a selection! Great stuff with a great range of photos.
2. openphoto.net Recently redesigned with a prominent tag cloud, openphoto is a useful resource with some really nice quality photos. Great for idly browsing around the tags looking for ideas.
3. moregueFile.com morgueFile offers the same sort of experience as openphoto.net, just without the tag cloud. morgueFile uses its own custom license for its images, but does allow personal and commercial use with some restrictions.
4. stock.xchng stock.xchng is a really nice looking site with some really nice pictures to match. Well organised, with the original photographers each getting their own profile page. Unfortunately, stock.xchng requires you to register to download the originals.
5. Stockvault I recently stumbled onto stockvualt the otherday. Its got a pretty nice looking site with some nice touches like hand picked “featured” images. However, the interface lets it down slightly - I don’t seem to be able to browse categories, and there doesn’t seem to be any license information included with the images other than calling them “Free”. Some really nice pictures though, and well worth a look.

Have fun!

Typically, you just use something like this to change an element’s style with javascript, where attribute is the CSS attribute you want to change (e.g. width, margin etc)



document.getElementById("blah").style.attribute = blah

However, for background-position (i.e. as CSS refers to it!) you need to change the attribute to be backgroundPosition - note the capital P and the missing hyphen! So now, to change the backgroung-position using javascript, I’d use something like this:

document.getElementById("blah").style.backgroundPosition = "10px 10px"

It turns out that the same goes for all of the hyphenated attributes too:

CSS Name	Javascript Name
background-attachment	backgroundAttachment
background-color	backgroundColor
background-image	backgroundImage
background-position	backgroundPosition
background-repeat	backgroundRepeat

]]> http://www.mdibb.co.uk/2008/02/10/change-the-background-position-with-javascript/feed/ http://www.mdibb.co.uk/2008/01/06/moving-servers/ http://www.mdibb.co.uk/2008/01/06/moving-servers/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:33:29 +0000 Matt http://mdibbcouk.nfshost.com/?p=51 Just a quick note to say that I am moving servers.

I’ve had to restore from a backup a couple of months old for various reasons - some posts have not been copied over, but Google has cached them so I will reinstate them eventually.

Although the site now appears ok from the outside - thanks mainly due to jumping into FTP and doing things manually - basically the entire backend of the blog is now hosed…just managing to post this “service outage” notice required excessive effort.

Hopefully in the next week or so I’ll get the chance to wipe the slate clean and do things by hand, but until then I wont be able to update as much as I like, sorry!

<meta name=“ICBM” content=“35.121865, -85.358774″ />

Throwing that coordinate into Google Maps show us a place just north of somewhere called Chattanooga, which turns out to be mentioned on Shaun’s About page too so I am guessing that is where Shaun lives or works … or perhaps more likely somewhere nearby and not the exact location!

I thought maybe this was just a bit of fun on Shaun’s part, but a quick bit of googling reveals that this is actually a way of semantically geo-tagging your site so it can be shown on a map for use in mashups etc. Pretty cool stuff - I am slightly embarrassed I’d never heard of it before!

There is some more information about using these meta tags available at the Geourl.org site. Hopefully will be adding to this site soon!

Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. … Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.

People always like to roll out the “Stealing” line. I am no lawyer, but “stealing” and “theft” is attempting to permanently deprive someone of something. If your server voluntarily sends me a copy of your site, what exactly have I just taken away from you with the intent to permanently deprive you of it? And what exactly are these rights (other than basic Copyright etc) that us web site owners and developers have?

Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site.

I’ve never heard of these scripts before to be honest - if anyone has any links I’ve love to hear about it in the comments - but this could possibly be considered a “unauthorized access offence” under the Computer Misuse Act 1990…but again, I am not a lawyer…

Its tempting to start quoting the entire site but I’ll resist the temptation. They don’t seem to realise that even if they could somehow disable the blocking of the ads, are these users (users that do not want to see adverts remember) actually going to click them? Of course not!

They go on to show how to redirect users to their site with some basic PHP and Javascript code that totally relies on the user-agent string containing “firefox”, apparently not realising that the sort of users who can find, install and use AdBlock are probably the very same ones who can find, install and use a User-Agent switcher extension.

Personally I am not bothered - my other sites all have adverts on and frankly I am amazed that anyone clicks on the ads at all. If a few people block them then I am not fussed in the least. Sure its good to get some income from your hard work, but you cant have everything, and throwing your toys out of the pram certainly isn’t going to help!