CSS

Housemadehome.net Website

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I have finished up another website for a client of mine (my wife), designed for her blog called housemadehome.net. The blog chronicles the renovations and decorating of our house, some recipes, and stories associated with the raising of our family. I worked really closely with her on the design of the site and I think it came out really well. I developed it using the WordPress backend, so she could easily make posts to it and handle the whole site by herself. We focused a lot on search engine optimization and the site has had a really good start so far… she has over 15 followers already. There are tons of home design blogs out there and they are getting bigger all the time. If you are looking for a custom made blog template, contact me so we can discuss the details of the project.

Cya

InVeritas Website

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

inveritas-website

I have recently just finished working on another freelance website for a company called InVeritas. InVeritas Research & Consulting, Inc., is a national research and consulting firm specializing in strategic communications, political polling and research, government relations, grassroots/grasstops organizing, press relations and message development. This client had a very specific vision in mind about how they wanted their website to look and feel, and it was my job to make that vision come  true.

This website is built on top of a wordpress backend so they can easily make posts or news alerts whenever they want. I used several wordpress plugins in the development of this site. For the menu I used the PixoPoint Menu Plugin which is a really great wordpress menu plugin. This plugin comes with tons of customization options and allows you to easily add your own custom dropdown menu to any WordPress site. At first it was a little difficult to work with  but in the end it did exactly what I needed for it to do. Another plugin I used was the  Redirection Plugin which is used  to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.  I also used the Exec-PHP plugin to allow me to run any php code thats in posts, pages and text widgets. The final plugin I used was the .html on Pages WordPress plugin, which adds “.html” to the end of all the pages on the site.

I always try to learn something new from any project I undertake, and this one was no exception. The main thing to  realize when building or creating something for a client is that its really important to work with the client and give them exactly what they want, because in the end they are the ones paying for it. It i s hard sometimes because what they want isn’t always the easiest, quickest, or best solution. Its important to tell the client what they need to know to make the best decision though.

I worked with Kinetic Media Solutions again on this project and I enjoyed working with InVeritas as well.

Cya

Fade In and Fade Out in jQuery

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

I have been working a lot more with jQuery lately, so I thought I would show you how to do the simple fade in or fade out jQuery hover effect that occurs to the navigation when you go to the Google homepage. You know the one that I am talking about, its occurs when your mouse goes over the page of the google homepage, all the navigation at the top appears.

For the first example, I will show you how to make the fade in jQuery hover effect. Hover over the box below to see the effect.

 

The rest of the content of the page

To do this, first place this jQuery code in the <head></head> section of your html file.

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//the first line gets the latest jquery scripts
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
//this function is called when the page is ready
<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
        //first hide the div with the id of googlenav
	$("div#googlenav").hide();
        //then when you rollover the specified div fade in the googlenav
	$("div#googlediv").hover(function(){$("div#googlenav").fadeIn('slow');});
});
</script>

Then add this html code into the <body></body> of your html document

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<div id="googlediv" style="width:500px; height:200px; border:1px solid #ffffff;">
<div id="googlenav">
	<ul>
    <li><a href="#">Web</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Images</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Videos</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Maps</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">News</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Shopping</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Gmail</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>
<div style="margin:0px auto; width:500px; text-align:center;">
<p>&nbsp;</p><p>The rest of the content of the page</p>
</div>
</div>

You can style the content hover you like, I tried to keep all the links inline like google does. Here is my styling, you can add this in the <head></head> section too.

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<style type="text/css">
#googlenav {
	padding:0px;
	margin:0px;
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size:12px;
	border-bottom:1px solid #c9d7f1;
	height:26px;
	position:absolute;
	width:500px;
}
#googlenav ul {
	padding:3px 0px;
	margin:0px;
	padding-left:15px;
}
#googlenav ul li{
	display:inline;
	padding:0px 3px;
	margin:0px;
}
</style>

Now google fades in their links and navigation when you roll over the page, not a specific div. So if you wanted it to be exactly like that, you would target the page instead of that particular div. So in your jQuery instead of this:

$("div#googlediv").hover(function(){$("div#googlenav").fadeIn('slow');});

You would put this:

$(document.body).hover(function(){$("div#googlenav").fadeIn('slow');});

And style accordingly. Now if you want to fade out in jQuery, instead of fadeIn(), you would use the fadeOut() function. And Remember you don’t have to hide the content first, so the jQuery would look like this.

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//the first line gets the latest jquery scripts
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
//this function is called when the page is ready
<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
        //then when you rollover the specified div fade in the googlenav
	$("div#googlediv").hover(function(){$("div#googlenav").fadeOut('slow');});
});
</script>

An example of the fadeOut function is below using the code above.

 

The rest of the content of the page

That’s really about it, if this helps you out please leave a comment.

Cya

Detect Iphone

Thursday, March 11th, 2010


I got inspired and wanted to finish up the iphone version of my website. To do this, first you need to detect the iphone and then redirect the user to another webpage. Here is the script to do that:

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<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
	if ((navigator.userAgent.indexOf('/iPhone/i') != -1) || (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('/iPod/i') != -1)) {
		document.location = "http://www.scottrockers.com/iphone.html";
	}
// ]]></script>

Add this Javascript inside your <head> tags. and change the document.location to the page you want the user to get redirected to. The reason I have a iPhone version of my website is because my home page is made in Flash and as you know the iPhone can’t display Flash yet. So I created a basic html page that has a div in the body of it that is sized to 300 width by 350 height. And if you put this line of script in the <head> section it will tell Safari that the viewport should be the same size as the iPhone screen. Setting this line of code forces the content to always fit the window.

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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">

Now, if someone wants to bookmark your website, they can hit the + sign and then click “Add to Home Screen” and you want to specify what icon to use for the iPhone, then create a 57px by 57px .png formatted image, put it up on your server and put this line of code in to your <head> section as well.

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.scottrockers.com/library/images/sriphonelogo.png"/>


Just make sure the href tag is the correct destination to your image. What is cool is that you don’t have to add the corners or shine effect on the webclip because the iPhone will do that for you.

If you want to see all the actual html code, you can just go to scottrockers.com iPhone Version and click view source.

Cya

jQuery Cycle Plugin – A Slideshow Creator Javascript File

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Here is another useful script that I wanted to write a quick post about. Its called jQuery Cycle Plugin, and its an additional javascript file that basically allows you to create a slideshow very easily and it supports many different types of transition effects. It ‘s dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses which is great so you can use it in basically any project. If you don’t want to use Flash this is a really simple way to setup a slideshow that will show in all browsers. Some of the transitions are: scrollup, scrollleft, scrollright, scrolldown, shuffle, and turndown. The images above is an example of it in action, and here is the code to it, really simple.

There are two things you need to add to your <head> section in your html, the css and javascript import lines:

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<style type="text/css">
.banner {  
    height:  82px;  
    width:   82px;  
    padding: 0;  
    margin:  0;  
} 
 
.banner img {   
    border:  1px solid #fff;   
    width:  80px; 
    height: 80px; 
    top:  0; 
    left: 0 
} 
.banner img { display: none } //these lines hide all the rest of the pictures on startup 
.banner img.first { display: block } //except the first image
 
</style>
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<!-- include jQuery library -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<!-- include Cycle plugin -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cloud.github.com/downloads/malsup/cycle/jquery.cycle.all.2.72.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	$(document).ready(function() {
		$('.banner').cycle({
			fx: 'scrollLeft' //  transition type, scrollleft
		});
	});
</script>

And here is the image code, just add this anywhere in your <body>, just make sure the class name is the same as what the javascript is looking for:

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<div class="banner"> 
    <img src="http://scottrockers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/233158.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> 
    <img src="http://scottrockers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/271131.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> 
    <img src="http://scottrockers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/216505.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> 
    <img src="http://scottrockers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/260178.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> 
    <img src="http://scottrockers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/115908.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> 
</div>