Monthly Archives: May 2010

Untold Entertainment Made in jQuery Part 1 – Animating Twitter Text

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Ryan Creighton’s Flash development site Untold Entertainment has a quirky home page with plenty of animation and things to click on (complete with roll-out tongue) and of course is built in Flash. Thing is, I’m against any kind of Flash interface. It’s great for games, but otherwise it’s unnecessary (which includes videos).

With the whole Adobe v Apple debate that’s going on right now (yes, I said I wouldn’t mention it but it applies here ‘kay), it’s safe to say you’d be better placing your chips on the JavaScript and HTML5 end of the table.

The discouraging part is that his website could be done without Flash as most of the scrolling and animating could be done with straight JavaScript, and jQuery will help see things along smoothly.

Today I’ll show you how to animate the text at the top, feeding in from his Twitter feed, complete with jerky timings, slanted text and collecting feed data. Continue reading →

Copying Images with allow_url_fopen Switched Off

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I’m working on a Facebook app that needs to collect images from an external server. Normally I could use a function like copy to do this, but this requires allow_url_fopen to be on and a lot of providers like mine have this turned off to tighten server security.

Eventually I came across file_get_contents to do the job. Since this also needs allow_url_fopen to be on, my post on fetching page content with cURL came to mind.

This does the same thing without restrictions on privacy and is available on most current setups. Continue reading →

Messing with Background-Attachment

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Earlier this week I came across an interesting Tumblr theme by Jarred Bishop. The site played with the background-attachment CSS property to show a unique background for each Tumblr post on his main page (depending on which post image he used) and stays static as you scroll.

I started to play around with some code to replicate this effect and instead came up with some different examples, while still manipulating background-attachment. Hit the jump for some demos. Continue reading →

Load WordPress Gravatars on the Fly

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Globally Recognised Avatar (or Gravatar) is a service from the WordPress team that allows you to improve your web presence across blogs and specialist websites. It’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” products that are so simple but yet have so much opportunity to be integrated into virtually everything. You can see examples of this from the comments below and in my sidebar.

The problem with Gravatars that I find a lot of people mentioning is that they don’t get to see their Gravatar before they post a comment – like the comments section on Shamus Young’s Wavatar post.

You may not think that’s too big of a deal, or perhaps from a marketing point of view that’s your way of driving comments (nasty people), but allowing them to play about with their image in the form will improve their relationship with your site and increase traffic anyway. Saves people deleting and re-commenting just because their Gravatar didn’t show up right too.

So this week I’ve put together a little script that generates these little Gravatars as you type. It’s even got little Wavatar faces on them that change when you make a new address, so you’ll never get bored! Continue reading →