Articles Posted During April 2003

origami cd case

Interesting use of PDFlib: Creating custom paper cases/mailers for CDs via an HTML form.

2003-04-25 16:51:01

photozone

I'm shopping for some new camera equipment, and had been spending a considerable amount of time scouring Google Groups for opinions & 'from the hip' reviews, when I stumbled onto PhotoZone. There's an incredible amount of information there, with detailed specs on all of the camera bodies I was considering, as well as a database of user-contributed reviews of various lenses.

After beating up on this guy's server for the past few days, I'll definitely be sending a few dollars his way when I finally make my purchase.

2003-04-22 00:58:54

another ruler

Apparently, I wasn't the first to come up with the idea for a favelet that measures distances in the browser. Here's one that adds conventional rulers along the top & left sides of the window, allowing the user to drag markers for the X and Y coordinates in WinIE5.5 and later.

2003-04-19 03:04:19

html tidy online

Jason Perkins' tongue-in-cheek comment regarding a favelet that automagically converts tag soup documents to valid XHTML/CSS spurred me to Google for an online implementation of Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy. Sure enough, Jonathan Hedley has built just such a beast: HTML Tidy Online. So, here's a simple favelet that runs the browser's currently-loaded document through Jon's tool:

If you happen to run it on this site, you might get warnings about the favelets' HREF values. Do not panic. They are not real links.

2003-04-09 01:29:29

ruler 1.2

Thanks to fry@fcc from Slovenia, the Ruler favelet now works in IE5 (both Mac & Windows), and is no longer constrained to selections from top-left to bottom-right:

Unfortunately, WinIE6's limitation of 508 characters means that in order for it to be usable for that browser, the favelet will need to be reworked so that the script is loaded in a SCRIPT element as documented here. If some industrious soul cares to do it, I'd be more than happy to post the results...

2003-04-07 02:24:42

ascii-hex converter

I posted a simple form that translates ASCII to HEX and back. Nothing groundbreaking, but I did go ahead & add some server-side mojo to make it work without JavaScript.

2003-04-07 01:25:03

updated ruler

[Update: be sure to check out version 1.2.]

I updated the Ruler favelet so that it can be disabled without reloading the current document:

Unfortunately, Safari (as of v67) doesn't support document.onkeypress, and none of my Gecko browsers seem to handle document.ondblclick, so I had to implement different mechanisms for turning it off for the two: Gecko users can simply press any key to get rid of it, but Safari folks will have to double-click somewhere in the window

I might get around to reworking the whole thing per Stuart's suggestion to anchor the floater one of these days, or perhaps make it draggable, but for now, I have bigger fish to fry.

For those wondering how long a favelet/bookmarklet can be, this one stands at 2796 characters. It's more verbose than I generally prefer, and I could easily cut ~500 out by compressing variable names & whatnot, but I decided to leave it somewhat readable for the curious.

2003-04-02 02:22:48