Experiments

Every now and again I experiment with code and technical-type things. The results I release from my mysterious underground laboratory are shown below. Please take a look, you might find something useful.

3hive player – playing the sharing!

If you’re a fan of 3hive as I am then you may have got frustrated like me at having to download everything just to see what music you might like. No more, get an in-page Flash player for every track with this nifty Greasemonkey script for Firefox.

CSS Gantt chart

Gantt charts are great, with their boxy goodness and timelineliness. So what if you need to do one in CSS and HTML but don’t know where to start? Here, let me show you the way.

Datatable class

I’ve been experimenting with object-oriented programming recently, and created this little PHP class to help me output HTML tables with data in for my projectGenie system. It does a few clever things, like allow you to apply attributes to rows, it automatically pads empty columns to the end of the row, and allows you to format fields using a simple syntax. And here is is, for you to share and enjoy.

Refresher function

If you’re brain is melting with the number of AJAX frameworks, here’s another one. However this does one very simple thing; reloads any element in your page. And it does it in a very nifty way by using the Document Object Model and a specially-crafted ID attribute to specify the refresher options, therefore without mucking up your lovely clean HTML.

Clean URL Capability Checker

Down with querystrings! Hide your pages! Validate input with regular expressions! If that sounds like the cry of your heart, take a look at this.

Zoom Boxes

Unobtrusive JavaScript – that’s what keeps me awake at night. That and the thought there’s a spider crawling on the ceiling above me. Anyway, have a look at this little demo.

AIRE – automatic image replacement engine

Jagged edges on larger-sized HTML text can be a real problem, so for a while now people have been replacing textual headings with images which can be smooth-edged. I found it a bit of a pain to have to create these images for every text heading that needed it, so I wrote this little PHP function that automatically creates the image in any TrueType font, with any text and background colour (including transparent backgrounds) and saves them for future use. It even writes CSS that will leave the original HTML text available for text-only website viewers. Take a look.

Leave a Reply