Now I need to get my finger out and integrate tumblr into this site. My tumblr is at wonkenstein.tumblr.com if anyone’s interested.

You don’t have to do it by yourself

Bokko Dancing on TV

Last week, I had to incorporate a newsfeed into a client site and had to think about things such as caching and parsing. Also the site is built upon CodeIgniter, an open source PHP MVC framework, and is a new project we’ve recently taken over the maintenance for.

With only a teeny bit of experience to CodeIgniter and parsing pesky rss feeds, I was a bit apprehensive about this. But it turned out to be a lot easier than expected.

After a bit of reading, poking about and keyboard hammering. It was done. It didn’t take as long as I thought and was surprised by how easy it was to plug some code into the framework. Simplepie took care of all the rss feed parsing and caching and adding it to CodeIgniter was extremely easy.

Hurrah for MVC, re-usable code and Open source projects with good documentation!

/**
* Return a list of all fields.
*
* @param $field_name
* If set, return information on just this field.
* @param $content_type_name
* If set, return information of the field within the context of this content
* type.
*/
function content_fields($field_name = NULL, $content_type_name = NULL) {
}

This is Benny the squirrel, which I drew when doing something different from coding at work. He looks unsually happy.

However, he wasn’t the squirrel that attacked Developer Dan aka Tall Dan aka Aussie Dan aka Squirrel Dan

First, sifr headings had to be added to a few panels that had a fading rollover effect. When you rollover, the panel darkens making the text easier to read. But when sifr was added, the heading didn’t render on the page, it just disappeared. And when you mouse over where the text should be, the cursor changed like it would if sifr was displayed properly. Very odd.

After some head scratching, poking about and googling. We found the rollover effect was causing the sifr text to stuff up as the panel had it’s opacity set. Removing the effect led to the text being rendered properly, yay!

But this led to a quirk only in firefox and gecko based browsers! arrggg! We had a hero panel, which fades images in and out to promote certain shows, and was done in jQuery. The problem was that links on other parts of the page were being rendered blurry in firefox 2 and during image changes on the hero panel, the links would flicker. Very annoying.

It took some more poking about and searching to find out what the problem was. This comment by Mark Priestap was enlightening

“I believe there is a bug in FF where if you change the opacity of one part of the page in a hover event, it effects the opacity of page elements elsewhere on the page. It is highly annoying, but is a quirk of FF as far as I can tell.”

Armed with that knowledge, and it looks like it’s a firefox 2 only bug, we set the opacity of all the links on the page to 0.99 using -moz-opacity to target firefox only. Flickering was gone. Job done. This wee bug also affects another of our sites in development.

Another problem I found with sifr was rendering links. Sifr is notorious for misbehaving with links and I have had some experience with how annoying this is.