Skyrocket.be

Today I’ve spent over an hour searching how the background opacity with the lightbox JS 2 has been implemented. I wanted to change the opacity from 80% to 40% or less since one of our clients requested so.

What does one do first when one wants to change some layout elements? Check out the CSS stylesheets, and yes. There are three lines defined in the #overlay declaration:

filter:alpha(opacity=80);
-moz-opacity:.80;
opacity:.80;

How convenient, lets just cut all values in half and the opacity of the background overlay should turn more transparent, no? Wrong!

Apparently these CSS styles are only defined to support the script degrading gracefully, in javascript enabled browsers it doesn’t serve any active use, you could leave the styles out and the script would still be fully functional. But how do we change the opacity then? Well after some digging through the javascript code it ends up being fairly straightforward. Just open lightbox.js and search for the following line (it’s around line 320 depending on which version of lightbox JS 2 you are using)

new Effect.Appear('overlay', { duration: 0.2, from: 0.0, to: 0.8 });

The red value is the value you wanna change to manipulate the transparency or opacity of the page overlay. Pretty easy to change if you know where to look.

I hope I saved some of you some time with this. It could prove usefull if Lokesh Dhakar, the creator of this fabulous script, would include some configuration directives in the top of the script controlling the behaviour and style of the lightbox.

Today in #CSS on IRC.freenode.net found a link to this interesting propaganda article about using webstandards and semantic markup. If you need to prove someone the advantages of webstandards and everything related to it this might very well be the best page you can point him to. Clear to read and easy to understand.

Do you sometimes ask yourself this question when welding a visual design created by someone else into a CSS layout:

What the hell was he thinking here?

Well no more, with HTML Stamps. For some time now i’m using them myself to attach visual aids to my designs in Photoshop.

HTML Stamps are a set of custom symbols and brushes created by the people at Twinsparc and allow a visual designer to add clear guidelines to a layout he created. They are available in different flavors, illustrator, fireworks, visio and others included. I don’t need to tell you that using these increases teamplay and workflow by huge leaps.

Using them I never forget how that one element has to be implemented, does it need to be a h1 title, h2, or maybe a sIFR replacement? Is the menu ment to be a <ul> or <dl>? Even if I open up the a design I created several months ago, I still know how everything has to be implemented in CSS and I can start coding straight away.

Check them out and you might end up getting the css guy buying you a beer at the next geekdiner

My oh my, just when I thought Netvibes couldn’t get any better (virtually speaking) they release Netvibes Anise version.

What’s in a name you say … well in this one there’s alot. Netvibes just got so so much better. They added tabbed pages, speeded up RSS feeds, added icons (Famfamfam icons rule) and hover captions for feed posts, you can now aggregate feeds requiring authentication which means you can add all kinds of info to your netvibes startpage. There is simply too much to tell about … just go check for yourself!

Netvibes just got a worthy alternative to Bloglines as my main feedreader with their Anise version.

Accidentally bumped into this interesting blogpost about domain names and their availability. It’s frightening to see the numbers Dennis Forbes comes up with.

I’ve noticed this first hand a few weeks ago when I was looking for a domainname for a future project of mine. After two days of searching and alternating words in my domainname i just decided that i’d reverse the process and name my website after the domainname I found. Here are some quoted numbers.

If you want one of the 676 possible two-letter sequences, for instance for an acronym or abbreviation, you’re out of luck: They’re all taken.

That’s not so weird, there are only 676 possibilities you see …

Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences, again every single one is already taken.

Doh!

Adding digits to the mix, giving 46,656 permutations, yields a larger number of garbage domain entries (either REGISTRAR-LOCKED, REDEMPTIONPERIOD, or with no nameservers), giving a false hope of 228 seemingly open domains, yet they aren’t actually available.

Now i’m about to faint …

Read the full article one Dennis Forbes’ website.