Unbecoming Levity

Business Website Updated

Abacquer — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:58:41 -0400

Well I spent this afternoon making some more updates to my business website. I incorporated a few more images and rearranged the order of the images on the thumb bar at the bottom of the page.

I also added arrow buttons to allow the user to manually rotate through the thumbs, and also set the thumb bar to auto-rotate if the image currently displayed by the slideshow doesn't appear on the thumb bar.

One invisible but important change was to set up timely preloading of the images such that there shouldn't be a big wait for individual images to load, but also no big wait up front. Basically the page now loads an image, and schedules the preload of the next image a few seconds later, long before the slideshow will automatically display it. In this way, the next image is loading while the user is viewing the current image, and should avoid delays.

If the user dorks with the thumb-bar the preloads and slideshow are cancelled and rescheduled to be further out. Theoretically this should prevent the user from being interrupted while working the toolbar with annoying delays or images loading.

FireFox and the CODE Tag

Abacquer — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:25:36 -0400

Minor thing I discovered this morning while testing a page in FireFox. FireFox v1.5.0.6 does not support or recognize the <code> tag that people occasionally use to show an excerpt of source code...

Unbecoming Levity Gets Floaties

Abacquer — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:16:34 -0400

I'm experimenting with floating sidebars in blog articles. If it works out okay and is legible in your browser let me know...

Minor Commenting Issue Fixed -- I Think

Abacquer — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:01:00 -0400

You may have noticed that my blog had stopped correcting comment subjects for awhile. Or rather it was only sporadically doing it. (I like to keep the subject on the replies nice and short because it looks neater in the recent comments sidebar.) So you should never see "Re: Re: Re: Do NOT Click That Link -- Another E-Mail Scam" as a comment title when the form first comes up. Instead it should be something more like "Re: Do NOT Click That Link ...". Due to a change in the way BlogHarbor processes comments, the script I wrote to do this was only working some of the time. Tonight I made a fix (with help from BlogHarbor support--thanks John!) which should correct the issue. Please let me know if it doesn't work for you.

Thanks!

Photo Albums Redesigned

Abacquer — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 04:35:38 -0500

I have now redesigned the ULev photo albums to use rolling divisions to display photo thumbnails, doing away with the fixed number of columns on those pages. Let me know what you think! (Remember you can navigate among the photo albums by using the TOPICS navigation links in the sidebar.)

Recent Photos

Abacquer — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:22:56 -0500

Recent photos component added to sidebar. It uses rolling divisions to display the photo thumbnails, which look good in IE and -okay- in mozillla... (mozilla and similar browsers seem to ignore the vertical-align style on the span, so photos with long titles don't line up nicely... I may deal with this by dropping the titles from the recent photos sidebar.)...

New Blog is Up

Abacquer — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 15:22:04 -0500

Doubtless ULev's sister blog will be of little or no interest to most of my readers. But just in case, here it is: http://stonerainproject.blogharbor.com/blog. Check it out, I'm happy with how the rolling divisions made the card galleries look.

Rolling Divisions

Abacquer — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:15:34 -0500

So I've been way too busy to blog lately, but worry not, stuff is coming eventually. I'm actually working on another blog which will run concurrently with ULev. Not going to give anything away yet as to what it is about (because it isn't anywhere near ready) but I did want to share this little bit of HTML I puzzled out this morning...

Internet Explorer Sucks and So Do the "Experts" Sometimes

Abacquer — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 11:56:00 -0500

This article is somewhat technical, so if building web applications isn't your thing, you may want to skip it. I recently finished a project involving a web application for which IE (Internet Explorer) was the target browser. As the product was going through SQA (software quality assurance -- i.e. testing) news of a rather annoying bug filtered back to me...

The Evil Spammers Do

Abacquer — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

So lately I've been getting a rather insidious sort of comment spam. Perhaps you've noticed the peculiar comments I get every now and then that are only a few words long and add nothing useful to the discussion (as in "What do you mean?") or sometimes don't make any sense at all (as in "This theme is not actual.") Ladies and gents, this is the work of a spammer trying to improve his site's standings on Google. How? By placing his advertising on the page in a hidden fashion...

Dame D'Veekr - Free Fworu Readings - Come in and know your future!

Abacquer — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 10:38:26 -0400

1. I firmly believe all forms of divination to be crap. 2. I created a method of divination. Yes it does indeed appear that those two statements are at odds. Allow me to explain and you may yet get to try your hand at divination...

How's Your JavaScript?

Abacquer — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 10:00:00 -0400

Here's an annoying JavaScript problem I encountered the other day. It took me forever to figure out what I did wrong, and it turned out to be quite simple and stupid...

Insult Generator --> v1.2.1

Abacquer — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:13:33 -0400

Added more insult templates, and opened the door to make the insult generator more "participatory". There's a field for you to try out your own insult templates! Test out your own templates and if you find one you like, post it as a comment...

Insult Generator --> v1.2

Abacquer — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 15:25:37 -0400

Further neatening of the insult generator, corrected some of the annoying language errors, and added more insult templates. Check it out.

Have you finished writing 'Meat Gobbling: The Secret Of My Success', yet?

Insult Generator --> v1.1

Abacquer — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 15:59:28 -0400

Neatened up the insult generator and added three new types of insults plus some more "interesting" expressions. Check it out.

Your Incorrigible Momma Eats Pig Nipples.

Abacquer — Sat, 09 Jul 2005 06:10:42 -0400

Well not really! I mentioned a long time ago that I once wrote an insult generator in HyperCard. On an overnight JavaScripting binge, I have produced a new web-capable insult generator. It has a few quirks, but most of what it produces is pretty good. Here it is for you to enjoy...

Cracking the Twenty Five Cent Code

Abacquer — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 02:54:28 -0500

So yesterday I talked about the Twenty Five Cent Code, and gave people the opportunity to try and crack it themselves. Apparently nobody gave it a shot, oh well. For those of you who are interested, this article will explain how the code works. I've included a javascript encoder/decoder at the bottom of this article if you want to try the code out for yourself...

Naming Elves and Babies

Abacquer — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:50:41 -0500

It's no secret that I am fascinated by letters and letter patterns in much the same way I am with numbers and number patterns. Really all kinds of patterns interest me for the most part. But today I want to chat about the generation of names for any purpose...

Randy Banners

Abacquer — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:07:20 -0400

My friend James has a site where he makes available political banners of his own design promoting John Kerry. Until midnight on November 2, Unbecoming Levity will display a random banner under the ULev logo above. For now all of them will be James' unless I decide to make a few of my own. If you're curious to know how I made the random banners happen, read on...

Collapsible Sidebars

Abacquer — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 11:31:52 -0400

As an experiment, I've modified the layout of Unbecoming Levity to use collapsible sidebars. This allows me to use more screen real estate for the actual content of the articles. What do you think of this look? Better? Worse? Please share your comments...

The Wonder of CSS -- Unbecoming Levity Goes Printer-Cuddly

Abacquer — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:15:57 -0400

That subset of Unbecoming Levity readers who ~~bitched and complained~~ noted that articles don't print very well will be happy to know that U-Lev should no longer abuse their printers. ...