Okay, that’s quite a bit of an exaggeration, maybe purgatory rather than hell.

Anyway, I don’t really know any javascript so I rely on help from the bountiful internet so I can do things with it. Lucky for me there are a bazillion javascripty jquery type pop ups, however unfortunately there are A BAZILLION javascripty jquery type pop ups. Well again, I’m overreacting slightly. But here are a few of the pop up plugin type things I tried out.

Lightbox

Lightbox is the one everyone has heard of, but it annoys me slightly – although I’m not entirely sure why. Simple to use and install, but unfortunately wasn’t any use for me this time as it can only show images, rather the sections of HTML that I required.

Colourbox

Colorbox is nice. It produces nice looking pop ups. Smooth transitions. It can load up flash, video as well as HTML. However, again I couldn’t use it for the project I wanted as I needed a div to pop up then stay where it was allowing you to interact with the rest of the page. I think you might be able to get Colorbox to do this, but I struggled with the coding.

DOMWindow

DOMWindow was my saviour in the project I was working on. I didn’t want a hover pop up, or one that fills the entire screen, but with one click a little window should appear, then it should close when the user clicks on the close button. Very simple and easy to use.

A few others

Fancybox
Thickbox
Shadowbox

I found this website today and I’m trying to work out how I feel about it…

Wonga – Short Term Loans

They’ll lend you up to £400 for up to 30 days to help you pay a bill, and they’ll approve it and transfer the money in under an hour.

The APR sounds shockingly high, but as the loan is only over the maximum of a month the repayment isn’t horrific, i.e. if you borrow £200 over 15 days you’ll have to pay them back an extra £35.90. You can even get them to pay direct to your service provider.

I certainly think in the past this could have helped me out, although it’s worth considering if the interest charges are going to be more or less than the bank charges. I guess time will tell if they’ll become a useful service for people struggling a bit with their cash flow, or if they will horrifically rip people off when they are needing help.

So, make any web page look like it was made by a 13 year old in 1996, huh?

You know – that is better than the first site I made when I was 17….no, I’m not going to EVER let anyone see it.

Geocities-ize your site

I love arts and crafts in general, but one of my main hobbies is knitting. I love that it is so relaxing, then at the end of it you have something beautiful, original and generally useful that you have made yourself.

Check out all the adorable little knitting things in this smashing magazine post – The Beauty of Knitting. These kinds of things always give me inspiration. Here is a few of the adorable creations.

Eye of the Beast by kathrynivy.com

Daphne and Delilah the Momma and Baby Monster by Rebecca Danger

On February 7th 2010 I fell out of a plane. I can’t really claim to have been the one to jump out of it – the instructor did that for me – I didn’t really get the choice once I was up there.

Anyway…I’d been wanting to do a a parachute jump for a while, so when my friend Gill said she was going to do it I thought it would be fun. Always easier to do these things when you have someone along with you. We booked our ‘first’ appointment wa-a-a-ay back in September 2007, but thanks to the wonderful weather we have in Scotland we had to go up another 4 times to get the right weather. But what a beautiful day the 7th of February was. Gorgeous clear blue skies, a little cold though, well only -22°C in the sky!

We learned from our experiences to get to the centre sharp, to ensure we were one of the first to jump, so, nice and early we got all our gear on. Looking rather ridiculous in our dodgy hats, goggles and jump suits, but that’s all part of the fun. At this point we’re really not that nervous – after so many times going up the nerves just fade away. Off we shuffle to the little plane, my instructor Bob with his rabbit fur hat leading me out by a strap, like I’m a puppy on a leash. I’m jumping after Gill so I get into the plane first with Bob behind me – all snuggled up in the back, further away from the gaping hole in the plane – oh yes, the plane has no door – just what you need flying in below freezing skies.

As the plane lifted off the ground my nerves started up a little, but after about 20 minutes of looking at the beautiful scenery you kind of forget what you are about to do. At 8,000ft things start happening (We jump at 10,000 ft). We get ourselves strapped to our instructors tighter, and our goggles come down. Right – no time to think! Gill’s instructor shuffles forward to take her to the edge of the door. This is it! Before I know it Gill’s instructor has gone and I see Gill fall in to the sky. “Aaaaaah! What the hell am I doing?!?!”, but before I know it Bob is shuffling forward too! We’re on the edge of the door and I’m thinking ‘Don’t look down! Head back. Arms crossed. Legs under the plane’. Then I tip over…..and I’m gone. There’s nothing you can do now. I think I screamed for a little bit, but then I realised there is absolutely no point to it, and thought I’d better get myself into the right position. Free fall is amazing. Wind is just flying past you and you can barely see, then before you know it, you feel this gentle motion and then you are vertical again, lightly floating down to the ground. It felt so calm and relaxing, so even when I looked down at my toes wiggling thousands of feet above the ground it just felt nice. We did a bit of spinning round in circles, then started to prepare for the landing. We came in fast and bumped to the ground, no harm done. Then we pick up the parachute and trundle back to the hanger. And that was it over, it all happened so fast. I’m ready for the next time…I just hope Scotland’s weather is.

This article was sent around my office the other day causing a little bit of a stir…5 Good Reasons Why Designers Should Code.

I think what caused the fuss wasn’t the actual content, but rather, the context it was sent in, i.e. by a developer to the whole company. It was seen as an insult, implying that the design team aren’t doing a good job, rather what it should have been, which was a comment on how we could all work better together. I do agree quite strongly that every designer should understand how websites are built. It can only be a good thing that the designer understands the capabilities of the tools to build websites, helping make best use of them to create a richer user experience.

On the other side of this though, the developer should also understand design. We can often battle against the belief that us designers are just styling. What we are really doing is attempting to create a good interactive user experience; considering a whole barrage of things, including content, structure, client brand, how to prioritise content and create visual cues, for example, by using contrasting or consistent colours and styles, using white space or even round corners to make it easier to distinguish between components.

Well, the list could go on and on, and I’ll hopefully get around to writing more on it another time, but the main thing to consider is that each member of a team has a role to play, and with good communication and understanding we would all create better websites.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some ‘thinking time’ for some new projects. It has involved researching the brand, target market as well as the competition, then creating a concept that provides the user with something a bit more unique; something that has a point of view, rather than just a nice looking design.

It’s been a little hard going trying to keep my ideas fresh, but I’ve actually really enjoyed getting into creating the brand concepts for them. I’ve also been doing my emotional thinking, that I was talking about in my last post, to make sure that I’m doing something that users can identify with. Well, I still need to push myself in this way for all the design work I do, but it does feel nice that I’m progressing as a designer.

When designing websites in the past, I’ve tended to be very logical and practical, especially if I get stuck with something. I make logical choices for positioning, colour and layout. This is really quite an important way to think to create functional, user-friendly websites. However, to create something a bit more special and visually appealing you need add something else to the design. I believe this to be the personal and emotional input that a designer imbues into the work they do.

Without actually thinking about it I think most designers make emotional choices, whether it’s colour, styles or shapes. These help create a site that fits the brand and the intended purpose. Understanding what these emotional cues are will not only make it easier to make the correct decisions when creating a new design, but also allow us to be able to explain to the client exactly why the design should look as it does. This should help us communicate better with the client, and end up with a design that everyone is happy with.

I’ve been looking into a few methods for how to replace text on a page.

I’d initially used CSS to replace text with images, this is quite an awkward solution as you have to create a new image for every item you want to replace. I did a bit more searching and discovered siFR 2. sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) allows you to replace text on a page with any font you want, using CSS, Javascript and Flash.

I’d struggled previously getting this version to work properly and behave the way I wanted it to. Mainly for each item in a navigational menu to look the same. So I was rather happy when I discovered there was actually a version 3. This version is incredibly easy to use. I love being able to apply CSS styles, as well as defining the font size.

Take a look here: sIFR 3

I’ve been having trouble implementing the code to upload an image to a server. The code is basically this:

Set the variables for the file reference, file types to filter by and the url to send the image to:

var imagesFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter("Images", "*.jpg;*.gif;*.png");
var fileReference:FileReference = new FileReference();
var uploadURL:URLRequest;
uploadURL = new URLRequest ("upload.php");

Select which file you want to upload to the server.

fileReference.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, selectHandler);
fileReference.browse([imagesFilter]);

Function to tell Flash what to do once you have selected your file.

function selectHandler (event:Event):void {
var file:FileReference = FileReference(event.target);
file.upload(uploadURL);
}

Then use the following PHP code in a file called upload.php.

<?PHP
// The folder where the image will be uploaded to
$target_path = "uploads/";
/* Then add the original filename to the target path.
Result is "uploads/filename.extension" */
$target_path = $target_path . basename( $_FILES['Filedata']['name']);
if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES['Filedata']['tmp_name'], $target_path)) {
echo "The file ".  basename( $_FILES['Filedata']['name']).
" has been uploaded";
} else{
echo "There was an error uploading the file, please try again!";
}
?>

So, why wasn’t is working

So basically, this code wasn’t working, and I had no idea why. I kept getting the generic error [IOErrorEvent type="ioError" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Error #2038"].

A nice relaxing sleep later I did some more searching and discovered this wonderful post: Romantika.name | Flash Uploader Error. Which basically informed me that there can be a security issue with Flash trying to upload things to a server. I updated my .htaccess file and ta da….all worked perfectly.