Solving technology problems, one at a time
Saba People Cloud provides for settings changes through the UI for theme styles and labels. This may not be suffiicient to achieve the workflow and usability improvements you need. To do more significant theme changes,
Continue readingInternet Explorer’s propensity to drop floated elements adds time to site development, and sometimes causes a page to appear blank if the floated content drops below the window “fold”. Ignoring the problem and designing only for standards-adhering browsers is not always possible, particularly in enterprise environments where IE (and not always the latest version) is the only officially supported standard. Of course, other browsers are being used as well.
I’ve finally came across a fix that appears to work well cross-platform, thanks to Thierry Koblentz in the YUIblog.
Continue readingI’ve worked on a few projects where a CSS style on some page element has been specified as “!important” and it interferes with the way the page functions. Ordinarily, I would just change the original style, but sometimes I don’t have control over the stylesheet or script that is generating the style. One example is a recent project where an embedded Captivate player is written to a custom HTML wrapper at by the javascript SWFObject.js. SWFObject writes style attributes to the page dynamically to hide the Captivate player as required until it is fully loaded:
object, embed {
visibility:hidden !important;
}
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Here’s an example of CSS styles you can use to create nice soft drop shadows around elements on a web page: <style> #test { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #666; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #666; box-shadow:
Continue readingA very useful displays an RSS feed as a list of article excerpts within a webpage.
The screenshot below shows the way the original script displays the RSS feed. A list of article excerpts is displayed in the center column of a portal site..
The z-index bug in action
Although Internet Explorer 8 has been widely adopted, IE 7 is still the browser in use at my office, so all new projects must be compatible with it. Even though IE7 was already obsolete when we adopted it, it was a wonderful change from IE 6, because of the reduced need for CSS and javascript hacks, workarounds and compromises in general.
So it was a surprise to realize that an old Internet Explorer 6 stylesheet problem, the “z-index bug” still lingers on. You’ll know you’ve hit this bug when your drop-down menus fall UNDER elements that are lower down on the page. (…I should add: and there are no iframes or frames on the page).
There are several sites that do a fantastic job of telling you exactly why this happens. I’m just going to tell you how to fix it. In fact, if you want to jump to the fix right now, click here
Continue readingThe pagetree plugin for Confluence is a commonly used navigation widget for the popular wiki. There are now 2 versions: the older “pagetree” and the newer “pagetree2” which has several improvements, including a less cluttered look. The older version displays the standard Confluence page icons next to each node of the tree, whereas these can be hidden (and usually are) in the newer version.
Old-style “pagetree” New-style “pagetree2”
I just found this while experimenting with the Flickr badgemaker. It’s a much more customizable way to get nice results than the method I posted earlier. Go to: Create your own Flickr badge and make
Continue readingThe other day, I found an Internet Explorer ordered-list bug I hadn’t seen before:
A numbered list of items which looks right in other browsers will be rendered with the number “1” in front of every item in IE7.
This happens when a width is added to the “LI” tags in an ordered list. Internet Explorer 7 will not increment the numbers.
