I wanted to have an AddThis share button that would fit better with the site’s design, and if you’re reading this post on its own page you can scroll down and see what I mean. While AddThis provides plenty of ways to customize their buttons, there is no way to assign your own image to the icon, which means doing it the hard way… well, relatively speaking of course.
There are three main steps to creating a customized share button. There’s some javascript to include in the footer.php, few lines of html to add at the end of your posts, and of course some styles and the icon itself.
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Placeholder is a very useful attribute of the <input> tag that is specified in the HTML5 spec. It provides a text that goes into the field, by default, and is used as a kind of a quick tip for the user about what they should type into the field, such as “type to search”, or “type in username”. The nice thing about “placeholder”, as oppose to, for example, simply setting some value for the field, is that it automatically disappears when the user starts typing something in, but it reappears if the user ends up leaving the field empty. Unfortunately this attribute, and its functionality, is actually not supported by most browsers, including Firefox 3.6 and IE8, it is however supported by Chrome 4, and possibly Safari 4 though I can’t vouch for the latter.
I recently had a few projects that needed this functionality, and while some of them had email, password and other fields that required validation, one needed just very simple text fields with placeholder text. So I wrote this very simple javascript function, using jQuery, to do just that (I’m using jQuery 1.4.2 here). Keep Reading
Gizmodo had a post on an HTML5 experimental page from 9Elements design studio. If you have Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 or latest Chrome build you can check it out yourself here.
It’s really an amazing piece of work — beautiful animations coupled with sound and neat interactivity (clicking the lights displays tweets about the page). All this is done with no Flash, or Silverlight or anything like that, though of course the code that runs all that isn’t exactly trivial, it’s all HTML5, JavaScript and Canvas.
I hope that we see more and more people taking advantage of HTML5. Internet Explorer currently supports only a small subset of HTML5 spec and none of it is for something like this. But if there’s enough push for HTML5, hopefully either the other browsers will leave IE completely in the dust and people will just stop using it (one can always dream), or Microsoft will wiseup and implement proper standards and HTML5 support into IE.
[Gizmodo Post]
So this has been a pretty busy week. Of course the biggest news is me launching this site… <crickets>… or maybe not. I guess it all depends on your perspective. As for the other interesting stuff — Google is sending out 100,000 beta invites to Google Wave in September; HTC Hero has been reviewed by everyone except me; Steam is having a sale on King’s Quest and Space Quests collections, and you know I got it as soon as I saw it; and finally a small Firefox add-on that is going to change my life (not really, but it’s an attention grabber, ain’t it). Keep Reading
