Tools

Suitable font replacements for standard non free fonts on free operating systems

2010

When writing and testing stylesheets while working on a free operating system like GNU/Linux, you will most likely have to install the msttcorefonts package, as typical typefaces like Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman etc. are not included with the distribution of your operating system, as they are not free.  Even worse, you may have to purchase Apple fonts that are included with the Mac operating system, but expensive for anyone else in the world. Wait. Are we making websites only for Windows and Mac users?

Why use free software, write free software but conform to non free web design?

Consider a font style like this one:

font-family: "Helvetica", sans-serif;

On a freshly installed GNU/Linux system this will use the fallback « sans-serif » default font, which is most likely Bitstream Vera Sans. Although Bitstream Vera Sans is a very beautiful font, it is really much bigger and wider than Helvetica or Arial. Some designs may not fit anymore or lose their particular character, when viewed on systems without the « right » font. Lire la suite | Read more »

Custom horizontal and vertical scrollbars at a time with jQuery

2010

A client of mine wanted to use custom scrollbars for a website. I quickly found Kelvin Luck’s jQuery plugin for modifying the browser’s scrollbar. So, jScrollPane works great for vertical scrollbars and integrates neatly with WordPress, when calling it like this from the <head> section of your WordPress site:

var $j = jQuery.noConflict();
$j(function(){
    jQuery('.scroll-pane').jScrollPane({scrollbarWidth:10});
});

However, the client also wanted the horizontal scrollbars customized…

It took me several hours to stumble upon the modification of Luck’s plugin by Threeformed, a canadian media company.
But I ran into problems integrating their plugin with WordPress’
noConflict function and had to modify all the calls to « $ », into « jQuery ». It then worked out, but I needed to be able to design it via CSS independently of the vertical scrollbars. In order to do that I added a second CSS selector, through which I was then able to design the horizontal scrollbars using other background images than for the vertical ones.
One strange thing however is that this plugin expects the element you want to add scrollbars to to be set to « float:left », otherwise it has problems calculating the initial width of the horizontal scrollbars.

You may download my modified jQuery plugins here.

Lire la suite | Read more »

WordPress Galleria plugin autoplay

2010

For a client I was looking for a slideshow which could be easily integrated with WordPress and galleria-wp has been my choice.
It just does not start the slideshow automatically…

In order to do this I added the following lines of code to the showNavigation if-loop :

if ( $showNavigation == 1 ) {
  // code..
} else {
  // autoplay
  jQuery(window).load( function() {
  timerID_$galleryID = setInterval( \"jQuery.galleria.next( 'stage_$galleryID', '$galleryID' );\", $intervalMilliSec );
 });
}

So, if one unselects « show navigation » in wp-galleria’s admin panel in WordPress, the slideshow will autoplay.

Design Mailboy – a web interface for Postfix and Amavis

2010

mailboy interface curly

I made a nice and sober theme for Mailboy, a webinterface for Postfix and Amavis written by Emmanuel Revah. Mailboy is available as a beta-version for the moment but will be published soon under the GPL-License.
As you can see, I even use the software myself and am very happy it exists. :)

php-indexes – a file tree generator

2009

php-inphp-indexes generates an index of files in a defined folder, similar to the Apache file listing. Files may be ordered by name or date. It also generates an RSS feed. It does not require a database and is configurable via a simple config file for:

  • title and description
  • search engine friendly permalink support (thank you Manu)
  • defining the number of entries in RSS feed
  • modify style to your needs

php-indexes is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), version 3. Use at your own risk.

I’m happy with feedback & criticism.

Try a demo here.

download php-indexes-v1.1.tar.gz | php-indexes-v1.1.zip (mai 2010)

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