SilentGap

Ok, as you may know, I’ve been really interested in my shed project this year. One thing that’s been on my mind (well, at least I’ve been thinking about it) is electricity, more specifically, how do I get electricity out to my shed. I do have a 220 outlet already routed outside from an old hot tub (cue SNL’s hot tub skit – classic), installed by the previous owner. But where’s the fun in that, for me that involves more digging, which isn’t exactly what I would call a good time.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Ok, I’ve run into this problem a few times and keep forgetting what the solution is, so here’s a good reference post for myself and the rest of you wondering.

Let’s say you have in your WordPress install 5 or more categories, but to the general public, there’s only two categories you want to show (such as the case with http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/). In this blog there’s multipule categories, some of them for a public post / Q&A section and the other for the author blog posts and still, some more for the sidebar featured products section. Well, to the general public, they don’t need to see the Featured Products or the Q&A section in the general feed, but rather just the blog posts, from the various authors partisipating. So let’s say they post to the category ID’s 22 & 23, well in your link tag in the header place the following tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed"

href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>?cat=22,23" />

Which outputs in html as

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

title="Mid Market Innovators RSS Feed"

href="http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed/?cat=22,23" />

In the case of Mid Market Innovators, the feed was placed into a feedburner plugin, which redirects the http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed to the feedburner link. But, this should still work if you’re not using feedburner. If you run into any troubles, post a comment.

Through a little bit of research, I found a few Agencies / People who i thought were interesting that they were using twitter. Below are a few.

• http://twitter.com/CitySiouxFalls
• http://twitter.com/SenateFloor
• http://twitter.com/USAgov
• http://twitter.com/HouseFloor
• http://twitter.com/NRSC
• http://twitter.com/TheWhiteHouse
• https://twitter.com/Drudge_Report
• https://twitter.com/rushl (maybe rush limbaugh – not sure)

Can you think of anyone else?

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

On July 31, an article was posted on ZDNet.com about some worms on the web, squirming there way through Facebook and MySpace. The actual method of attack seems to be through,… [long pause] … Social Enginering (which means, you’re curiosity get’s the best of you and someone tricks you into thinking you’re doing one thing, when you’re actually doing another).

Some of the messages and comments posted to the social network sites include:

- Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street
- Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet
- Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam
- Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others.

The messages and comments include links to a fake YouTube-like site. Clicking on the link redirects the targer to another YouTube clone fitted with a note to download the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player.

However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine; this file is also a network worm. Kaspersky said [from Kaspershy Lab's]its security suite detected the threats proactively and signatures were added to the database on July 31, 2008.

In short – don’t download anything unless you read the file name and know exactly what it does.

Original article can be found here

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

I’ve just noticed that on the Google code site, there’s a new browser debug tool for all of us developers. The good news, it works across browser lines, that means not only Firefox, but also IE 6, IE 7, Opera, etc.

I originally found out about this guy on digg.com & the explanation is below:

code.google.com — pi.debugger is a cross browser web development tool allows you to examine web page’s structural and debug with console. A real alternative to Firebug because it works in all browsers and has more features than Firebug light.

Well, to say that it’s a “real alternative to Firebug” i think is a bit of a stretch, but for Firebug lite, it seems to be a great alternative (NOTE: I haven’t actually worked with Firebug lite – but it’s info can be found here (site currently not working) and a review on it can be found here).

Simply put – point an html script tag to src=“http://pi-js.googlecode.com/files/debugger.js” place it below your “title” tag & refresh your page. Viola.

The problem you run into w/ this type of JavaScript debugging insert is that you can’t edit the HTML or CSS at all, unlike the full version of Firebug for Firefox.

All in all, this is a handy tool if you’re lacking the IE debug toolbar or Firebug extension and is an informative ‘Read Only” tool, but don’t be expecting it to work like the full version of Firebug.

~tim

So I subscribe to a few of ZDNet’s newsletters & blogs, and in my inbox was a headline that said “AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010″. Naturally, being a developer myself, this peaked my interest. So I started reading. There were two subjects that really stood out to me. One subject dealing with the title, but another one that I’ve been hearing bit’s of rumors here and there, but wasn’t sure if it was true.

Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK said the following:

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

Which I’ve thought about often, how much more the current infrastructure (I.E. servers, backbone (internet cable and wires), organization of systems & protocols, etc) will be able to hold out as the user’s hunger for online video increases.

Think about it, the idea of renting video’s online & downloading it to play on your entertainment system of choice (Steve Job’s talked about this in one of his keynotes for a feature in the newly updated Apple TV), is good one. Not only that, but now you can watch YouTube Vid’s in Hi Def – or at least in it’s original uploaded quality (A whole different post for this guy).

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said.

Then comes the next subject that I was totally not expecting, but was glad he covered it. It’s in regards to “Net Neutrality”.

Net neutrality refers to an ongoing campaign calling for governments to legislate to prevent Internet service providers from charging content providers for prioritization of their traffic. The debate is more heated in the United States than in the United Kingdom because there is less competition between ISPs in the States.

Content creators argue that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers and keep all Internet traffic equal. Network operators and service providers argue that the Internet is already unequal, and certain types of traffic–VoIP, for example–require prioritization by default.

Meaning, there’s been increasing concern & even fear that the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – like Midco, Comcast, AT&T, etc.) will start limiting what can & can’t be viewed on the interent. Also that, these companies will give priority to larger companies – over the little guys. Even some rumors say that the internet will become like the TV / Cable system of today. You have your basic free service, your basic cable, your upgraded cable, your Hi Def cable and then satalite or anything else out there – only it will be for the internet

Personally, I’ll have to wait and see, i think some of these rumor’s are nothing to worry about, but there is not doubt, there will have to be a change in the way the internet works with the increase demand for user content.

~tim

ZDNet’s full article can be viewed at http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6237715.html?tag=nl.e550

.

I’ve had many people ask me “What is RSS?” or “What is an RSS feed?”, and I’ve answered with some really off the cuff answer – never really giving them a good, easy to understand explanation. Well, with this post, I will “Hopefully” clear this answer up.

Having said all of that, I remember back to the first time I heard the term RSS and remember asking someone to explain it to me, and then, been given this explanation – “RSS means, Really Simple Syndication”. Then I remember asking myself – “What the heck does that mean”, all the while never focusing on the key word SYNDICATION. Syndication means (as defined by dictionary.com)

“a group of individuals or organizations combined or making a joint effort to undertake some specific duty or carry out specific transactions or negotiations” 1

Except in the case of RSS, instead of being a group of individuals/organizations for a specific duty, it’s a group of audio, video or text files combined for a general subject, published for the world by single person or an organization.

So, there’s two type of people that have to deal or interact with an RSS feed, the person who publishes it (which is a whole different post on how to publish) and then you, the person who subscribes (often referred to as consume within some circles). For the sake of keeping this post short and sweet, I’m only going to discuss the part that deals with a person who would want to subscribe.

Subscribing should be no new concept for anyone, you may subscribe to newspaper or magazine of some type. Maybe you subscribe to a set of audio taps or cd’s, and they are delivered to you in the mail. With RSS, instead of being delivered to you in the mailbox, it’s delivered to you (through your computer) and the “Virtual” mailbox that holds it is called a “Reader”.

Now depending on what your having delivered, will depend on how the reader (or virtual mailbox) functions.

There’s a text reader – like the one i use to subscribe to all of my blogs (again, a whole other post on what a blog is and different types of blogs), Google Reader – picture below.

Google Reader isn’t the only one out there you can use, often times your E-mail client/application (such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or the Mac OS X Mail) has a reader built right into it, and can organize your different subscriptions into E-mail form – which can be really handy if you don’t like to do things different. There are tons of different online services you can use, but will not be discussed here other than to say Google it.

And then there’s a reader to hold all of your video or audio files (referred to as a Vidcast for video files and a Podcast for audio files – I didn’t make up the names), the one i use is iTunes – see picture on the right. Again, you don’t have to use iTunes, but can use other programs to store your audio/video files.

In my case of vidcasts and podcasts, my subscriptions include (ok, hold your breath – my subscriptions really vary), Pastor Bob Coy from florida (Active Word), Boagworld.com (tech, web podcast from Paul Boag), Boing Boing TV (ahh yeah – funny name – just know it’s a tech podcast), Diggnation (ummm…this one could have it’s own post – DISCLAIMER:I can’t recomend (in good conscience) this podcast to anyone), Joel Osteen, Photoshop Killer Tips, Rush 24/7 Podcast (yeah!!!), and the last one “this WEEK in TECH”.

In order to keep the size down on this post i better start wrapping things up – but for a more detailed explanation, go to Wikipedia. And when ever you’re out on the web and you see a symbol like the one on the left, just know that site you’re currently on has an RSS feed publishing the most recent (usually) information posted onto that particular site.

If you have any questions or if I left anything out, please leave a comment and who you are, I’ll get back to you when time permits.

~tim

Ok, so the documentation below has been contributed by a number of people. I’ll try to give credit where credit is due.

The following article describes in detail the problems and solutions behind the JavaScript rollover menu falling behind a flash element embedded on a web page.

Issue

---

The layout requests the use of a JavaScript dropdown menu. Everything works fine until there’s a Flash (or Java Applet) object embedded on the page just below the navigation. When the user rolls over the navigation and the dropdown is invoked, the dropdown falls behind the flash object instead of over.

Reason

---

From various sources on a Google search it sounds like there may be a few different explanations from this problem – very few of those sources come with good documentation. So far this is what has been found. From further research, it appears that all of these reasons may be playing a part.

The two that seems to have the most impact are below:

1. Flash – By default, a flash movie doesn’t actually play within the browser. Instead it’s given it’s own window, giving flash the power to render it’s files independent of the browser abilities, thereby increasing the performance of the object. Because of this, Flash then “floats” it’s movie over the browser to make it appear within the browsers window.
2. CSS – It all goes back to the div’s. When working with a dropdown DHTML menu, it needs to hover over all other objects & page elements, displaying the ‘hover over’ appearance to the user. The rules still apply, trying to ask a <div> / <ul> menu to display over a parent / higher ranking menu doesn’t work unless you obey the CSS gods.

A further note on the Adobe Flash issue, there is a parameter you can set that will change how flash is rendered. It’s with the ‘wmode’ parameter. Below are the three options you can set and an explanation of what each option does.

1. Window (default) mode [example] – This is the mode that’s described above in point one. It’s usually the fastest performing setting and is the way Flash worked before version 6 (it think – don’t have a reference to back this up, but remember reading it somewhere).
2. Opaque mode [example] – This enables a ‘windowless’ mode which “means that the browser tells the Flash Player when and where to draw onto the browser’s own rendering surface.” When this mode is set, it will now accept CSS values and positioning.
3. Transparent mode [example] – This mode is similar to the “Opaque” mode, in that it gives the control back to the browser, different in that “the Flash Player zeros the alpha of the movie background color and draws only the parts of the Flash stage that contain actual objects.”1 This will come in handy if you have a flash move that’s not square or is irregular shaped in some way. The other drawback is that this mode can cause the Flash rendering performance to go down. NOTE: “If you have overlayed your Flash movie on top of a DHTML layer containing a text field, you will not be able to get the focus to go to the text field. Each time you click on the text field, the Flash movie will grab the focus. Though I did not experiment with this, Scott Barnes from MossyBlog suggests you may want to swap the z-indexes when you no longer need the overlayed Flash movie.”1
   

NOTE: “Windowless Mode is available by publishing for Flash Player 6 or 7 in the following browsers:”

• Windows
  

• IE

• Netscape 7.0

• AOL
• FireFox *.*
  

Mac OS X

• Mozilla 1.0
• IE 5.1 & 5.2
• Netscape 7.0
• AOL
• Mozilla 1.0
• CompuServe
• FireFox *.*
  

Linux – Your guess is as good as mine

Solution

---

“You may have read that to change the mode, you should go back into Flash and republish your Flash movie. That’s not necessary. If you haven’t yet published your Flash movie, certainly use the publish settings dialog box to choose your wmode setting. That option is in the HTML tab of the Publish Settings. Choose either transparent windowless or opaque windowless in the tab and publish the document.”1

You’ll have to change the two Flash tags or if using the SWFObject JavaScript file – it will change both of them for you.

• Param Tag – <param name=”wmode” value=”opaque”>
• Embed tag – <object wmode=”opaque”>
• SWFObject – add to your script tag, just after the new SWFObject(); function

• so.addParam(“wmode”, “opaque”);

Next, you’ll have to make sure you’re dynamic dropdown menu is on the same level as the flash file level. Suggestion, create a placeholder image to mimic your flash and get the dropdown to hover over the image first, and then work with the flash.

You can control this with setting both the menu class and flash class files to position: and then setting the z-index higher for the menu div than the flash div.

There’s a good chance this still won’t work due to the amount of different div levels in between the actual menu and the flash movie, so you may have to use the following hack to get around this problem.

For your Navigation code -

==========================
<ul id=”nav”>
<li><a href=”">Link 1</a>
<ul>
<li><a href=”">Child 1</a></li>
<li><a href=”">Child 2</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href=”">Link 2</a>
<ul>
<li><a href=”">Child 1</a></li>
<li><a href=”">Child 2</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href=”">Link 3</a></li>
</ul>
<div id=”flashContent”>
<img src=”/images/photo.jpg” width=”300″ height=”300″ border=”0″ alt=”" />
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
// <![CDATA[
var so = new SWFObject("/flash/flashfile.swf", "flashContent", "300", "300", "7", "#FF6600");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.write("flashContent");
// ]]>
</script>
=========================

Then in your CSS – set your dropdown as below (you can add additional attributes as you see fit.)

=========================
#nav li ul {
position:absolute;
z-index: 20; /*or as long as this z-index value is higher than the flash div. So this value could be 2 if the flash div z-index value is 0 or 1 */ /* reference note below*/
}

#flashContent {
position:relative;
z-index: 10; /* reference Note below*/
display:inline;
float:right;
}
=========================

Then, in your body, create a placeholder div that will frame out the section you want to display the flash movie

=========================
#flash_place_holder {
width:300px;height:300px;
}
=========================

Note: You’ll want to set the z-index of the flash content to a value higher than zero in order to be able to access content in the flash. Along with that make sure you keep the z-index of the navigation higher than the flash content.

Once the placeholder is positioned in the correct location, go back and float your Flash div over the placeholder. The use of 1px borders really help when trying to place the flash in the exact position.

Also, it doesn’t seem that this problem can be fixed by setting the z-index when the menu and flash are in separate container div’s. The z-index seems only to change the values within a containing wrapper and not ones outside of that containing wrapper.

IE.
=========================
<div id=”header_containing_wrapper”>
<div id=”nav_wrapper”>
<ul id=”nav”> <!– Setting the z-index on this guy doesn’t seem to impact the id=”flash_container“ in the id=“body_containing_wrapper“ but it does in the id=”header_containing_wrapper” id=”flash_container” b/c it’s in the same containing div tag –>
<etc></etc>
</ul>
<div id=”flash_container”> <!– impacted by z-index set from the id=”nav” –>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div id=”body_containing_wrapper”>
<div id=”right_col”>
</div>
<div id=”left_col”>
<div id=”flash_container”> <!– Not impacted by z-index set from the id=”nav” –>
</div>
</div>
</div>
=========================

If you find any additional hacks or other information that needs to modified or added – please feel free to do so.

Sources & Original Articles:

1. http://www.communitymx.com/content/source/E5141/
2. http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_15523
3. People who have contributed to this documentation are myself, and two guys that I work with, Chris Lukenbill and Ben Bertrand – as well as some influence by a few other gentlemen from Blend Interactive.