HTML5 my ads

First came Flash. Then came advertisers that thought it'd be great to abuse it. Then came Flashblock^tm and friends. The geeks don't like Flash, it's evil.

Now the iPhone & iPad don't have Flash, but they're the shit. Advertisers want a part of the shit of course, and they can put shiny ads in native apps, but not in the open apps that are websites. Thank god there is HTML5, geeks love it, it's all great. So you've got solutions like SmokeScreen developing. It's Flash without Flash, everyone should be happy right?

Have you looked at their demos? Ads. Yes. I'm not saying they won't do more one day, but for now the target market seems to be advertisers, so that they can put out Flash-like ads in HTML5, reach the iDevices and to kill two birds with one stone, they'll reach the geeks that run Flashblock. And all that while interpreting Flash content so it'll most likely be more of a resource hog than Flash is.

What's the solution? CanvasBlock? Noscript? In the end people will find ways to abuse anything.

Of course Apple could come back to the table and implement Flash in the next iPhone OS, instead of having us suck up some half-working slow Flash ersatz on top of completely broken sites.

June 02, 2010 // Web, JavaScript // Post a comment

The joys of user stylesheets

User stylesheets are a way to inject some CSS in all the sites you visit, each browser has his own way of setting it up (if you use opera step 2 there should be replaced with: "Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > Style Options > Select your css file in My stylesheet"), but the idea is always the same.

I've recently found a couple of use for these styles so I thought I might as well share :

Changing gmail's font

I like gmail, but losing my dear monospaced font was annoying me - especially when reading code-related mails with snippets in them. So this little hack allows you to choose the font used in the mail body area of the page. It's made for the "old" gmail interface since I don't have the new one yet, but it can probably be adapted if it doesn't work with the new one.

.XoqCub .ArwC7c {
  font:16px proggytinytt, "courier new", courier !important;
  font-size:16px !important;
}

This uses the proggytinytt font by the way, which is my font of choice for all monospace purposes, however if you don't have it it falls back on courier new/courier.

Saving flickr's images peacefully

Some images on flickr seem to be protected with a file called spaceball.gif that's overlayed onto the actual image, so that when you right-click it to save, you hit the transparent gif and can't save the image. With the help of that great CSS3 selector :nth-child(N), you can make sure you hide the gif if it's there.

.photoImgDiv img:nth-child(2) {
	display:none !important;
}

If you've anything useful, feel free to post it in the comments.

November 28, 2008 // Web // Post a comment

Installing Habari on Lighttpd

Just a small post about Habari installation over Lighttpd, since it is not really documented anywhere that I could find.

I will assume that you know how to run php scripts on your server, and start from there. So once you have unpacked Habari files in say /home/seld/domain.com/, all you need to do is add the following to your lighttpd.conf file :

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(www\.)?domain\.com$" { 
    server.document-root =  "/home/seld/domain.com" 
    url.rewrite-once =  ( 
        "^/(?!scripts/|3rdparty/|system/|doc/)(.*)$" =>  "/index.php" 
    ) 
}

With this setup, your blog must lie in the top level directory ( http://domain.com/ ), should you want to install it in a subdirectory, you need to add it to the url rewrite, for example to install in http://domain.com/blog/ you would need to replace line 4 with :

"^/blog/(?!scripts/|3rdparty/|system/|doc/)(.*)$" =>  "/blog/index.php"

August 02, 2008 // Web // Post a comment