Pages

Sunday, February 26, 2012

34

Youtube videos lazy load, improved style

I styled my previous youtube lazy load hack a bit so that the video description text is easier to read. Before it looked like this (this is an image, so no hover effect):


HTML needed to produce this is:
<div style="text-align:center;"><a class="youtube-lazy-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFiWfrLEqPw" style="width: 420px;height:315px;" title="Click to play!"><b>Mozart Fantasy in C minor</b> played by me</a></div>
With the new style, it looks like this (actual embed):


Here's the code, place it before </head>. If you had previous version installed, you replace it with this code. And as always, you can edit CSS styles to your needs.


This script is installed on this blog.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

3

Pastebin embeds temporarily broken

I use pastebin to store most of my hacks' source codes and to embed them into this blog. Pastebin was today updated to version 3.1, and it broke the embeds. On my blog's first page the sidebar had fallen to the bottom of the page because of an imbalance in div elements' opening and closing tags. I fixed the first page, but on consequent pages the sidebar might still drop, and embeds contain this 'ss="javascript">' bug. And the code is not syntax highlighted. I notified this to pastebin admin, hope it gets fixed soon. Codes can still be copied like before by clicking the "Download Raw" link.

Update 3 hours later: Pastebin embeds fixed.

Monday, February 13, 2012

9

Automatic image caption from img title

I'm administering a Blogspot blog where some of the content uses img title tag to store image captions. Title tags are normally shown in a tooltip window, when user hovers the mouse over the image. There are some scripts around that display the image caption from image's title tag, but I decided to make my own. To get it quickly done, I used jQuery. This code goes before </head> tag, remove first line if you have jQuery already loaded.


Now you can use the following html markup on the page:

<img class="caption" title="Image title" src="./pics/pic.jpg" />

and it will dynamically be turned into something like this:

<div class="caption-wrap">
<img class="caption" title="Image title" src="./pics/pic.jpg" />
<p class="caption-text">Image title</p>
</div>


Use the classname "caption" and a title tag for those images you wish to autocaption.

Alignment and left/right margins are copied from img to the wrapping div, so horizontal positioning of the title paragraph is (should be) the same for basic image alignment options (centered or float left/right).

Here's a link to an example article with many auto-generated image captions, the blog is in Finnish, article is about prohibition: Nobel-palkitut ja huippupoliitikot vaativat huumeiden laillistamista.

Blogger post editor's "compose mode" has possibility to set image captions. But I think compose mode is not reliable, and so I mainly use the HTML editing mode. Also the HTML markup is much simpler using title tags and this script.

If you use this, you can adjust the script and the styles for your needs. This script can also be used outside Blogger.


Update January 21st 2013: Changed the script to use $(window).load() function instead of $(document).ready(), which makes sure that outerWidth function always returns the image width correctly. Line 31 was changed.

Monday, February 6, 2012

13

Hack to expand/collapse Blogger sidebar gadgets

Previously I made the tabbed gadgets hack, which can save space in blog's sidebar. This hack serves the same purpose, but a bit differently. With this hack you can make your sidebar gadgets vertically collapsible, using jQuery. I have used it on this blog on some gadgets, and here is...


You can choose which gadgets you make collapsible, and make them either closed or open initially. You can also make gadget groups, from which only one gadget may be open at one time (in this blog the search gadgets, and in demo blog the profile gadget and "read more" gadget).

To install, you need to have some computing skills and know your way around. Edit your blog's template, and paste the following code before </head>. If you have jQuery already loaded somewhere in your template, you can leave out the first line.


Then you need to edit the window.load function at the end of the script. There you should add calls to cedgAddOpen or cedgAddClosed for all those gadgets that you want to make collapsible (and open or closed by default). Use gadget ID, preceded with #, or gadget title, as parameter. Using "#ID" is preferred method. You can easily see the IDs of the blog's gadgets at end of the template, when widget templates are not expanded.

To make a gadget group, pass several ID parameters to cedgAddOpen. The first ID's gadget will be opened initially, others closed. Example: cedgAddOpen("#Profile1", "#HTML1"); You can call cedgAddClosed again for the first gadget's ID if you want it initially closed, too.

Note: if you use also tabbed gadgets, you cannot collapse gadgets that are made into tabs.

As you can see in the CSS, the little plus and minus signs are implemented as base64 images. You can change them if you want, and they can be external images, too. Also other styles, and the gadget spacing, can be easily changed. You may also want to style the gadget titles (H2 element), I use a gradient there, here are instructions.
See the hack
for this dynamic
views icon: