It’s a very old photo, dating back some 50 years and shows her, her mother and her mother-in-law on my Nannan’s wedding day.

The photo took me ages to restore, but was totally worth it to see the look on my Nannan’s face, when I presented it to her on her birthday.

Priceless!

The photo and the original are below.

Original

Restored photo

Not a bad result, even if I do say so myself. :-D

I was using the new RGBA property and noticed that IE totally ignores it. The colour displayed this way is non-existent.

The fix

So I began experimenting.

I noticed that, when the standard RGB or Hexidecimal value is placed in the CSS as well, IE uses that value to display the colour.

But depending on the stacking order, depends how more standards compliant browsers display the colour.

If the RGBA value is first and the RGB value second.

e.g.
background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5);
background: rgb(255, 255, 255);

All browsers display the RGB colour.

However.

If the RGBA value is second.

e.g.
background: rgb(255, 255, 255);
background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5);

Safari/Chrome & Firefox will display the RGBA colour whilst IE displays the RGB colour.

That’s a nice neat little fix. Hope you find it useful.

Then look no further.

The time is now to start using the magical @font-face.

Font Squirrel

On the Font Squirrel website, you have access to around 100 ‘font kits‘. The kits include everything you need to use the beautiful fonts on your website.

There’s the .TTF and the ever elusive .EOT.

For those that don’t know, the .EOT file is needed for IE. Microsoft have implemented the @font-face declaration in every browser since and including IE6. .EOT is a proprietary format belonging to Microsoft.

The kit even include the license that you can upload to your server, to stop any arguments about the usage of the font.

@font-face

This is great, web designers everywhere can rejoice, they’ve been waiting for this moment for years.

There’s now a viable way to use @font-face and Font Squirrel has an ever growing collection of fonts available, all totally free, with the correct license.

What more could you ask for?

I use the built in Sites feature on my Mac for internal development purposes. Something I’ve noticed is that the I.P. address I need to access keeps changing. It was really starting to get annoying.

When I mentioned it to @crayons, he pointed out that I can change the options on my network settings from ‘Using DHCP‘ to ‘Using DHCP with manual address‘.

Now before you do that, copy down the I.P. address and then all you’ve got to do is just paste it into the relevant text box.

Simples!

In it he explains the benefits of Google Chrome Frame.

Google Chrome Frame

Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:

• Start using open web technologies – like the HTML5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
• Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.

Basically for most web pages, all you have to do is add a single tag to your pages and detect whether your users have installed Google Chrome Frame.

• If Google Chrome Frame is not installed, you can direct your users to an installation page.
• If Google Chrome Frame is installed, it detects the tag you added and works automatically.

And that’s it.

No trickery like IE6 Update, which, incidentally, I think is a great way to get users to update their browser, even if it is unethical.

Not only will your users not have to upgrade their browser, which for many large corporate organisations, could cost millions of pounds upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6.

Users can benefit from open source, up and coming software, and see the web at it’s best!

What do you think?

A new job

I’ve just started a new job, working for Ebuyer.com, one of the largest Internet resellers of brand name computer technology and consumer electronics products based in Howden in the North of the UK.

I’m hoping this move will allow me to grow my potential and learn loads of new skills. I’ve been there a couple of months already and I’m really enjoying my time there. Everybody is a great laugh.

I really enjoyed my time at TechnoPhobia and I’m really grateful for the opportunity they provided me as a young fledgling designer.

A new band

Those of you that know me a little bit more, will know that I’ve joined a new band, Curry Quiche. They’re an alternative rock band.

It started out as me doing a favour for my mate when their bass player left them in the shit, but I quite enjoyed my time with the band, so decided to join permanently.

I’m also in the process of developing their website, check it out. Steve’s done some great work on the illustration. Remember though, it’s work in progress.

A new website

When I launched this in february of this year, I was never quite happy with it. There’s still a few niggles and some unfinished bits … so I’ve decided to scrap it and start again. I’ve been working on my new site for a while now, and hopefully it’ll be live before the end of the month.

I’ll also have some great pieces to add to my portfolio that I’ve been working on. But you’ll have to wait to see them all.

Thanks for sticking around, hopefully now I’ll be able to share some more of my wisdom with you and get back to posting regularly.

To give them a helping hand, every now and then they ask someone t step in as a guest poster and I was thrilled to be one of them.

So here’s my entry for 31st July.

I thought I’d have a go at illustrator, it’s a tool I don’t use very often and I’m pleased with the result.

Whilst developing a site, I noticed that the main column on the index page had suddenly disappeared. It was working fine earlier and I couldn’t figure out what had happened.

Background

The site is a recruitment site, and the index page has job adverts on it.

So, after some time, it eventually dawned on me.

It was working fine on one instance of Firefox, without Adblock installed. But on an instance with Adblock installed it wasn’t working. Strange.

The problem

So I looked at the generated code. On the copy of Firefox with Adblock installed, there was an inline style added to the containing div, set to display: none;.

Although a little annoying, I was impressed with how Adblock worked. It had obviously scanned the page for anything with a class or ID of ‘advert’ and added the inline style. This was confirmed once I’d disabled the plugin.

The fix

This was easy to fix, I just changed the div’s ID to something else, and changed the appropriate styles. Ta da! Easily fixed.

So, be careful what you name your divs as this may have an effect on how a user views your site.