badlyDrawnToy

A couple of days ago I released a jQuery plugin that provides a grid overlay when working with the 960.gs css grid framework. The plugin seems to have been quite popular, and as a result I now have a host of new Twitter followers – Hello to everyone in Romania!

I’m glad that others have found the plugin useful. A couple of people have suggested I release the overlay as a bookmarklet, so I spent yesterday learning how to develop one. So here it is: grid960 – a grid overlay bookmarklet for 960.gs

To install the bookmarklet simply drag the link below to your bookmarks toolbar. In Internet Explorer, right click, select ‘Add to favourites’ and then select ‘Links’.

grid960

You can test it on this page.

The bookmarklet works slightly differently to the original jQuery plugin. Firstly, if jQuery is not installed, it will inject it for you. If jQuery is already installed it will use this library – it will dynamically upgrade the library if it is not the latest vesion (1.3.2).

Secondly, the bookmarklet provides a small configuration menu on the page. When the bookmarklet loads, it will defaults to the 12 column grid. Through the menu, you can switch to a 16 column grid, and also alter the opacity of the gridlines.

The bookmarklet does not work in IE6 (yeah, whatever).

Any problems or suggestions, let me know.

Categories: JQuery, Web Development | 10 Comments »

I’ve been using 960.gs on a few sites recently. Without wanting to get into a discussion about the pros/cons of using css grid frameworks, I find them useful for some sites.

The 960.gs framework comes with a handy demo that shows a grid overlay, but the GIF images used have no transparency, so it is difficult to add a nice grid overlay to sites when developing them.

On the 960.gs home page there is a button by the thumbnail examples that dynamically adds a grid to the image. I Googled around for a similar solution, but didn’t find one that quite did what I wanted. So, I decided to build a simple jQuery plugin of my own.

Here’s a demo of the plugin in action.

To use the plugin, simply add the following code to your pages for a 12 column grid:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.960grid-1.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	$(function() {
		$("body").addGrid(12);
	});
</script>

Once the plugin is activated, a small toggle link will be visible in the top left-hand corner of the page. Unsurprisingly, if you change the input parameter from 12 to 16, you get a 16 column grid available!

The plugin relies on a couple of PNGs and by default the image path is set to /images/. You can override this setting, along with several others, by passing in some options as follows:

var options= {
	img_path: 'img/',
	z_index: 999,
	opacity:.6
};
$("body").addGrid(12, options);

As well as the image path, it is possible to override the default z-index used by the overlay, in case there is a conflict. You can also alter the opacity of the PNG if you require.

Please feel free to download the plugin for your own use. Let me know of any problems or suggested enhancements.

Categories: JQuery, css | 10 Comments »

Last night I finally got round to upgrading my Win XP VMWare image from IE8 beta to the production release. A bit slack on my behalf as the browser was released about 3 weeks ago. Still, I’d been testing websites in the beta release and all was cool.

Well, that’s what I thought. Last night I discovered that my company website, no longer worked. Looking into the problem this morning, I discovered that the culprit was a jQuery plugin that renders rounded/curvy corners.

I looked at a few other plugins, but none seemed to work. After a bit of Googling, I cam across an interesting blog entry from the guys at filmanentgroup, who are heavily involved in developing the jQuery UI API.

The blog entry highlighted an interesting piece of javascript development by Drew Diller that has nothing to do with jQuery. Drew has written an IE specific library called DD_roundies, that uses VML to produce the rounded corners.

The idea is that this code be used for browsers that don’t (yet) support CSS3 border radius. However, Drew has included an option to also render the CSS3 syntax for those browsers that support this feature.

I’ve now updated my site to use Drew’s code with CSS3 syntax support. This works in IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari, FireFox and Chrome. It doesn’t yet work in Opera, but this is only a matter of time (and perhaps a code update). If you want to support Opera, you can simply use conditional comments.

Categories: Web Development | 2 Comments »