Thoughts on the web, web design and film photography…
General
Happy Blue Beanie Day
0Happy Blue Beanie Day from the HTML5 Hipster
Credits: Seth Ladd for the HTML5 Guy idea. Kevin Cornell (via) Zeldman for the Beanie.
Other Formats: SVG Adobe Illustrator PNG
Starting at PeteLePage.com
0After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve rebuilt my website, and am in the process of moving my MSDN blog posts over here as well. In any event, it’ll take a few days to get everything set up, but it’s on the way.
PEte
T-Mobile DASH upgrade to WM6
0Oh hot! T-Mobile just released the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the DASH.
http://www.t-mobile.com/wmupgrade/
Enjoy!
Pre Define Your Event Tags
0I’m on the airplane on my way back from the SV Web Builders Browser War event, and it was pretty cool. It was great to meet Mike Shaver from Mozilla (and fellow Canadian), Hakom Lie from Opera and Douglas Crockford (aka Internet Genius) of Yahoo! fame.
As I was shooting photos (which will be on Flickr shortly after we get on the ground and I can get a net connection), and shooting video, it occured to me, how am I going to tag this stuff? The event organizers didn’t define and promote any tags for the event!
One of the really successful things that the Web Directions North guys did was predefine the tags and tell people about them. They were in the attendee book, and they were mentioned several times during the conference. You can find all the photos from Web Directions North just by looking at a few of the tags.
So, if you’re putting on any kind of event, user group meeting, conference, geek meet up, anything, I’d love it if you told me how to tag it so my photos are associated with the event, and I can easily find everyone elses.
And on that note, if you’re on flickr, be sure to turn on public tagging! It’s a great feature, and lets the community tag and add all sorts of info to your photos. I think every one of my WDN photos are tagged with the people in them now because of that!
(in my personal blog style)
okay, so i did it…. i signed up for twitter, not sure if it’s a good thing, or a bad thing… you tell me… petele on twitter, feel free to add me… i’ll likely add you back, especailly if i know you, have met you, or you’re doing some kind of web development and are dealing with IE 
btw: more photos on flickr from web directions north.
PEte vs Pete
0A few people have asked, but I figured I’d post a quick note about why I sign my emails “PEte” instead of “Pete”. And yes, there is a good reason. Well, at least I think it’s good.
http://petelepage.com/blog/about/pete/
PEte
Random Image Loading With JavaScript
0I’m teaching the From Prints To Online: Updating Your Website class today at PCNW, and I had someone ask how they could random show an image on their home page. All of the students aren’t really web designer or developers, but fine art photographers. They know and understand photography like the back of their hands, but not HTML, CSS or JavaScript.
Normally with a big class, I would have said it’s a little too hard to teach to all 12 students (remember, these are not people who understand code). But, I’ve got a small class this weekend, so I figured why not. I also figured I might as well post it for those who are interested.
In the head, you’ll need to paste the following code:
<script type=”text/javascript” language=”JavaScript”>
MyImages=new Array();
MyImages[0]=’034.jpg’;
MyImages[1]=’038.jpg’;
MyImages[2]=’acid2.jpg’;
MyImages[3]=’boat.jpg’;
function newImage()
{
document.getElementById(“mainImage”).setAttribute(“src”, MyImages[Math.round(Math.random()*3)])
}
</script>
You’ll obviously need to change the file names to what ever files you want to load.
In the <body> tag, you’ll also need to add onload=”newImage()”, so you get something like <body onload=”newImage()”>
Finally, you need to make sure that you have an image with an ID of “mainImage” on your page somewhere. If you don’t, you’ll get JavaScript errors.
<img id=”mainImage” />
Hope this helps!
What’s Missing From The IE Developer Center
0One of the tasks that I’m currently working on is updating the IE Developer Center. It has lots of great information in there, but I have a hard time trying to find any of the stuff I need, so I don’t find it to be as useful as I’d like. One of the first steps in trying to redesign it is to do a site audit, find out what’s in there, what is out of date, what is current, or what is current, but looks out of date.
If I’m like most developers, if I see content that talks about IE6, I automatically think that it doesn’t apply to IE7, or even worse, if I see something referencing IE5.5, I would guess it doesn’t apply to IE7. Well, because of some of the hard work we’ve put around backwards compatibility, it is still relevant, and so we need to flag that, and make it clear that it is still relevant to developers.
So what do you want to see on the IE Dev Center? What would be useful to you as a web developer, as a web designer, AddOn developer and any other type of web person who I’m missing?
A Quick Link To Extending RSS in IE7
0One of the cool demos I saw around IE7 was how to extend the RSS platform so that you could include additional information, or provide additional ways of listing and sorting through data that you’d have in the RSS feed.
Sean Lyndersay on the RSS team pointed me to these links that I found really informative.
Generic RSS info: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/
Simple List Extension Example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sle/
Writing IE AddOns
0Having just kicked off the AddOn contest for IE, we’re working madly to get more documentation and other info out about how to write AddOns for IE. Last week, John, one of the SDK writers got a great article up on the MSDN website about how to write BHO’s for IE. You can check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/cols/dnexpie/expie_hello_bho.asp. It’s basically a HelloWorld type walk through that gets into a little bit of detail, but is a great way to start if you’ve not tried before. This first one is written in C++, but we are working on managed code examples as well.
If you’re not familiar with AddOns within IE, there are a couple of different kinds. There are Explorer Bars/Tool Bands and Desktop Bands, Download Managers, Browser Helper Objects, Tool Bars and Menu Bars and finally context menu AddOns. Each one has a it’s place for the features that it offers, and often, you might build “one” AddOn that uses several different AddOn models to create the full power that you want. For example, the Windows Live Toolbar is a BHO, plus a Menu Bar. The IESpell AddOn is an Explorer Bar (I think), and so forth.
You can find out lots more info about AddOn development at on the IE Developer Center. There is a whole section on AddOn Development, that goes in to a lot more detail about how to create AddOns, and what you need to do them.
BTW: A couple people have asked about the contest, and if it is open to people who have already submitted their AddOn. The answer is kind of. You need to resubmit it, and it has to have some kind of update. You can’t do a bug fix, or a small UI change, but you need to do some kind of significant upgrade. But you’ve got plenty of time to figure out what you want to do, and make sure it gets done well. We’ll get a post up on the IE blog later this week about that.