Milburn

My own anaglyph maker uses PHP to make anaglyphs from two images uploaded by a user. But I’ve found someone who has gone one step further. They’ve managed to make them using JavaScript alone. Unfortunately Internet Explorer fails miserably on this task. This is because his method uses the canvas object which so far is only supported by Firefox, Safari and Opera.

It simply loads the two images into two canvas elements and extracts the red channel from one of them and inserts that red channel into the other canvas. Hey presto you get a simple anaglyph. This method has another flaw. Modifying an images data channels can only be done from an image on the same domain to obey the same domain security policy. A small proxy sorts that out but means the solution isn’t all JavaScript. Read the rest of this entry »

Released earlier this week was my star rating tool. I’d actually started this about a year ago but only remembered last weekend that I had it gathering dust in my hard drive.

Instant Star Rating allows you to create 5 star ratings in several different styles to go on your website. Unlike other star raters it doesn’t use Ajax. This is because Ajax doesn’t work across domains. Instead it uses the dynamic script method. When the user clicks on a star it loads a new script from the server. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time, I was showing you how to create the cool drop caps on my blog. The only problem was that I was having to write extra mark-up into each post to generate the drop caps.

Extra mark-up is bad. It’s bad because if I wanted to change blogging platforms or even change theme I would have to go through every post and page and remove the HTML mark-up. Not really too difficult with only 4 posts to date but if I have a hundred or so posts in the future, it becomes a real pain. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s one of the most striking features of my blog, the crazy drop capitals with drop shadows. Not only that but I’ve come up with away to achieve this in all good browsers (unfortunately that doesn’t include IE) using only CSS and HTML. Let’s start with the markup.

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I’ve got a new blog so I need a way to display some cool images at the bottom of the page. Anyone who has dealt with WordPress before will tell you it’s not made for dealing with images. I’ve decided to counter my fears and sign up to Flickr.

Flickr offers a range of ways for developers to integrate images with their website. I have mashed my Flickr photostream with my blog and got a wall of images at the bottom of the page. It was actually remarkably painless to set up, Flickr helps simplify the uploading, classifying and exporting of images. Read the rest of this entry »