Last.fm Radio
An internet radio feed of my Last.fm music library (don't judge, it's on random)
Yelp Reviews
Recent restaurant & business reviews
Jon Raasch's Web Development Blog
Web development and design blog from Portland based developer Jon Raasch
Announcing the TranslateThis Button for WordPress
I just released a new WordPress plugin to leverage the TranslateThis Button, a Javascript translation widget that uses the Google Language API. This plugin provides an easy interface for customizing the options in the TranslateThis Button. The widget can be either be displayed anywhere in your theme with a template tag, or be included as part of the widgetized sidebar. The plugin provides a variety of settings that can be accessed in the WordPress admin section: Control the languages in the dropdown and the text of the various UI elements. Enable Google Analytics tracking for translation events. Use new button imagery, or disable images altogether, opting for text-only links. Confine the translation to the post/comments, or translate the entire page. Disable the cookie, or allow the plugin to translate all the pages on your site automatically. And more...
These Icons Look Like Crap – Poopy Social Media Icons
Social media often seems like a load of crap, so I’m releasing these Poopy Social Icons: 36 different icons in 3 crappy sizes: 48×48, 64×64, 128×128. Feel free to use the Poopy Social Media Icons on any site personal or commercial. No attribution is necessary but please link back to this post or retweet it if you like using these. Thanks! Download the Poopy Social Media Icons The Poopy Social Icon set covers 34 different social media outlets with an extra icon option for both Twitter and Digg. If I missed any, please let me know.
Get Around Email Address Privacy Issues in Google Buzz (Sort of)
Last week marked the release of Buzz, Google’s new competitor for Facebook and Twitter. Initially Buzz inherited a lot of the privacy issues of G-Chat by automatically adding everyone in your Google contacts. The problem with Google contacts is that even people you email casually end up in this list. Fortunately, this privacy [...]
10 Javascript Performance Boosting Tips from Nicholas Zakas
Nicholas Zakas is a Javascript guru and principle front-end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage. Zakas just announced his new book High Performance JavaScript, which you should order today. Zakas is pretty much the man when it comes to Javascript performance, and in June he gave a Google Tech Talk entitled Speed Up Your Javascript. While Javascript [...]
CSS Rounded Corners In All Browsers (With No Images)
In the past two years, increased browser support has transformed CSS3 from a fringe activity for Safari geeks to a viable option for enterprise level websites. While cross-browser support is often too weak for CSS3 to hold up a site’s main design, front-end developers commonly look to CSS3 solutions for progressive enhancement in their [...]
Interactive Volcano
All-inclusive interactive + creative website providing tutorials for jQuery, Flash and JavaScript
jQuery? You’ve got to toggle
Toggling makes it easy to turn things on and off Everyone likes writing jQuery for one main reason: it’s really easy to use. One feature that makes life a lot easier is toggling. Let’s say you have an image that you need to show when a button is clicked and then hide when it [...]
Appending Grayed-Out Overlays with jQuery and CSS
Probably one of the most widely adopted "web 2.0" features is the grayed out overlay. Rather than always redirecting users to a new page, overlays allow the current page to get "grayed out" with an overlaid panel. With the wide use of Javascript libraries like jQuery, the prevalence of these grayed-out overlays is understandable: they are very easy to build. Let’s start with the markup and CSS. We’ll need two wrappers, appended at the end of the DOM. Although we will append these later with jQuery, for now just put them right in the HTML (or wait until we append them). The idea for these wrappers is that the first 'overlay' div will be the grayed-out background and the 'overlay-panel' will be the HTML panel that sits on top of the overlay. Now let's get started by styling the overlay. The first problem we'll have to tackle is making the overlay fill the screen and sit on top of all the content:
Best Practices: How to Include IE-Specific CSS Styles and Stylesheets
Although good CSS should be written to be as browser-universal as possible, even the best front end developers find it necessary at times to target specific browsers for certain styles. In most cases this means writing a set of special CSS blocks to handle eccentricities in IE and its various versions. There's a wide variety of reasons to target specific browsers: IE6's lack of native support for transparent png24's, pesky 'has-layout' bugs, and IE6's lack of min-height support are just a few. One way to target specific browsers is through CSS selector hacks, which take advantage of quirks in different browser implementations. Perhaps the best known browser hack is the "star html" hack. Basically you prepend * html to any normal selectors in order to target IE6 specifically:
Controlling Animation Timing in jQuery
Animation and function timing can often seem like an uphill battle in Javascript. Thankfully jQuery's variety of timing control mechanisms provide excellent alternatives to Javascript's standard order of function processing. With both callback functions and chainable methods, jQuery allows much greater control over animation timing than Javascript alone. Callback functions provide the ability to execute a function once an animation has completed. Chainable methods allow us to stack a series of operations on a single object. Combining the two, jQuery provides near perfect control over the timing of animations.
Build a Simple Flash MP3 Player in AS2
Making a MP3 player is really simple using Flash and AS2. First open up an FLA in Actionscript 2.0 format. In the first frame, open the actions window and write: var simple_mp3:Sound = new Sound(); simple_mp3.loadSound( 'example.mp3', true ); Here we're loading the MP3 'example.mp3'. The second variable in loadSound() is whether to stream the media. If you would like to wait until the MP3 loads completely, just set this to false.
Up to 88
A blog about stuff that has disappeared
Pee Wee Herman
First of all I’d like to say that Pee Wee Herman was and will forever be my homeboy. But there’s no denying that he has gone ‘up to 88′, and in a big way.
My favorite Pee Wee moments of all time were in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. It really has everything: a quest [...]Trapper Keepers
Who could forget Trapper Keepers? Let’s face it, in 1992 elementary schools, kids weren’t cool unless they had a Trapper Keeper. And since it was the early 90’s, it had to be a REAL name brand Trapper Keeper, sorry poor kids!
Click here to find out what happens if you feed your Trapper Keeper [...]Hammer Pants
Please Hammer don’t hurt ‘em!
Who could forget Hammer Pants, these were everything in hip-hop fashion in the early 90’s, and yes, ‘Hammer Pants’ is a proper noun. Back in the late 80’s / early 90’s, ‘more’ really was ‘more’, so the more fabric in your pants the cooler you were. It was simple [...]Jeff Goldblum
Remember Jeff Goldblum? Hint: he was the sarcastic 90’s guy with the square glasses in all the iMac commercials (and every record executive’s personal hero).
There was a widespread rumor that Goldblum was drunk during every one of his performances, which I think was probably only partly true (the other part was cocaine).
And for some [...]Janeane Garofalo
Oh Janeane Garofalo you were so important in the 90’s. Your angry thing really appealed to Gen-Xers until around 2000 when they all got too old to care.
Wikipedia says Generation X likes Janeane Garofalo because of Reality Bites. It makes sense to me. (When I first saw that movie I was [...]The American Gladiators
I could care less about that new American Gladiators show, the original American Gladiators are definitely up to 88 in the coolest way possible. I used to love this show when I was a kid, it was so bad ass with the jousting and the human cannonball. But I think my favorite [...]Pluto
2006 was a sad year for astronomy: it was the year astronomers ruled that Pluto is not planet.
Putting Pluto ‘up to 88′ makes me want to cry, but Pluto is really no different from any celebrity. In the 60’s-80’s the space race put Pluto in limelight. It’s fame trickled off but it still [...]Air Phones
Remember “air phones”? These used to be on every plane in the 90’s. They were so 90’s too – they looked like the Zach Morris cell phone. And remember the place to swipe your card? That was almost 80’s…
Well air phones haven’t gone completely “up to 88″, I saw them [...]Susan Boyle
Remember Susan Boyle? That was a pretty brief 15 minutes huh?
Well I for one am glad she made it up to 88 so quickly…I remember feeling seriously disappointed when a friend sent me her now famous Britain’s Got Talent performance.
Thing is, when someone links me an American Idol-type video I’m expecting to see some [...]Cuz I’ve Had the Time of My Life – 10 Best P. Swayze Clips
Miss you so bad P. Swayze. Namaste Bodhi, I hope you’re catching waves up in heaven bra.
1. “Back off warchild” from Point Break (1991)
2. ‘Pain don’t hurt’ – from Roadhouse (1989)
3. ‘She’s Like the Wind’ music video performed by P. Swayze (1987)
4. Fight from Roadhouse (1989)
5. Bodhi learns more Spanish than “Vaya con dios”
6. [...]