iris lines designs

I just attended a day-long workshop on Responsive Web Design at the User Interface Engineering (UIE.com)  UX Immersion Mobile conference in Seattle.

A comment by the presenter, Jason Grigsby (of  cloudfour.com) caught my attention.    It was his opinion that if you had to choose between optimizing a site for speed in loading and making it responsive, that he'd go for the speed.    A site that might FIT on a small screen, but that still takes too long to load, will lose more viewers than one that loads quickly, even if they have to do some pinching and zooming to see the content.

For Joomla! sites a plugin can help with the speed thing:   JCH Optimize.  Here's a blog entry about that:  http://bit.ly/11oiaKA.

Beginning to work on an updated ScreenShots manual for a client, and my No Number plugin buttons would only work if I toggled the editor OFF.

Not Acceptable!

I found I had to set the JCE Profile "Editor Parameters" setting for Validate HTML to "No".

Today I was working on a Joomla 2.5.7 site with a responsive template.   Some image dimensions got saved in an article, so they wouldn't behave responsively.    As I went looking for a setting I remembered seeing  to set "Always include dimensions"  to "NO"  I discovered that this is an option for the standard Image Manager that is not available in the Image Manager Extended.  I uninstalled the JCE pluggin  and all of my editor icons disappeared.  The "toggle editor" link displayed, but wouldn't work.

Off to google and the JCE forums --   some people had success with other browsers -- indeed, Chrome and Safari were fine with JCE.   Someone suggested clearing the browser cache -- I did, but still no go in Firefox.

I uninstalled JCE,  reinstalled 2.2.9.1  and the File Manager but NOT the Image Manager Extended.  Still no go in Firefox.   Finally I  1.  Quit Firefox,  2.   Restarted Firefox,  3.  Cleared the Cache (again) and all was well.

Just posting this here to remind myself that when Joomla components are giving you things you don't want, you might be able to solve it with an override of the component's language file.

Recently a colleague Mark Madison was struggling to kill the display of the word Category:  in as site that uses SobiPro.   A language override was a quick and efficient way to deal with this,  vs a full-blown template override.

Thanks to Andy Tarr for pointing this out.

I had discovered widgetkit when I needed a great mp3 player that did not rely on flash.  Widgetkit ALSO provides a pretty friendly slideshow solution that does not combine cropping and resizing as the ckslideshow extension does.

CK Slideshow might be a good solution if your slide images won't suffer from being cropped -- the smaller images delivered on a mobile device will be a vertical slice of your horizontal banner image, rather than just a proportionately reduced banner.    In some cases this would be a better solution -- but banner images would have to have good content in the middle of the banner image and often that is NOT the composition we'd prefer for the larger images.

Tradeoffs!  

I'm upgrading a site from J1.5.26 to J2.5.6 and needed a replacement for an extension that will not work in 2.5:   the Ultimate Content Display extension.

Today I found a free extension from bowthemes.com  called BT Content Slider.

With persistence I got it to work but....  there are a few caveats:

The center column of my site, using Joomla Bamboo's Meridian template was not behaving.

The template uses javascript to calculate the height of the columns and some tabs and sliders were causing problems.

Anthony wrote:

My friend and colleague Bill from Grumpy Engineering  helped me with this one:

I added this to the php block at the head of my template:

$isIPad = preg_match('/ipad/i', trim($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));
if ($isIPad) $device="ipad";
else $device="not-ipad";

I searched the JED and the best I could come up with was to use Allvideos to create simple, single mp3 players for a website I'm working on.

The syntax of this pluggin is nice and simple:   {mp3}Name-of-file-without-extension{/mp3} or

{mp3remote}http://other-site.com/name-of-file-with-extension.mp3{/mp3remote}

or...

How I spent my Valentines' Day while my musician husband was on the road....

working on a site that needed a form to collect information along with a paypal button for payment.