A couple of days ago, I was looking for a way to add a pause after an animation was triggered. This was before jQuery 1.4 was released. I found a couple of solutions including using the javascript function setTimeout or some people would imitate a delay by setting an animation for the desired number of seconds that doesn’t change anything. Something like this…

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While re-designing my site, I had to extract some bonzai from their backgrounds. I thought the Extract filter in Photoshop would be perfect for this. But when I fired up Photoshop and went to the Filters menu, I didn’t see the Extract filter. Photoshop CS4 has been out for a while now, but this was the first time I tried to use the Extract filter. After some research on the Internet, I found out the Extract filter along with other features were removed from CS4.

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Here’s a way to get the following fonts for free:

• Cambria
• Calibri
• Candara
• Consolas
• Constantia
• Corbel

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Cooking with Amanda

Putting up my Xmas tree

Here are a couple of ways that Opera makes it easier to search the Internet and to search for text on a website…

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See that red beetle in the upper-right hand corner? I create that after the page loads, using Prototype. In fact, all the auxillary content in the header is created after the page loads. It’s not site content and it’s not navigation; it’s just for fun, so why load it before the “real” content, right?!

Ok, first, to add content using Prototype, I recommend that you already know or have the content you want to add to the DOM. For example, I wanted to add that red beetle to the DOM using Prototype. I already had the HTML coded up and here’s what it looked like…

<a href="#" onclick="beetles(); return false;">
  <img src="/images/beetle1.png" alt="" id="beetle1" border="0" />
</a>

It’s a lot easier if you know and have the HTML code you’re trying to duplicate in Prototype. So, to add this content to the DOM after the page has loaded, we use the following Prototype functions: Element constructor, Element.insert, Element.update and document.observe. And here’s what the Prototype code looks like…

document.observe('dom:loaded', function() {
var linkBeetle1 = new Element('a', {
  href: '#',
  onclick: 'beetles(); return false;'
});

var beetle1 = new Element('img', {
  src: '/images/beetle1.png',
  id: 'beetle1',
  alt: '',
  border: '0',
});

linkBeetle1.update(beetle1);
$('header').insert(linkBeetle1);
};

new Element – creates a new HTML element with the provided attributes.

.update – updates/replaces the content of the element with the provided content. In this case, we’re attaching the <img> to the <a href> tag.

.insert – attaches the newly created element into the document to the element you specify.

document.observe(‘dom:loaded’… – this will make it so that the content is loaded after the page has been loaded (but before the images are loaded).

And that’s all there is to it!

I saw 16 bands in 3 days!

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