shibbyonline

Panic: CODA Alert

Yesterday the tubes were alive with the news of Coda, the new application from Panic.

Coda is an attempt at an ‘all in one’ application containing all the tools for the development of a web page.
Currently I use a combination of TextMate, CSSEdit and Transmit that seem to fill most needs, but what if I could have all that power and only need load up one application?
Well I downloaded the 15 trial of Coda and spent a few minutes using it.
Find out my thoughts.
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Did you reboot?

Today is the Autumn reboot. Sites from around the world will release there new look, hopefully completely standard compliant, with a view to gain interest and a better view of their sites.

I’m gutted that this time around I have just not had the time to take part. I had every intention to have another go at the reboot but due to work load and changes in job I’ve been totally snowed under; well I’m still sporting the Pink for October theme.
The whole reboot scheme has actually changed since the Spring version and to be honest it does not appear to have that same level of input and respect of previous incarnations; to demonstrate long standing reboot successor Matt Brett is not on the list, in fact none of the big names in standards and designs appear to be there. That said congratulations to every one that took part.

New home and a new start

This should hopefully be a ‘come back’ style of post, as you will know I have been some what pre-occupied with other things and the whole blogging side of my life was put on hold.

Yet what better to kick start your progress than a new theme!
I present to you: Frost.

It is still not 100% complete but over the next few days it should be tweaked to a point of being workable.
The second more important news is that shibbyonline has moved.
For many years the good people at UK Cheapest have been providing me a place to call home. Yet with another year looming I thought I would shop around. I ended up at 5thirtyOne and noticed the offer currently running with his host of choice; DreamHosts. Being the cheap bastard that I am I signed up and got a cheap year; thank you Derek!

All in all despite the lack of work on the surface things have been moving very quickly behind closed doors. Now that everything is sorted it just leaves me time to sort out my email clients and the new DreamHost settings.

Search box, Light Box and other Scripty goodness

I’ve been working away at those extra little bits on the site, you know all that fluff that makes you feel good about the amount of time you spend sitting in front of a computer screen.

The latest installments apart from some style changes are the use of the various script.aculo.us Java scripts. First off we have the new AJAX powered search bar found on the home page, in the archives and on any 404. The second is the use of Lightbox for displaying photograph’s and images from within posts.
I have always enjoyed using the script.aculo.us libraries for various effects but since moving themes around I sort of missed the boat when it came to the whole Lightbox revolution that appears to have taken the web by storm.

My problem was that I did want to find a way to display images in a way that kept a small clean image in the post but would allow the reader to see a larger version without directing them to an external source such as my Flickr account. I’m afraid that at present Lightbox is the perfect answer, of course I could have followed Derek’s comments and tried Thickbox which runs off the more streamlined compressed jquery script. But when I’m already loading part of the script.aculo.us for the search bar it makes no sense to load another library to save space. Besides which due to my limited readership, bandwidth or page load is not a concern, I’m not exactly digg material!

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