articles tagged with mephisto

On my to-do list for some time was implemting Jeroen Wijering’s mp3 player (flash) in this blog as a mephisto filter.

Somewhere between the sessions of @media yesterday, I found the time to code it in (grab it , there are some steps to follow at the top of this file). It has sensible defaults, and configuration attributes.

You can also place alternate content inside the filter tag (e.g. a direct link to the mp3).

While the code degrades well with flash/javascript off in the browser, some work needs done on what shows up in feedreaders. The filter could be amended for RSS feeds and simply show a link to the mp3 file(s) being played. If anyone finds this filter useful, let me know.

You might have noticed a minor style change in the most recent blog entries. I’ve decided (from now on) to use a light-box for showing off any embedded videos and (biggish) images on the page. It keeps the layout tidy and allows you to focus on the video you’re watching or image your viewing, without distraction.

All of this is made possible using Control.Modal, a light weight, unobtrusive JavaScript library for creating modal windows and lightboxes using content that is already on the page. So with javascript turned off, everything still works, with the links navigating to anchor tags in the page.

At the moment I am applying display:none; on the modal content to avoid a visible onLoad jump effect as the content gets hidden by Control.Modal javascript. I’ll be changing this (since doing this hides the content when javascript is off, and CSS is on) – There’s also a small bug with the tv-icon link style on IE6.

In Mephisto, I was able to create my own custom ‘Modal Macro’ filter, so I can easily apply the effect to any content in my articles. Here is the code for doing just that. Save this as modal_macro.rb in the lib/ folder for any new or existing vendor/plugin. As usual, any comments, questions or suggestions are appreciated.

Maybe youv’e noticed, maybe you haven’t, but quite a lot has changed at this site in the last few days. Its all behind the scenes work though, with the exception of a few style changes and new pages here and there. So what’s new;

• Switched from Typo to the much better, Mephisto
• Microformats have been applied to all entries (hAtom)
• My updated footer profile and all comments have also got the hCard treatment
• The entire layout is a bit more liquid (in more ways than one) Its now fluid rather than fixed – (drag your browser width) and built on liquid templates (part of Mephisto) There is a min-width defined – which (of course) falls over on narrow IE6 pages :(
• Gone are the old AJAX comment submissions (in Typo) and AJAX on ‘search-as-you-type’ has also been removed.
• I’ve added my own code to handle Gravatar caching, which was very easy to bolt into Mephisto. I’ll probably do another post on how this was done soon.
• I’ve upgraded the server to the latest Lighttpd 1.5 RC. With the new mod-proxy-core module, it means I no longer have to work with a mongrel-pound-lighttpd stack. The site is just served straight-up, from Lighttpd to 3 Mongrels.
• As usual the newer ‘more about me’ page still needs more work.