www.nickhodge.com

Col­league in web crime, delic8genius, has craf­ted 3 fine 3 minute videos for web developers:

Screen­cast: IE8 WebSlices in 3 mniutes

Screen­cast: IE8 Accel­er­at­ors in 3 minutes

Screen­cast: IE8 Visual Search Pro­viders with sug­ges­tions in 3 minutes

Go have a squiz. It will only take 9 minutes.

Fel­low Aus­tralian DPE-ers, Chris Bright, Michael Kordahi and Greg Wil­lis have been busy work­ing on a micro– mega– project.

For the last 30 years, Sydney’s Gay and Les­bian com­munity has paraded down Oxford Street. The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald has a lib­rary of images from the parade: and has used the Deep Zoom fea­ture of Sil­ver­light to dis­play these images.

Michael Kordahi cre­ated the front-end (Sil­ver­light) and Greg Wil­lis archi­tec­ted the back-end (Azure)

Well done guys.

Test­ing only. If you are read­ing this, please ensure you are using Inter­net Explorer 8

Webslices are new con­sumer fea­ture in Inter­net Explorer 8. You can embed simple HTML within a WebSlice that is a por­tion of a pre-existing page. To get IFRAMES and OBJECT to work there is a little tweak­ing required. Then you get Sil­ver­light and/or Flash.

The IFRAME/OBJECT con­tent is stripped (for secur­ity reas­ons) by the RSS engine in IE8. How­ever, when dis­play­ing a unique page – things can get way more interesting.

In the example WebSlice below, I use an altern­ate dis­play source. This altern­ate dis­play is used as the con­tent for the slice. This also per­mits smart styl­ing in your slice; as used on http://istartedsomething.com/‘s Webslice. The xxxx.html below is the page with the Webslice content.

<a rel="entry-content" href="xxxx.html" style="display:none;"></a>

Thanks to Michael Kordahi, Chris Bright and Greg Wil­lis for the push to check this out.

In the cat­egory of “why didn’t I think of this” comes liveslices.com. Go have a look (obvi­ously after installing IE8RC)

Webslices is one of the new end-user fea­tures of IE8. It is easy to imple­ment on your web­site: I added it to http://www.nickhodge.com/ within minutes. Some micro­format wrap­ping around chan­ging con­tent, and it is active.

WebSlices will main­stream web-site alerts where RSS has struggled.

Inter­net Explorer 8 beta 2 has been released. The night before a big PR thing in Mel­bourne (Premier of Vic­toria, etc) and I decided to install it on my demo laptop. Brave, yet safe move.

What about this website?

Not so good. Some­thing is broken some­where. In the week before TechEd 2008 I don’t have time to com­pletely dia­gnose and fix the word­press tem­plate. So, sort of like weld­ing it together for a few weeks until things die down — it is time for a simple fix.

How can you tell? See the “broken doc­u­ment” icon on the right of the URL: this indic­ates that the site has been designed for older browsers.

 

There are two poten­tial fixes. One is to click on the broken icon, and Inter­net Explorer will revert to Inter­net Explorer 7 mode.

A smarter fix for this web site is a one-line change to my tem­plate (in my case, header.php for this template)

<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” con­tent=“IE=EmulateIE7” />

 

 

Refresh­ing the site, and magic­ally it renders cor­rectly, and there is no “broken” doc­u­ment icon.