latest ffffrozen entries

As you may have heard, on the 18^th January some sites were blacked out as a protest against SOPA and PIPA. To do that, different techniques were used, below are the most interesting and well executed ones.

Minecraft

Poster-like approach with simple message using striking contrast - red background and white letters. Font reminds me movie opening titles and posters from 50s and 60s.

Wired

Just like in real life - simulation of document censorship using black blocks. Creative approach using CSS without messing around with the structure making site still usable. Scary and impressive at the same time.

Ars Technica

Ars Technica also decided not to mess around with the structure and applied revolution/resistance theme to the top banner. Similar image was placed on the dedicated article and the whole site was also usable.

Tags: sopa pipa protest resistance

Nothing posh or sophisticated but delicious and easy to make, minimum cooking skills required - baked chicken breasts with baby potatoes, spinach with blue cheese and garlic.

Peel of baby potatoes and cook for 6-7 minutes, slice chicken fillets into cubes; mix chicken and potatoes with pressed garlic, few spoons of olive oil and lemon juice. Mix well and bake in the oven for 25 minutes (180 °C).

In the meantime, prepare spinach. Melt butter (25 g) in the pan, add defrosted spinach (200 g) and pressed garlic. Keep stirring and after 15 minutes add blue cheese (100 g) - smaller portions will melt quicker. Keep stirring for another 10 minutes.

Once done, add spinach with cheese to the chicken and potatoes and keep in oven for another 5 minutes. Feel free to add salt or pepper.

Tags: dinner meal chicken spinach cheese potatoes

Tags: foggy evening photography

I contributed to the plugin. Well, sort of. While ago I was digging through my netvibes and found quite interesting jQuery plugin on WebAppers. It is a nice replacement for JavaScript alert/confirm pop-ups. It is lightweight, has its own CSS file, so the appearance can be adjusted. Plugin has been developed and published by Daniel Raftery.

I found that text for buttons was hard-coded and therefore L10n was not supported. This particular problem has been resolved by adding extra options to the configuration. After while, I realized that these options have to be passed each time when plugin needs to be used. This was another opportunity to play around with the code and transform it into proper jQuery plugin.

What gives the transformation? Options can have default values, which can be overwritten (without repetition) once are made public. That also changes the way how the plugin is called, but the core functionality done by Daniel remains the same.

Sample usage

$("#element").click(function () {

    $(this).apprise('Lorem ipsum', { 'verify': true }, function (r) {
        if (r) {
            //do something here when confirmed / verified
        }
    });

    return false;
});

Overwrite the defaults

$.apprise.defaults.confirm =  false;   // Shows OK and Cancel buttons
$.apprise.defaults.verify = false;     // Shows Yes and No buttons
$.apprise.defaults.input = false;      // Returns with user inputed text
$.apprise.defaults.animate = false;    // Groovy animation (can true or number, default is 400)
$.apprise.defaults.txtOK = 'OK';       // Text for OK
$.apprise.defaults.txtCanel = 'Cancel';// Text for Cancel
$.apprise.defaults.txtYes = 'Yes';     // Text for Yes
$.apprise.defaults.txtNo = 'No';       // Text for No

The final result of my conversion can be found on the bitbucket repository. Original version is available on the plugin home page.

For the record - full credit for the plugin goes to Daniel. 

Tags: jquery plugin js