- It is time to skin your Google!
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsAfter years of looking on the sparse Google page, it was time to pimp it up a bit. It all starts by using the personalised Google start page (iGoogle).
- Recent changes allow you to apply beautiful dynamic themes, like the cityscape theme in this screenshot:
These themes will change based on your current location and time of day. - Next, you can add small gadgets for all kinds of information. It is similar to the Windows Vista Sidebar, except that you can drag and place the gadgets in 3 columns, and that they're always visible whenever you open your personalised Google page. (Gadgets in the Windows Sidebar tend to get stuck behind active applications — although they're easily revealed with the Win+Space keyboard shortcut.)
- Finally, you can easily create your own gadgets, for yourself or to share with friends and family. You do not have to program anything! You start with one of the handy templates and literally tens of seconds later your gadget is ready!
As an example, I created a new gadget called Weekly Infrared that will bring a new infrared photo to your Google page every week.
- Recent changes allow you to apply beautiful dynamic themes, like the cityscape theme in this screenshot:
- SuperWasp Blog Restyled
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Today I've relaunched the SuperWasp blog, using a Blogger skin I developed for my family blog TV15. Several modifications were made to the skin to accomodate the longer posts: on the main blog page and on all archive pages, long posts appear with a scrollbar (on the latest browsers of course), while on the single post pages they appear as one big article.
One of the other techniques I used in the restyling is dotIR (Image Replacement for .NET). Actually, I modified the code from Milan Negovan's .IR, which on its turn is based on sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) Version 2.0b2 by Copyright 2004 Mike Davidson, Shaun Inman, Tomas Jogin and Mark Wubben.
So what does .IR or dotIR do, you might ask?
It replaces the headings and titles in the webpage with (in our case) a graphical version based on a TrueType/OpenType font. This enables web designers to use any font you like, as long as it is installed on the web server. The biggest drawback of course is that it relies on scripting and that there's a small performance hit. You cannot simply replace any text on the webpage with this technique.
Leave your comments on the new style, and problems you might encounter under this post.