Sledges in summer?

Order way in advance for winter 2011-2012. The sledges.co.uk prestashop version is now online and trading.

Lots of 301 redirects!

Callisti in wonderland

Curiouser and Curiouser is now online. Another prestashop (1.4) online shop customisation for the Edinburgh curiosity shop that also provide bespoke picture framing services.

Lots of text and odd angles and some interesting photographs. The bulk of the work was in converting the design to CSS and trying to find all the relevant .tpl and block css files in the prestashop structure.

Property development in NW11 London

Callisti has been helping Glentree new homes with their new Aylmer Place apartment development in north west London. The luxury apartments are at the Hampstead Garden Suburb area near Hampstead Heath so there is access to urban parkland.

The website is a customised wordpress child theme based on the twentyten theme so takes advantage of the custom menu feature and widget sidebars. CSS3 was used to create background gradients in the main content container area and the featured thumbnails were used to give each page a unique header image (required a minor functions.php tweak)

2 of the 5 apartments (prices starting at around a cool £1.15m!) have already been reserved ...

Rotate text in Internet Explorer using CSS and Matrix transform...

Not sure about Internet Explorer 9 yet but there is an excellent online tool for calculating the correct values for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 css filters:

Enter the degrees of rotation and click 'Set'

This will generate CSS for the equivalent values for Firefox, Safari/Chrome and Opera but these can now be more simply stated using, e.g.

-moz-transform:rotate(25deg);
-webkit-transform:rotate(25deg);
-o-transform:rotate(25deg);

The basic filter for IE only allows 90 degree rotations (0, 90, 180, 270) so if you want text or images at a jaunty angle it's not enough. It's worth the extra effort to keep text as text and not resort to imagery.

However, don't expect the text to be as smooth as in other, more capable browsers...

The maths

Vertical text

CSS3 is providing a selection of memes. The old age problem of browser rendering and cross-browser testing heads up again though.

ScottGale.com gives a working solution.

The axis of rotation can vary between browsers and pre Internet Explorer 8 offerings are jippy.

Waste of public money?

Callisti has been using the BuddyPress plug-in for WordPress to set up community frameworks (notably Dumfries and Galloway For Sale Free and Wanted) and recently revised the phpBB forum experiment on Wasting Public Money with a similar WordPress and BuddyPress installation for a more pleasant user interface.

There is also the added feature of being able to use the WP-FB connect tool (recently updated after Facebook's change to acceptable authentication methods) which allows greater accessibility to those already familiar or at home in a Facebook environment.

Visitors are welcome to contribute to the website with relevant content...

White noise resignation

This is the sort of pish that gives SEO a bad name. Clutters up inboxes as well.

Also have been getting variations of attempted blog posts on client site. Tedious.

Google is meant to be penalising content farms that produce low quality crap, maybe this will change the course of spam river. For a while.

Must be practising - trying out a typo pattern generator using stock phrase, search engine URL (email addresses suppressed for this blog post)

Maybe these are some of the stumbling steps that will lead to true AI :)

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.google.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Cool! That's a clever way of loonkig at it!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.bing.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Home run! Great slugging with that aswner!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.yahoo.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
AFAIC that's the best aneswr so far!