Complete mess up of the Moodle layout

I have been adding the Google Feed reader to my Moodle setup. One line which has been repeated a few times in the standard CSS makes a real mess of things. The culprit is white-space:nowrap. I shall be avoiding using this line in my own CSS.

Unexpected CSS3pie issue

I have shifted between using CSS3pie and not over the past year from http://css3pie.com. I really appreciate all the work that's gone into it. Sometimes it just doesn't work for me. This morning, I started to look at why it was not working on my portableCMS. I started to gradually remove elements and discovered that if I removed the colour from my body background ie from:
background:#FFFFFF url(images/bodyBackground.png) repeat-x;
to
background:url(images/bodyBackground.png) repeat-x;
I got partial site of my rounded corners etc.

Then I found this blog post. http://www.jakobloekkemadsen.com/2010/10/how-to-make-css3pie-work/
So I put, position:relative; in the CSS call to my selector which used PIE.htc and hey presto!

Two lessons learned about IE from the coal face

Yesterday was a difficult day. It's my own fault. I should have started testing my portableCMS in IE earlier. I came across 2 problems which took more time than I was prepared for in debugging. 

So here is tip number 1. Don't even think of trying to refer to JavaScript constants in your jQuery calls. It's just not worth the hassle.

Tip number 2. As well as referring to a html5 reset, (I use http://html5resetcss.googlecode.com/files/html5-reset.css), add your own HTML 4 reset. Mine is listed below. You will still have problems, but less.

*

{

    margin:0;

    padding:0;

    border:0;

    outline:0;

    font-size:100%;

    vertical-align:baseline;

    background:transparent;

}

body

{

    font-family:Sans-serif;

    font-size:1em;    

}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

{

    margin:0;

    padding:0;

    font-weight:normal;

}

p, th, td, li, dd, dt, ul, ol, blockquote, q, acronym, abbr, a, input, select, textarea

{

    margin:0;

    padding:0;

}

blockquote

{

    margin:1.25em;

    padding:1.25em

}

q

{

   font-style:italic;

}

acronym, abbr

{

   cursor:help; 

}

small

{

    font-size:.85em;

}

big

{

    font-size:1.2em;

}

a, a:link, a:visited, a:active, a:hover

{

    text-decoration:none;

}

table

{

    margin:0;

    padding:0;

    border:none;

}

form

{

    margin:0;

    padding:0;

    display:inline;

}

label

{

    cursor:pointer;

}

.clear { clear:both; }

.floatLeft { float:left; }

.floatRight { float:right; }

.textLeft { text-align:left; }

.textRight { text-align:right; }

.textCenter { text-align:center; }

.textJustify { text-align:justify; }

.blockCenter { display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; }

.bold { font-weight:bold; }

.italic { font-style:italic; }

.underline { text-decoration:underline; }

.noindent { margin-left:0; padding-left:0; }

.nomargin { margin:0; }

.nopadding { padding:0; }

.nobullet { list-style:none; list-style-image:none; }

At long last a proper mobile simulator

http://iphone4simulator.com/
If you know of another good one let me know.

portableCMS

My updates have not been as frequent or as detailed lately because I've been writing a CMS which I have so far name portableCMS. So far I have been able to:

• Create a set of configuration files
• Create a method of providing CSS to the correct devices
• Hold editable content data without the need for a database
• Minimise the requirement for developers to code beyond the HTML body if required
• Provide a method of creating plugins
• Provide the opportunity to enhance the CMS with external Functional PHP, OOP PHP, jQuery and JavaScript sources

At the moment I am working on delivering real-time data.

Some of my favourite free stuff

For those of you not subscribed to my delicious feed at http://www.delicious.com/guitarbeerchocolate, I thought I would share with you some of my favourite links to free tools and content. Happy clicking!

http://colorschemedesigner.com/
http://html-ipsum.com/
http://snipplr.com/
http://search.creativecommons.org/
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
http://code.google.com/

PHP API call to Summarity

Summarity at http://www.summarity.com/ is software which summarises items of text. They helpfully provide an API for developers to use. There is an example of how to call the API using python on the website. I don't use python. I use PHP. So I went about writing the API call in PHP. So below is an example of how it's done. You will need to get your own API key. I hope it's obvious where to add your text string.

<?php

 $url = 'http://summarity.com/apiV1';

 $data = 'summarity_api_key=yourAPIkey';

 $data .= '&text='.urlencode('Just some text for testing');

                 

 $ch = curl_init($url);

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);                

 $response = curl_exec($ch);                

 curl_close($ch);

 echo(json_decode($response));

?>