Sunday, August 10, 2008

and then there's positioning

Where would we be without positioning?! Your furniture would be on the ceiling and cat flying on the back of a seagull, who knows?!



Static: This is default, and need not be set generally



Relative: This positioning method refers to the items position relative to the positioning characteristics of the container it rests in. If it is plopped right in the body, than its the same as static



Absolute: this bugger has a strong hand, swiping away all the opposing forces and declaring "THIS IS WHERE I AM, AND NOBODY CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO!"



Floating: Floating is a nifty little thing, it is what brings us above the lowly old-world programmers that rely on tables instead of DIVs, and likely have 24k dial up modems. Floating is especially handy in creating columns, for instance if you wanted a three column layout you could create 1 main container, and 2 containers within it, the first of these two would contain your left and center columns, and than the third right column would float outside of this inner container directly within the main (see diagramn)



Sunday, August 3, 2008

ok, i did it! embed dynamic yelp reviews to a website in 5 minutes flat

Voila! After much fruitless searching and cursing SEO's around the world I have stumbled upon a disgustingly simple process for posting specific business reviews from yelp to a website.



A New Hope:
If you don't have Firefox than discontinue reading this blog and push your computer out the nearest window. If you do than high five!

(plugins you should download NOW!! Web Developer, DownloadHelper and Tamper)

Navigate to the Yelp page containing the business reviews you wish to stream into your website, if you are running the latest Firefox you will notice a little icon like this appear next to the web address (on Safari the letters RSS are next to the web address, zeus only knows what IE does):



Click on this RSS feed icon, than copy the URL of the page it va

what the hells an RSS feed?! check out this to clear the fog:




The Empire Strikes Back:
Navigate to a page such as: http://grazr.com/ follow the steps to creating a customized RSS reader (an RSS reader will except the .xml URL you had copied above and display the dynamic content... watch the video!!)



Return of the Jedi
After you've completed customized fiddling and otherwise wasting your time on grazr.com creating your RSS reader and plugging in your .xml RSS feed copy the HTML EMBED code from grazr where you've created your reader, now paste this inbetween the body tags on your website and VOILA!! May the feed be with you