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written by: ryan coughlin
Its been a very long time! I have been extremely busy with the end of the school year with finals as well as client work up to my eye balls. I have been working on a new layout for ryancoughlin.com and you can check a quick preview here: http://ryancoughlin.com/nightday/
If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free. Still needs alot of work. My goal is to get this up fairly soon. The site needs a face lift, looking a bit dull.
Along with the new layout, I have some blog posts that I have been working on, so keep your RSS feeders ready. If not, head over to the subsribe box and grab my Feedburner URL.
I am going to be headed off to Europe on May 13, starting in England, then headed to Greece to end my trip. Im going to do my best to keep at blog posts as well as keeping my flickr updated. Expect lots of pictures. I’ll do my best to keep it updated.
Stay tuned for updates.
written by: ryan coughlin
Everyone is using Twitter as a means to promote their blog posts or articles. Since Twiter only limits each tweet to 140 characters, which doesn’t leave you alot to say you have a new blog post and the title, along with the URL for users to check it out. Thanks to the expansion of Twitter, more and more tiny URL services have been released. Below is a collection of 8 that i have found and used in the past.
Some are the more well know such as Ping.fm and TinyURL, but I found a couple others that do the job just fine. Check out the list below and post if you have any others you use!
TinyURL
Example URL: http://tinyurl.com/c35n8e – 28 characters
Organic URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 27 characters
This is by far one of the mostly used and original tiny URL services out there. Generates a fairly small URL. This service makes it great for posting long URLs on twitter or any other social media service. Shows you the original and the number of characters, which is a nice added bonus. Also allows you to create your own tiny URL
alias instead of having the service generate one for you.
Tinyarro
Example URL: http://✩.ws/ꉚ – 12 characters
Actual URL: http://www.ryancoughlin.com/ – 28 characters
This is a fairly new tiny URL service out there, but what makes this one differen than the others, is that is uses symbols instead of random characters for instance, it uses arrows and stars. There is a dropdown to the left of the input field for your URL where you can choose what symbol you would like to use for your URL. Once you create the URL, it has a shortened version and then a Twitter preferred version as well. Along with those two, it has a TinyURL version and the original. These are one of the smallest URL’s I have seen.
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written by: ryan coughlin
I am currently working on this site for a client: http://www.hornedpout.com/ – a very basic portfolio website for a designer/writer. I didn’t want to use the bulky code of the jQuery UI so I decided to use the smaller version, below:
$(".menu-header").click(function() {
$(this).next().toggle('slow');
return false;
}).next().hide();
The HTML would look something similar to:
That code will use jQuery’s toggle() function. When the user clicks the h2 tag it will close all elements until the next
tag. This snippet is very handy for creating a quick accordion effect, this can also be found on the jQuery’s documentation
Now we have the guts sorted out, but the problem is if you travel to another page within that category, it will close. I’m sure you want to check out the code that is going to do this.
Keep that open!
var matches;
if( matches = (new String(document.location)).match(/?c=w+/) ) {
$("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();
}
The code above is fairly straight forward. The first line checks to see if we already have a sub-menu open. It evaluates by looking at the current pages URL “?c=page_here”.
The latter part of the code. Now that we grabbed the current URL of the sub-menu, we can use this to find the parent menu which is the
ul and display it:
$("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();
The quick fix to keep your accordion block open while traveling to different URLS. To achieve the URLS of “?c=page”. I am using this PHP code below save it as index.php, also create a header.php and a footer.php.
Give it a shot, hope that this can work for you, it did wonders for my project. Also thanks to Kent, for helping me. If it did work post some examples!
written by: ryan coughlin
There are tons and tons of text effect tutorials out there, but sometimes the simplest ones make the best presentation. I opened up Photoshop earlier and played around with some Blending Options. Very simple tutorial to create some quick and clean bold text. The final results will look like below:
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written by: ryan coughlin
This one thing that seems to a rather large debate, which is better?
[poll id="1"]
Everyone has their own opinion on why they like one or the other, so I thought I would see what everyone else thinks of this topic. So…which one is it? Please share this!
You can say that Starbucks does not have the breakfast sandwiches or the donuts, and then you have Dunkin Donuts that does not carry have those very tasty cakes and pastries like Starbucks.
Happy Holidays!