Short version Just a few links to sites powered by our javascript and ajax

When we started offering javascript and ajax programming few months ago, we had no idea that it’s going to be this big. At first, there were just fancy menus and popups… then scrolling divs and animations… and now, we are getting more and more orders for full javascript/ajax applications.

Here are some of them that succesfully went live:

T4 Talk Indinero ACL Schedule

Short version We’ve updated our showcase with some sites and lot of effects, and we’re offering WordPress theme coding again

The outsourcing nature of our work keeps us from displaying most of it in our showcase, since most our clients are the designers who wants their design in their own portfolio.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make our showcase look good. So, check it out, NOW!

We’ve added some nice looking effects so you can scroll the sites and their subpages, visit them if they made it live… We tweaked the footer testimonials to slide in one by one… jQuery simply rules!

As for the return of our WordPress theme coding – we decided we like WordPress again, so we added a blog to the xhtmlmagic too.

Short version If you already have jQuery included, fixing 1px background centering error in Firefox is easy – just detect Firefox and change background’s horizontal position to 49.99% while leaving 50% in all other browsers

Although i’ts nice to blame every coding problem on IE, Firefox has its share of bugs too. One of those is 1px background centering offset. It goes like this: when you try to match centered body background with the background of your centered div, you get 1px offset whenever the browser window pixel width is odd. For even width, background centers ok.

There is no way around it in css (some tutorials say that you just need to add 100% height to the body, but that doesn’t work) but there is a simple solution using jQuery (or any other library which lets you change the css property of an element). Agreed, including jQuery just to fix this is an overkill, but chances are, you already use it for something else in your page.

First thing, we need to detect Firefox. Latest jQuery version doesn’t have browser detection function, instead they put a function which tells you what the browser support and what not. We’re not going to use that. There is a nice line of code for browser detection, which worked great for me in the past, and I have no idea where I found it, but here goes:

B = (function x(){})[-5]=='x'?'FF3':
        (function x(){})[-6]=='x'?'FF2':
            /a/[-1]=='a'?'FF':
                '\v'=='v'?'IE':
                    /a/.__proto__=='//'?'Safari':
                        /s/.test(/a/.toString)?'Chrome':
                            /^function \(/.test([].sort)?'Opera':
                                'Unknown'

It just works. And then you just need to give special css rule, just for Firefox –

if(B == 'FF') { $('body').css('background-position','49.99% 0'); }

Ta-daaa! All browsers are happily centering with 50% and Firefox is forced to always center the background to the left, which makes it perfectly matching your centered div.

Short version If you’re stuck with hand cursor in Photoshop or any other program, just uninstall Texter or any similar application you installed.

A few days ago when I opened my Corel Paint Shop Pro to edit some small image, I was shocked to see my cursor is stuck on hand, and nothing I tried could change it to normal. Everything was blocked and I couldn’t do anything. I said – well, whatever, I’m in a hurry, I’ll do it in Photoshop.

No luck. Photoshop’s cursor was stuck on hand too.

Ok, let’s google it. Turns out, it’s a common problem, and all solutions I found on blogs are the same – just press space when it happens and accept it as one of windows annoyances (or buy a mac).

Space? Cogs in the brain started working…

Oh, yeah, that morning I installed lifehacker’s Texter, and bound some text to… well, space!

After quick uninstall, hand never appeared again. So, if you have Texter, just uninstall it, or at least bind the actions to enter instead of space, and your cursor will be safe.

This probably goes the same for any application like Texter which waits in the background for you to press some key.

Short version We just needed a place to write some useful stuff, so we won’t need to google for it later.

Xhtmlmagic blog is now officially back, and we’re going to share with you some stuff we learned along the way.

Plan is to make this a nice collection of solutions for common problems in html/css, javascript or whatever we use in our everyday work.