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<title>http://charlesmarshall.co.uk</title>
<language>en-gb</language>
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<description>All from blog</description>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Advertising Accuracy.. or Lack of..]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/advertising-accuracy-or-lack-of]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Now I don't mind a bit of artistic license when it comes to advertising, but I have my limits. Recently more TV adverts have glaringly inaccurate parts to them and are still broadcast as if they are truths. The big offenders to get my goat so far this year are the PC World sale advert and the Change4Life campaign about healthy&nbsp;eating.Don't get me wrong, I think raising awareness about eating properly, exercise etc is needed. Apparently 10% of parents thought jaffa cakes counted towards your daily recommended amount of fruit, how scary is that! Lack of knowledge, apathy, social groups and non stop junk food advertising probably contributed to this sorry state of affairs, but thats for another time. What annoys me in this advert is the fact they show humans killing a dinosaur! Two species separated by over 60 million&nbsp;years!Somehow this managed to go unnoticed and has been airing regularly since the beginning of the year. Apparently ASA have no issue reenforcing a popular&nbsp;misconception.If that isn't bad enough the current PC World sale advertising fails at basic math; printer for half price, really? I could of sworn half of 129.98 was 64.99, however the advert tells me it's 59.99. The wording says half price, not less than half price. Again, shouldn't ASA be pointing these things out and getting them&nbsp;corrected?You might say that it's only an advert, but how many people are watching that advert? What if your child / nephew / niece etc gave that answer on a math test? Would you say then it doesn't matter&nbsp;then?In the current social climate most children spend almost as much time in front of the tv as they spend at school, so surely the prime time viewing should at least be&nbsp;accurate?      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2009-01-03 11:51:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[jQuery Diagonal Accordion]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/jquery-diagonal-accordion]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Looks like anything can be done with a bit of math &amp; javascript.. Take a look at this page for an example of sliding at angles.      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-12-15 12:29:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[jQuery Resizer]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/jquery-resizer]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Inside our current cms we utilise a jQuery resize tool for stretching out our content entry area. However, it is a bit clunky and and the large size (9k) doesnt help matters. Time to make a new one; and here it&nbsp;is.Example&nbsp;pageMinimised&nbsp;jsIf you've happy with it or having issues drop me a message on either the jQuery project page or via the One Black Bear&nbsp;site.      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-11-11 09:29:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[jQuery Zoom]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/jquery-zoom]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Working on a recent project I needed to be able to make a 'zoom' style effect. The easiest way I could think 
			of to do this was a simple + and - zoom bar (just like google maps) over a background&nbsp;image.This piece of jQuery inserts a nicely styled compliant ul with li's into the container specified (if it's not there already) and
			sets some trigger events for the a&nbsp;tags.Now
when you click on the plus or minus the background image is switched
out for a larger version (passed in to the&nbsp;declaration).The more images you pass in the more bars appear in the zoom&nbsp;control.To
make it work you need to set up some css and pass in the 'target_div'
parameter in to the js with an array on image paths; and thats it,
everything else is worked out for&nbsp;you.Take a look at the demo page hereGet hold of the minimised js hereOr grab the zip of everything including demos hereYou can also find this project over at One Black Bear and the main jQuery plugins&nbsp;website.      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-11-11 00:00:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[jQuery Draggable]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/jquery-draggable]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      One of more interactive projects of late required an image to be moved around as if the user was dragging it. There was also a good chance that it would need to be combined with some other effects such as a zoom feature an image&nbsp;switcher. Currently, most draggable image plugins use an inline image with absolute positioning and a surrounding clipping area, which in most cases is fine, but in this case it would be a real issue as the zoom plugin uses an absolute positioned container. To get around this I decided to convert the image inside the container to the background&nbsp;image.For all those people who don't have javascript turned on you just see a clipped image, but those with javascript can move the background image around as if they are dragging&nbsp;it.Quick and simple demo page is hereMinimised js is hereA more fancy mash-up of this and the zoom plugin can be found here.As ever all of these jQuery gubbins can be found over at One Black Bear and the jQuery plugin&nbsp;site.      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-11-11 00:00:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[jQuery Modal]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/jquery-modal]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      With recent projects I needed a flexible modal box. Most of the ones out there are either horribly bloated or 
			only work for images, which really sucks when you want a form inside one. I decided the best route would be to write a quick one&nbsp;myself.The example page is hereThe minimised js is hereThe big daddy zip with images is hereHave a look and see what you think. You can leave feed back etc via the jQuery doc page (which is here).      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-11-10 09:41:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Flash - aha - Saviour of the Internet?]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/flash-aha-saviour-of-the-internet]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Flash has its place; it's great for adverts, playing movies and anything that really, really needs smooth animation, but whole websites? I think&nbsp;not.I've always had an issue with Flash being used in such a fashion. Yes, google can now index some of it, but only if it's been coded properly and in a search engine friendly way. During a recent project (for the Impreza S microsite) we had several discussions about how best to present the creative we had for this&nbsp;site.In the end flash won, but with lots of consideration towards how google et al. Firstly, not all of the site is in Flash (yey!) the navigation is HTML and interacts with the flash. A few other things like sitemaps help the site to be&nbsp;friendly. The reason for our decission to go with Flash is mainly due to the colour changer. Regardless of how good the ajax libraries are (jQuery in particular) they currently dont handle image switching quite so smoothly. The final reason was the page transistion; I still find it somewhat unusal and a bit disorenting, but a good&nbsp;effect.On the whole I feel the site is nicely done (good job Sheldon!) and considering the timeline for it, it is a sterling example of how flash sites should be&nbsp;handled. On the other hand, some flash sites worry me. Certain so called 'creative' agencies who decide that just because they're creative they need their site to be 'creative' - which to them means Flash. In most of these cases you will find that the reason for the entire site being flash is something stupid like 'we want our logo to be animated and&nbsp;interesting' There are many such sites out there, you just have to look for them. When you find them ask this question: 'Is that silly little logo / animated character / smooth page transition / custom font worth the issues with accessiblity, maintance, readability&nbsp;etc'      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-10-20 08:53:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[So many OS', not enough machines..]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/so-many-os-not-enough-machines]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      If like me you have to test your work for the mass market (that means windows) and cater for the majority (yes, that means IE6 &amp; 7) but you are of more discerning tastes and don't enjoy viruses, malware and endless updates (in other words, you don't use windows) then you probably use a Mac (yes I&nbsp;do!).So how do you get around the problem? Simple answer, virtualisation.&nbsp;Basically this means that you can install a piece of software of your machine that lets you emulate another operating system. Most of the established solutions&nbsp;cost money, not much (around &pound;40), but still more than nothing.After trying both VMware and parallels found them to be very very useful, but at the same time memory and processor hungry. For example, say I have the infamous double margin IE display bug and I'm trying to find the right container to add the display attribute to. I Have textmate open, photoshop (as I'm still working on the design), firefox, safari and VMware; switching to and from applications becomes sluggish.. There is a better way..VirtualBox, developed by Sun, is faster and smoother than the others I have used and has an OpenSource version! Goodbye VMware!The only draw back is that the free download doesn't have support for wireless cards on macs, but otherwise it's brilliant. Supports lots of operating systems (almost every flavour of linux I can think of) and is very fast. Great example of this, full reboot of plain windows xp (with service pack 2) in under 1 minute...&nbsp;Further news on this as I use it more.      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-06-25 16:45:00</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Firefox 3 and it's fatal flaw]]></title>
    <link><![CDATA[http://charlesmarshall.co.uk/blog/firefox-3-and-its-fatal-flaw]]></link>
    <description><![CDATA[
      Yes it's new, yes it's pretty; but as a developer it has one very annoying 'feature'. It is determination to use a cached version of the page your on regardless of the number of times you hit apple+r, the refresh button or ctrl+r (for you windows&nbsp;people). It seems that they have decided to abandon the lovely built in command that has saved many a developer trying to convince a client the page they are seeing is and old version. That great convenience of knowing that one command will work regardless of the browser they're using and can only super seeded by the tyranny of the network admin is no&nbsp;more.This one little annoyence wasted a good 20 minutes of time this morning! Personally when I do a command that's known as a force refresh I don't expect or want it to look at the cache; isn't that the point of it? You know, to ignore the cache and pull everything fresh from the&nbsp;site.In their wisdom they have changed their caching method so now when I'm testing a web page I'm building I have to click on a link to it, or re enter the address manually.. Yes it sounds petty, but that fact no bugger published this fundamental change means many of us developers will be wasting time figuring this&nbsp;out! Please someone make a firebug for safari and my troubles will be&nbsp;over..      ]]>
    </description>
    <pubDate>2008-06-23 11:05:00</pubDate>
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