s9y

While surfing about the net I ran across a nifty tag cloud implemented as a flash movie, WP-Cumulus. Unfortunately, it was a wordpress plugin^[?]. Fortunately the creator, Roy Tanck, was kind enough to not only open source WP-Cumulus, but to provide tips on how to incorporate it into other web sites!

I tossed out the idea in the S9Y forum and had some interest, especially once I discovered it used the SWFObject javascript which, according to the creator,

is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

So I hacked it into my local blog (sorry for the down time ) and got it working with hard-coded parameters, then migrated it into the freetag plugin that Serendipity has. Garvin (the creator of S9Y) made a few improvements, and it is now bundled into the application, and available via Sparticus, the S9Y online plugin manager!)

his is a test of the Dynamic Text Replacement plugin^[?] I am working on for Serendipity. It dynamically renders text using the GD library, and replace it with an image of that text. There are a variety of options that are shown in the main body of this posting. The letter T at the start of the article was even generated by this plugin using the fon colton obtained from Fonts 101.

I had previous dabbled with some ways of dynamically rendering text using the GD image library to create headers and titles. I had enquired in the forums if there was interest in extending this to a markup plugin, andthe response was lukewarm. I had cobbled together a plugin, and decided to clean it up an release it either to use as is, or for someone else to include the code in their software.

Note that the image ALT text included the original text, for accessability reasons. More examples follow...

I found a nice three column layout based purely on CSS here and though it would be nice to convert to a s9y theme.

From the original site:

• Everything in EM (change your browser font size to see the effect)
• Source ordered
• Full height columns (or any column can be longest)
• Switch between one two or three columns
• Fluid center but fixed width side-columns
• Min-max width for IE (experimental)