You might be wondering where the daily addition to the album list is. Surprisingly, there are none today. All my time was eaten up by those new, little images at the bottom of the posts. If you’re wondering what those are, they’re part of a WordPress plugin called Sociable. What they do is allow people to bookmark posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us. Then, others can share and comment on the stories as a group. (More information on Social bookmarking from Wikipedia)

You may have noticed that yesterday they were colored, but today, they blend in a little more. That’s because I can’t leave things well enough alone. I spent a good few hours trying to hack the Sociable code to do image rollovers that only light up when you put your mouse over them. And that meant creating new images, figuring out how the rollovers should work, and figuring out what needed to be added to and hacked out of the original code to actually get it going.

The way it works is that each of the images you see is only half of an image. I took the original images, and created images like this:

Essentially, the only other thing that I did was resize some of the images to a standard size of 18×36 pixels (for simplicity’s sake) and make the top half a black and white copy of the bottom half.

That way, when we hover over the image, we can use the background-image property to have CSS tell the browser to look down 18 pixels to the bottom half, making the image appear colored. 2 images in 1. Exciting stuff, right? The code for each icon looks something like this:

a#fark { display:block; padding: 0px 1px; width: 18px; height: 18px; float: left; background-image: url(fark2.png); background-position: 0 0; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0 auto; } a#fark:hover { background-position: 0 -18px; }

Once an entry had been created for each bookmark on the list, I hacked out a few chunks of sociable.php to get it to work. And work it does, so I zipped up the mods for download for anyone needing it. I would highly suggest getting Sociable working before even contemplating implementing this mod because it’s late, I’m a hack, and my instructions are pretty poor.

If you have any questions other than “Did Tia Carrera have an album?” I’ll try to answer them.

Posted in Geeky