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Akatombo Web Log

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Maintenance

We are currently performing some site maintenance tasks we’ve been putting off for quite a while.  the largest of these is changing the backend that runs all dynamic aspects of the site.  We’ll try to keep interruptions to a minimum, and hopefully you won’t notice the changeover at all, but if you do notice anything strange, please contact us.

Monday, August 30, 2004

Dog Helmet Customer Gallery added

We have added a customer gallery to the Dog Helmets section of the site so that you can see our helmets in use.  These photos have been submitted by satisfied customers, and we greatly appreciate them spending the time to take the photos and send them to us.  Our initial round of thanks go to Earl and Mack, but there should be more photos coming in soon, so keep checking back.

All of our customers to date have been very satisfied, and we plan to keep it that way.  If you think there is some way that we can provide better service, please don’t hesitate to let us know.  If you have one of our helmets and can think of a way that it could be improved, we’ll pass it on to the manufacturer.  If they use your suggestion to improve their product, we’ll either send you the new helmet free of charge, or offer it to you below cost, depending on what kind of arrangement we can work out with the manufacturer.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Too many works in progress

Sorry for the complete lack of activity around here lately.  We have a bunch of articles and posts in the works, but none of them are ready for publishing yet.  With the rapid approach of CEATEC JAPAN 2004 we are pretty swamped with web pages for that, and don’t have much time for anything else.  Which reminds me ... any of you who have looked at the CEATEC JAPAN 2004 website:  Was there any information that you were looking for and couldn’t find?  Anything that you found irritating or hard to use.  We have out ideas about how things should be improved, but since CEATEC is such a large committee-run project it can sometimes be difficult to implement our ideas.  User feedback is considered very seriously though, and if you make a suggestion, it is likely to bring results. 

If you have any ideas for CEATEC JAPAN website improvements; particularly on the overall site or the German, French, Korean, or English pages; please comment on this post to let us know!

Friday, August 13, 2004

Javascript and CSS popins

We hope to flesh this concept out quite a bit more and then do a more thorough writeup about it, but for now we are putting up the very intentionally ugly rough, proof of concept version of the javascript and css popin windows that we were experimenting with a while back.

We decided to put this up to let Luis from Blog from Another Dimension have a look at it, for it’s use of the modification of css display properties with Javascript.  Here is the relevant text from the comment thread at his site:

Me:
The first solution is to use javascript to change the css display status for the best of bfad list when the header is clicked. You could then have a rolldown triangle to the left of the section header and have the actual section appear when people click on the header.) I have a proof of concept exercise that I did using a similar technique to make css popup help windows that I could show you if you’d like to figure out how to do this.

Luis:
That would be interesting. Is the proof-of-concept available for viewing somewhere? I still haven’t figured out javascript--I’ve tried pasting in pre-made freeware scripts from time to time with very limited success--and the how-to sites I visit when I try to learn usually assume that you know a lot more than I do…

Me:
I didn’t have it up and available anywhere online, but I went ahead and stuck it up in its rough, proof of concept state on the Akatombo Media site. Just understand that it is currently intentionally ugly so that it would be clear if anything was overrunning boundaries. I was considering fleshing out the concept a little bit more and writing an article on it at some point, but I haven’t had time yet, and don’t have time to do anything at all with it right now. (trying to keep enough client work going to keep food on the table and all that)

In the interest of giving credit I think I originally got the idea for this from something slightly related that Zeldman wrote about (use of Javascript to modify the css display property). Anyway, without further ado, I give you Javascript and CSS pop-in windows.  If you’d like to comment on it, please feel free to comment on the relevant blog post.