Find Motive

In just under 2 years, 4 Billion games of Halo 2 have been played. I can account for a few hundred of those myself =B. I love that game. Nothing kills my productivity better than Halo.

Full story Here

Back when I first started doing web development I used Javascript Image objects and onMouseOver and onMouseOut to make image rollovers for web pages. This worked well, but was kind of clunky and required 2 separate images.

Now I use CSS with only one image to do these same rollovers. You are basically just shifting the background image's X coordinate to give the rollover effect.

The following browsers support this:
IE 5.5+, Firefox 1.07+, Opera 7.23+, Mozilla 1.7.12+, Netscape 6.02+, Safari 2.0+, Konqueror 3.4.3+

Example

The Image

CSS

HTML

The Chicago based company 37signals has released their popular book Getting Real in an online format available to everyone for free. The book was originally released earlier this year in PDF format for $19. A paperback version is also now available.

I purchased this book a few months ago and I would recommend it to everyone. Its not just for internet based companies, it can apply to anyone for any task. Basically the book teaches you how to cut the bull and get to the point and to just do it.

Read/Write Web, one of my daily reads, has posted a great article comparing some of the top web browsers on the market.

The last few weeks have been packed with browser action and the two market leaders, Internet Explorer and Firefox, have launched major new versions. So to round out our recent browser coverage, we present the Web Browser Faceoff - looking at how all the main browsers compare with each other in terms of features and innovation. We are basically looking for what is unique, interesting - and missing - in each browser.

Read the full article.

I have been using Internet Explorer 7 for a few days now and I have noticed a significant load time difference for certain web pages from IE 6 to 7. Sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds for a page to completely load. It seems to be hanging on certain images in pages. Anyone else experiencing this? I even bypassed my personal firewall and it had no change. Firefox and IE 6 loaded these same pages in 1-3 seconds.

So far I am really annoyed with IE 7. I am really annoyed with myself.

UPDATE
I did some more tests and after watching my network load when IE is trying to access a page its receiving 12k/sec and sending out 7k/sec for more than 30 seconds. I know for a fact that the page is not that large. It is like it is hanging on something. I've only seen this problem on www.indiefy.com in the artist admin.

UPDATE
After reviewing the HTTP headers I have found that this issue was my fault. DOH! My site is using a custom 404 a page that I had not created yet. When IE 7 tried to access a page that wasn't there it was forwarded to the 404 page which was forwarded again to the 404 page. Basically it was in a constant loop. This issue was my fault and not IE 7's. I retract my statements about IE 7 from earlier. Its growing on me.

I have a simple mp3 player that I have written in flash 8 that streams an MP3 file. The problem is this: When I view the player in IE and let the mp3 file completely download and reload the page, the sound does not auto-play like it should when using the loadSound() streaming option. This seems to be an issue with IE's cache. So far I have seen this issue in IE 6 and 7 on multiple machines when the cache is enabled. Firefox and flock work perfectly.

Follow these steps to recreate:
1. Go to http://www.findmotive.com/flashautostart/
2. Let the flash completely download the mp3 (You can tell by the green progress bar)
3. Refresh the page

When you refresh the page the green progress bar should show 100%, but it will not auto-play the MP3. To make it play you have to hit the pause/play button.

If I open the URL in a new window or tab then it will auto-play even when fetching the mp3 from the cache. Let me know if you have a solution to this. If I find the solution I will post it here.

My friend Jeff over at Big Trapeze has posted a great code snippet to prevent users from accidentally double submitting forms or refreshing the page and getting an annoying alert box.

Alert box shown when you try to refresh a page that was posted to.

Lately, while developing sites, I’ve started to deal with a lot of form submissions, and I’m finding that it takes extra steps to prevent people from accidentally submitting a form twice. Double-posting (hitting the Submit button more than once, or refreshing a page where data has been processed) can lead to all sorts of bad problems. - Big Trapeze

Check it out! Big Trapeze

After many betas and a release candidate, Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 today. I IE7 is a step in the right direction, but its no where near it should be. I have not checked my sites for issues yet in the new version. I will probably download it this week and start the tedious process of checking for rendering bugs. In a perfect world...everyone would use Firefox or all browsers would be standards compliant.

If you are using IE7, give me your feedback. I would like to know your opinion on it.

I don't think they heard me.

I saw this at break.com and I couldn't resist posting it.

Yo Quiero A Liter A Cola!

Since Microsoft lost the patent battle between Eolas, IE has been required to display ActiveX plugins differently. This change now requires a user to click on the plugin for the user can interact with it. The plugin will still animate/play automatically, but user interaction is disabled until clicked.

A quick method of getting around this annoying problem is to write the flash to your HTML from an external Javascript file.

Example
- demo.htm

- flashfix.js

You can view a working demo Here.

Another solution is to use SWFObject formely known as flashObject. SWFObject has alot of great features for embedding flash into your HTML including the ability to detect what version of flash a user's browser is running.

Check SWFObject out here