professional development

I have run out of billable work so I have been working on a professional development skills project. Some school sites, for example St Bedes, have flash virtual tours that take the form of a map with hotspots that open a slideshow for that location. The pd was to recreate the experience in html, as obviously we want to get away from flash. My css needs some amping up so the pd has been good for that. I also was going to load the data for where the maker buttons are located and the images to load from xml. Johnny informed me the better technology to use was json. Json looks like a javascript vanilla object. Reading json in via ajax creates a javascript object ready to use, no need to convert xml into an object. So now I have a json file with marker locations as percentages and data for slideshow image locations. The slideshow uses FancyBox, but not the latest version as it has a licence for non-commercial use only.

I originally made an image sprite for the marker but Johnny suggested I should use css to make a circle and rollover. I wanted a gradient in the rollover which requires css that is unreadable for me. Luckily this site creates the css for you to copy and paste:

http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/

Unfortunately stupid IE7 and 8 shows squares where my circles should appear. But the functionality works so blow them.

Because the markers are set as percentages the map is responsive to size. I just used Johnny’s css changes, I do not yet understand myself the use of when to have display:block for the map image and for the marker div.

I am not sure how you would get the demo I have created into a cms content page as I need to load the css, which as far as I am aware needs to be written in the head which of course I don’t have access to.

All up a lot of fun, now I need to come up with the next project.

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Life away from work trundles along nicely. Not a lot happening but all good. The latest painting does not look nearly as good as Tegan Jovanka which looks terrific on the lounge room wall. I added some vermillion red to the current painting and it was hopeless. I will paint over all the red, I have added some more blue and green already. I am still not fixed on what colour scheme to use. The white and pale green look good but the white was probably added too soon, it would have better as the last layer.

The weather has not been very conducive to exercising and that has dropped off to a large degree, we did manage to play badminton last Monday. There is an exhibition of 80’s art at the National Gallery of Victoria at the moment that we will try to get to next Monday.</p