Welcome to Tim's World - a Worldcrafting, Writing, and Experimentation Blog!

Excuse the mess…

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Unhappy with my own attempt at Theme Creation, and after discovering this Awesome Free Theme: Imagination, I decided to go ahead an overhaul my Blog design.
This means that several parts of my layout ended up broken, but I’m working hard to get everything back in place. Bear with me, please!

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Improvements to wow-armory plugin + Linkbacks + Styles

Friday, February 27th, 2009

I’ve made some improvements to the wow-armory plugin:

Talents: You can now display your talent build. This option can be disabled per widget. You will see a link to your Talent in the Armory, displayed as “X / Y / Z”, where X, Y, and Z are the points spent in your First, second and third tree respectively. I’m not sure if the Armory will change to show your Dual-specs after patch 3.1, but I can change this if it does. Also, you’ll see the icon for your spec – if you have more talents in “Beast Mastery”, for example, you’ll see that icon.

Linkbacks: I have added an option to display a link back to my site. I debated for awhile how I can help get the word out on my addons, and this was, I believe, the best solution. This is completely optional, and it should default to “No”, so no one will show any links unless they choose to enable the option. Both the wow-armory and wow-guild plugin have this feature. You can turn on the linkbacks on a per-widget basis, or within shortcodes using linkback="1"

The link looks like this: powered_by

Shortcodes: You can use the shortcode:

Character portrait
of -US or EU
Level

You must have at least the char, realm, and realmtype specified.

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Tutorial: Show D&D Icon Font on Page using FLIR

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I was playing with some options for my D&D Adventure, and was getting annoyed by one of the oldest, and most annoying limitations in web technology: fonts. Specifically, I have a font that is made up soley of the 4E Icons for Attacks and stuff, and could not get it to appear at all. There’s never been a simple way to get a font to show up on your page that the visitor does not already have installed. I tried making images out of the font, but couldn’t get the size or the placement to work correctly.  It was very frustrating.  I think I ended up posting my Titanic Shark using the images I had made, but it stopped working after I moved hosts.

Then, earlier in the week, I came across an article that talked about something called FLIR.  Impressed, and a little jealous that I had not thought of that technique before, back when I was dabbling in GD for a WoW Signature application that I started, but never finished, I decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, neither the article itself, nor the documentation for FLIR was detailed enough to allow me to circumvent a few minor pitfalls without experementing, so I thought I would share what I learned.  Hopefully it will help anyone else out there with a D&D Blog or website.

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Update, Part 2

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Well, taking my last post into consideration, I decided to do some major housekeeping around here.

I removed all posts pertaining to the TARGEngine, and removed several other posts that were no longer relevant to anything, or were just me whining about whatever.  All told, I ended up disabling 45 posts.  I also spent a great deal of time reorganizing my categories.  I think there’s still a lot of work left to do to make them really work the way I would like, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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CSS Bubbles

Friday, June 27th, 2008

I was browsing the inter-web, and came across a site that had a bubble-effect on some of their text. I looked around, but couldn’t find any tutorials or anything that demonstrated how to make this effect, so I just played around with some CSS until I got something that looked kind of like it, and I thought I would share it with the (very few) people who read my Blog.

First, here’s sort of a demo of the effect. You can change the text and color of the bubble to see what it will look like:

In order to make this effect work, you’ll need 3 image files, one for the left edge, one for the background, and one for the right edge. For now, we’ll just use the Red images. You can use your own if you want.

Save these three images to a directory on your server. For example, /images.
Next, create a new HTML file, and add this CSS (either on the page itself, or in a separate, linked file):

.bubble_title {
	background: url(/images/red_bubble_01.png) no-repeat top left;
	top: 3px;
	left: 5px;
	height: 50px;
	z-index: 21;
	position: relative;
	float: left;
	display: inline;
}
.bubble_title_content {
	background: url(/images/red_bubble_02.png) repeat-x top left;
	left: 37px;
	height: 50px;
	padding-top: 0px;
	position: relative;
	float: left;
	display: inline;
}
.bubble_title_content p {
	font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	letter-spacing:-1px;
	font-weight:bold;
	position: relative;
	left: -20px;
	top: -17px;
	font-size: 22px;
	color: #333;
	z-index: 50;
}
.bubble_title_right {
	background: url(/images/red_bubble_04.png) no-repeat top left;
	width: 10px;
	height: 50px;
	left: 37px;
	position: relative;
	float: left;
	display: inline;
}
.clear {
	clear: both;
	height: 0;
}
.bubble {
	position: relative;
	float: left;
	display: inline;
}

The HTML Code for the bubble itself is:

This is some sample text...

Once you have the bubble’s HTML Code on your page, and the CSS Setup properly, you should see your bubble! You can play with the images, and the CSS to make bubbles that look/behave differently, and if you want to spice it up, try adding some Prototype and Script.aculo.us to your code, like I did.

I’m including the PSD for the bubble image, so you can modify it if you want – to make a new color, just change the color of the bottom layer shape, and export the images for web (PNG). Please let me know what you think, and if you use this code somewhere, let me know – I’d like to see it :D

Balloon Image

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