Tag: design

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Posting an Opera button on your website or blog is a great way to encourage people to try out the browser — but what if the visitor already uses Opera? It shows solidarity, but what if you could show them something else, something that is new to them?

You might want to replace your regular Opera banner with an ad for Opera Mini. Or show them another graphic of your own design. Or maybe not even a graphic, maybe post some sort of message, like “Opera spoken here!” or “Welcome, Opera visitors!”

It’s relatively simple to do this in PHP, or ASP, or some other server-side script…but sometimes you have to stick with static HTML. Well, client-side JavaScript can replace chunks of your page, and here’s how to do it.

1. Put the following script in a file called operalinks.js:

function replaceOperaLink(linkID) {

if(linkNode=document.getElementById(linkID)) {

if ( 0 <= navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera') ) {

var newButton=document.createElement('span');

newButton.innerHTML = '<a href="http://www.opera.com/">Glad to see you're using Opera!</a>';

var parentNode=linkNode.parentNode;

parentNode.replaceChild(newButton,linkNode);

}

}

}

For the innerHTML section, you can plug in a new link and banner, or a special message, or anything you want. (Just make sure that you put a backslash () in front of any apostrophes you use.)

2. Put a unique ID in the tag for your regular Opera button. Use the outermost tag that you want to replace. For example, let’s start it off with this:

<a id="OpLink" href="http://www.opera.com">Download Opera!</a>

3. Load the script in your document’s <head> section:

<script type="text/javascript" src="operalinks.js">

4. Call the function in the body onload event using the ID you chose in step 2:

<body onload="replaceOperaLink('OpLink')">

When the page loads, the script will check the visitor’s browser. If it’s Opera, it’ll replace the banner with whatever message you chose in step 1. It’s compatible with both HTML and XHTML, and you don’t need to worry about using <noscript> tags to make sure the banner still shows up for people with JavaScript disabled.

*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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Microsoft’s automatic update system is now offering an update to the Windows Installer. That’s the program that handles all those .msi files you use to install new applications, keeps track of what’s currently installed, and lets you uninstall them.

And it needs to reboot after installing?

WHY? What low-level system file did they have to change? There is a Windows Installer service, but it’s not running, and even if it were, they should just be able to restart the service. Why do I have to reboot the entire #@!$ computer because I agreed to install an update to something that isn’t running? Is the design so broken it can’t update itself?

I’ve never had to reboot a Linux box after upgrading RPM, Yum, or Apt (the equivalent software on many Linux systems). Never, in the seven years I’ve been using Linux.

And you know, it would have been nice to know that this update would require a restart before I decided, “what the heck, it doesn’t look like anything that’ll require me to restart, I might as well grab it now.” Telling me that some updates may require a restart is like labeling a box of cookies “Processed in the same state as a peanut farm.” It’s useless. It gets ignored. Kind of like this rant probably will.

Update 1: I’d love to make this change to the dialog box:

No, it’s not F*ing OK but you’re going to make me restart anyway!
Mouldypunk (link dead)

Update 2 (years later): “OK I guess” would have at least been amusing. And thank you sooooo much, Gnome Software, for bringing this behavior to Linux. There’s a reason I still use the command line to install updates.

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I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)