shepline creative

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In the last few months, the designers and developers at Shepline Creative have discovered, and fallen in love with, jQuery. With reasonably simple and straight-forward, lightweight code, there seems to be endless possibilities for exciting and vibrant designs.

Some of my favourite jQuery effects at the moment are:

• CrossSlide – some common slide-show animations, traditionally only available via Adobe Flash™ or other proprietary plugins. CrossSlide builds upon jQuery’s animation facility, so it is as portable across browsers as jQuery itself (that is, a lot!)
• Catch My Flame: Infinite Caroursel – excellent slideshow/gallery software
• jTabber – for tabbed pages
• Accordian – nifty accordian/show-and-hide for cascading content

The Bicester-based Gamages Accountancy Ltd chose Shepline Creative to redesign and relaunch their website. The new site, soft-launched today gives a clearer, more user-friendly look. The new site also integrates a Twitter feed from the Practice Manager and further developments and enhancements are promised over the coming weeks.

Work on this site involved using existing, unfamiliar web hosting and all the necessary problem-solving that goes with that territory!

The Buckinghamshire-based Greenwood Veterinary Clinic chose Shepline Creative to redesign and relaunch their website. The new site, launched earlier this month features about the team pages and online registration for new clients.

Work involved in the production of this site involved careful negotiation with the previous webhost to transfer the website, including email, to new servers, ensuring a smooth and continuous transition throughout.

The summer of 2010 is turning out to be a busy time of year for us, with several new websites currently in development for launch in the next few months. For an idea, think local small business; think complete redesign of an established site; think brand new, internationally focused, historically fascinating research project.

Watch this space for more!

This page nicely describes the technique of sharing videos hosted on Facebook on other webpages. I wanted to post the instructions here here for my own benefit and future reference.

Firstly, you need the id of the video you want to embed. This can be found in the address line, highlighted:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=238773845205&ref=nf

Then, paste the following code into your webpage or blog post, and replace xxx with the video id:

<object width="400" height="224" >
  <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
  <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
  <param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx" />
  <embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx"
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"
    width="400" height="224">
  </embed>
</object>

And you’re done!

For my sins, I use a webhost which works on Windows servers. For the most part, it makes not a jot of difference to me but does cause a few headaches when setting up sites using a wordpress install at the base of it. In particular setting nice pretty permalinks when I don’t have access to IIS mod rewrite rules…

I did manage it on this very site eventually, but it wasn’t straight forward particularly as I needed a separate 404 redirect for the subdomain (which I didn’t have access to). Setting up the new BVToday.net website is more straight forward, but I thought I would post the solution here, partly for my own future benefit:

Requirements and Install instructions:

• IIS for Windows
• WordPress
• Ability to change your 404 error page with your web host.

To install, copy and paste this text into a file named wp-404-handler.php:

<?php
$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, strpos($qs, ':80')+3);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
include('index.php');
?>

Next set the 404 error page to /wp-404-handler.php. If it gives you a choice between file and url, choose url.

Lastly, make sure you enable permalinks in the Wordpress control panel under Options > Permalinks.

This solution supercedes the ASP solution.

Whilst rolling out a new, spruced up, clean site design to my own website that conforms to both XHTML Strict DTDs and CSS 2.1, I encountered a conflict with the javascript scripting involved with the Lightbox that I was implementing. Although the pages continued to validate against the DTD and the CSS was similarly fine, and indeed in Firefox and some instances of IE8 there were no display problems. However in some instance of IE8, having the lightbox running on the page caused some elements of the page to not load correctly, and for the footer to not display at all. Further more I had the KB927917 error from Microsoft which was as inconprehensible as these things usually are.

By systematically deactivating the various scripts running on the page, I tracked down the problem to the Twitter provided javascript code.

I’ve now put in place a new Twitter feed service, which has the advantage of both working with Lightbox and having an option to abort loading tweets if the site is down (something which was causing a problem during recent twitter outages).

Details

You can see the scripts in action here.

Installation instructions

These are ammended for my install (you can see the original instructions and download the scripts here):

Container HTML

You need to insert a holder element for the twitters to go in to. In the example above, I’ve included some ‘waiting to load’ content – but you don’t have to.

Here’s what I did:

<div id=“tweet”>
 <p>Please wait while my tweets load <img src=“/images/indicator.gif” /></p>
</div>
<p><a href=http://twitter.com/yourtwitterusername>If you can’t wait – check out what I’ve been twittering</a></p>

Here are some more progress indicators.

If you include contents inside the holder div, then you’ll need to set the ‘clearContents’ flag.

Add the script

You should download the twitter.js script, and add the following code within the head or (best at the bottom of the) body tag:

 (this example will generate my twitter status in quotes on a single line with the ‘ago’ linkable back to the original twitter post)

<script src=“http://yourdomain.com/includes/js/twitter.js” type=“text/javascript”></script>
<script src=“http://yourdomain.com/includes/js/twitter.tweet.js” type=“text/javascript” charset=“utf-8″></script>

Create a file called twitter.tweet.js and paste the following code into it:

getTwitters(‘tweet’, {
  id: ‘yourtwitterusername’,
  count: 5,
  enableLinks: true,
  ignoreReplies: true,
  clearContents: true,
  template: ‘%user_name% %text% <a href=”http://twitter.com/%user_screen_name%/statuses/%id%/”>%time%</a>’
});

Note that the getTwitters function will execute after the page has been loaded by your browser. It will fire once the DOM is loaded but before images are loaded.

And your’re done!

Bicester-based wind band, Bicester Concert Band,  has today, soft-launched their brand new website. Teh new website, built using the Wordpress platform, features an intuitive and simple content management system so that much of the ongoing content changes can be managed by the band itself.

Shepline Publishing Services, which has been providing freelance support for publishing companies, charities and small companies in the areas of proofreading, copyright permissions clearance, web production and content control since 1997, has today rebranded itself as Shepline Creative.

The new name, together with the new website sets the company in place with its renewed focus on the creative side of the business producing expertly typeset small publications, print publicity, and effective, budget solutions for fully costed and upfront website production.

We will still offer all of the existing services but as a supplement to our core business.