Displaying feeds using javascript

I've been very pleased to find a site which gives you scripts for displaying feeds using javascript. They even let you run the scripts from their own site. I wanted to tweak them so I copied them and run them off our own site. You've got quite a few options when you call the scripts, but I wanted to do a couple more tweaks:

• Images with relative URLs in the feed (though not invalid, but not advised) needed the domain adding to the start.
• Displaying the first paragraph of the feed, as the feed is normally full text.

The code is very clear and those were fairly easy changes to drop in.

New NetCommunity donation pages

We have moved our main donation pages over to NetCommunity. They are all linked from our donate to a project page. The Blackbaud web designer did a good job of reproducing the layout from our site and it was fairly straightforward to create more pages with the different branding for the different campaigns on our site.

Now we've replaced existing pages, it's time to do some new stuff...

Portable audio Bible players

I've written about the megavoice before. Rob Baker has a round up of three portable audio Bible players. I saw the Saber a couple of days ago. It's very chunky. It's great to see some good solutions for getting the Bible as spoken word out away from main electricity.

Raiser's Edge sign

On a recent trip to our Belfast office I came across a Raiser's Edge, sorry Razors Edge shop sign.

BBNC Volunteer part

This is mainly here so I can post a photo on blackbus.org.

Musings on "View Source"

It's not an original thought that View Source has greatly enhanced the beauty and usefulness of the web. I was thinking on it today because a little trick I came across

#nav a:active, #nav
a.selected {
background-position:0 -64px;
}

What we have is a button which when you hover over it switches to display a different part of the button picture, which in this case displays the button text in a different colour. You can see it at: wycliffe.org.uk.

With the print medium to produce stuff you need decent software like Quark Express, which costs, as well as the money to print in colour, on nice paper. So not many people produce magazines and books. (I know we have the rise of DTP, but what that's done for the print medium is another discussion...)

Imagine if the web were the same - you had to buy Dreamweaver or equivalent to produce websites; you had to pay a significant ongoing cost to host your site. There would be no blogs, no personal websites on your free webspace from your ISP, no small company, small charity/school/church websites. A very different place.

Now imagine if you had View Source for print media. Imagine if it were easy to nick the layout used by Hello magazine, say, and put your own photos and text in. Imagine if you could print a run of a 100 of them for the price of a burger. You could do a special magazine for a wedding. Pamphlets and fanzines would be all over the place. Interesting to let your mind wander...

Busy Background Images

I thought busy background images were pretty dead until I came across this page with lots of juicy information about the Google Maps API.

And then as blogged about just now, boagworld has a nice bit of grass on it. Much easier on the eye.