mysiteonline™

Libraries, and many other institutions, have a difficult time leveraging the ability to allow customers access to communicate with them easily, using one of the most popular online communication tools available: Instant Messaging.

There are many problems, such as:

• Multiple Protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, GIM, Jabber, IRC, MSN, etc...)
• Inability to transfer conversations to another staff member more capable of handling a question or issue
• Software compatibility
• Operating System compatibility
• Web-based communication tools for these protocols

So what's left out there?

Continue reading "LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

An online friend asked me for some help in hiding all empty columns for every sheet within an Excel workbook. I figured I'd share the code:

(also on pastebin)
Sub HideEmptyCols() ' Deletes all empty columns on the active worksheet Dim iCol As Integer Dim wsSheet As Worksheet For Each wsSheet In Worksheets wsSheet.Select With wsSheet.UsedRange For iCol = .Column + .Columns.Count - 1 To 1 Step -1 If IsEmpty(Cells(65536, iCol)) And IsEmpty(Cells(1, iCol)) Then If Cells(65536, iCol).End(xlUp).Row = 1 Then Columns(iCol).Hidden = True End If Next iCol End With Next wsSheet End Sub

Perhaps someone else will find it useful for some odd reason.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I was creating a replicated PDF form in HTML/CSS for work today and needed to get a portion of the form (signature field) to rest at the bottom of the page, whichever page it was. This was easily accomplished in CSS-friendly browsers by using position:fixed; bottom:0; ... however, IE6 does not support the "fixed" position with CSS. Not good...not all of our staff members in the building have been upgraded to use IE7 - most have, a couple have not.

Stu Nichols has found a way to "trick" IE6 in to allowing something almost entirely the same by way of using another CSS bug. It's a bit hackish, but it's not an actual hack. I used IE's conditional CSS to make sure it didn't mess up any other browser's rendering, but the link (and demo) is below in case anyone else needs the same functionality.

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/fixed.html

Ironically enough, this doesn't seem to work in Safari for Windows properly (haven't tried it with my Apple). Thankfully for me, I don't need to cope with that issue for this form on our intranet. I imagine it's actually a bug in the browser's rendering (only for print, it works just fine for online display).

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I had some fun mixing a couple different JavaScript technologies and web services together to create something "interesting", and helpful for our Children's Room.

Introducing the Saratoga Springs Public Library's Children's Room Photo Gallery!

For the services, I am using Google's AJAX API to serve up my jQuery library, rather than me having to deal with keeping it upgraded and gzip/compressing it. You can read more about it here. For the photographs, I am using Flickr, as many other libraries do. It was one of the easiest and quickest that I could use with a nice desktop-based management tool that also didn't hog network bandwidth while searching for new photos (ala Picasa, or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery). Now staffers in that department can create their own photo sets (or photo categories) and manage their own images.

For the JS effects, I am using two separate libraries. Since I'm using Google's AJAX API to serve up jQuery I'll start with that one... I'm using ThickBox to show a larger version image of a thumbnail when clicked on. The nice things about Thickbox is that (1)it integrates with the other script I'm using, (2)it automatically resizes the images to fit (if too big for the viewport), and (3)is very versatile in its use of modal dialog support. The other library I am using is something called "ImageFlow" written by Finn Rudolph, which is one of the best JS-based CoverFlow implementations I have seen. The Official ImageFlow website isn't as fancy as someone else's implementation, so you may wish to check out the version that also has YouTube integration, and automatic rotation/slideshow.

I know there's currently no way to get from that page back to our home page or other areas of our website. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned about that at the moment, I have many more pressing non-web-related projects of higher importance (at work) to work on, unfortunately.

Update: Apparently ThickBox is not being fired with the newest photoset, and I'm not sure why...it worked before a staff member updated the textual descriptions of the images, because I tried it. No idea why it's not working now - anyone have any ideas?

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

From my new subscription to the Twine (data?) service, I subscribed to the RDFa group to hear, and read about new (or interesting) technologies around the web. It's been quite some time since I had heard about Freebase Parallax (last read about in the Web4Lib digest), and when reading over the article in my Twine digest email, I took a second look. The video demo really showed its power. But, to understand the Semantic Web (RDFa), I'd suggest anyone interested read over that article first. It discusses ideologies on how one should be able to find information and data over the web.

A Good Data Browser Allows You to Navigate the Knowledge Space by Car
...and...
Twine, if you're interested - currently in private Beta.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski