Blog Random

I was having some trouble getting sounds to play dynamically using javascript today. I’m not sure dynamically is the right word but basically I wanted different sounds to load and play on the click of a button using javascript without having to preload the sounds.

At first I tried using a single embed object, then changing the src of the embed on a button click and using embedObj.Play(); but for some reason changing the source of the file stopped that happening.

My second idea was to replace the entire embed code each time, and then call Play on the embed to get it to play. Still no luck!

Finally after a bit of searching I found somebody that had managed to do it. Its similar to my second idea only instead of calling .Play() on the embed object you just use autostart=true in the embed code, simple!

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I don’t often take the time to report on a decent service I’ve had. I usually spend more time thinking about and talking about bad experiences but I was very impressed with the guys over at car world uk, in Peterborough.

I was sceptical at first, the car was a pretty good price for what it was (not always a good sign) and I had to travel 2 hours to go see it! Having checked them out on-line and by telephone I went to take a look. Not only was the car great but so was everybody I dealt with. Most car show rooms seem reluctant to help, as if turning up is causing an inconvenience but not this place.

Having got the car home I found something very small wrong with a part of the interior. The part could easily be replaced for £40 and I had a free 3 month warranty, but the warranty wouldn’t cover it. At £40 I was just going to replace it myself but I gave them a call and after refusing to drive back to Peterborough for a cheap part they happily agreed to just reimburse me if I bought it myself - excellent!

To top it all off, they sent me a Christmas card the other week!

If you found this looking for a review of car world, I’d recommend them based on my experience. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, apologies for the niche topic.

When designing and coding the template for this blog I didn’t have access to IE6 (thanks MS), but I finally got hold of Virtual PC and managed to sort out a number of issues that made it look worse than it is supposed to be!

Unfortunately there are still many people using IE6, at least 15% of visitors to this site and a lot more to other sites that have a less technical audience. Luckily that number is falling day-by-day and hopefully soon we can all stop wasting time making exceptions for IE6. I’ve found there are far fewer issues with IE7, hopefully it will stay that way in future versions.

I’d apologise to IE6 users but I think its about time they upgraded! :p

I’ve neglected both the plugin and the blog a little lately due to the run up to Christmas but have made some time to release a major upgrade to rb internal links.

Some of the new features include:

• Changing the charset to utf-8 for tinymce plugin (thanks to vanco)
• A switch from the {{ … }} method to <!– … –> for entering a link
• Putting in the option for ID or slug returned to editor, default to be ID (good idea, thanks again vanco)
• Support for creating an internal link with an image
• The intlink code is now hidden in visual mode, replaced with the highlighted text
• The parsing engine has been completely rewritten for speed and scalability
• Some code changes that should help people with problems related to the wysiwyg icon not turning up
• Added filter for ‘the_content_rss’

I’d like to thank everybody that has commented on the blog so far regarding the plugin, it has been more popular than I had hoped for and I really appreciate it. More feedback, ideas and code very welcome!