Published June 6th, 2007
in CSS.
I was recently checking my site traffic reports to see where my visitors were coming from and I found a mind-blowing (at least for me) CSS technique for visited links. Eve-Lotta Lam uses a check mark background image for visited links rather than simply changing the text color. You might not think that this is mind-blowing, but consider that using background images to attach information to links has been around for awhile now, i.e. external link icons.
Why has this technique not been applied broadly to visited links as well? It makes so much more sense than changing the color. You don't have to think about which color corresponds to a visited link as opposed to a non-visited link. The color swapping doesn't really help across different websites because there is no standard convention for which colors to use. The exception may be blue for non-visited purple for visited, but these are antiquated and clash with most websites' color schemes. Using a check mark doesn't require that users remember a link had a different color when or if they re-encounter it after they have visited the it the first time. Users do not have to compare one link's color to another and try to remember which of those links has been visited and which has not. The check mark conveys the same meaning without requiring the user to think as much; it is a much better solution.
Evalotta pointed out that Paul Boag also uses this technique. If you know of any others, let me know.
Published June 3rd, 2007
in JavaScript, Google Maps and Geocodes.
I've been working more and more with the Google Maps API recently. And one thing strikes me as odd; it's difficult to find examples of how to retrieve geocodes for addresses. If you're going to implement the API in a website, you usually have to take multiple addresses and convert them to geocodes. But how do you do this?
Enter Geocoder. You may be asking yourself, "Who's Geocoder?" No, no my friend; Geocoder is not a who, it's a what. It is a little webapp that will retrieve the coordinates of any address (known to Google Maps), using the Google Maps API. The beautiful thing about Geocoder is that it allows you to perform batch retrievals using any character(s) to separate the records. Geocoder also gives you the ability to drop a draggable marker onto the map and it will tell you the coordinates of the location you move it to. This is extremely helpful for locations without addresses. And best of all, Geocoder is completely free and onemarco.com-independent. "How," you ask? Simple, you can download Geocoder and insert your Google Maps API key in the index file. It will run on any web server as long as you have an API key. I've even zipped it up into a convenient archive so that you can download all the files with one click.
Geocoder is free to use for any reason without any restrictions. Just credit me if you redistribute it.
P.S. I would like to thank Simon Reynolds for designing my masthead. You can check out his blog at SR28.com and his artwork at 4StoryStudio.com. His blog is designed beautifully.
