Blog - Page 7 of 14 - Trippnology

Improve your browsing speed and stay safe with Adblock Plus

It often takes longer to download the ads on a page than the page content itself (in the case of flash ads anyway) and how annoying are those ads covering the bottom section of YouTube videos!? Firefox and Chrome addon Adblock Plus is here to save the day.

Ads are not just annoying, they are potentially harmful too. Although the site you’re visiting may be legit, the ads they carry (which are often out of their control) can infect your machine with all kinds of malware so blocking them is a very good idea.

Download Adblock Plus for Firefox or Chrome and never see another ad again!

Unfortunately, Adblock Plus isn’t available for Internet Explorer. Yet another reason to ditch Internet Explorer for a better internet experience.

Let us know what you think in the comments here or on Facebook and remember to share with your networks.

Our first HTML5 site – Glass Splashback Colour

We’ve just put the finishing touches to our first HTML5 website: Glass Splashback Colour. GSC is an offshoot of Glassact UK, a specialist glass company from Norwich supplying glass splashbacks, glass worktops, image glass and bespoke architectural glass. They already had a website but it was built using a free online site builder which meant it wasn’t properly optimised for the search engines, it was poorly laid out and took an age to load.

We’ve redesigned the site from the ground up to be search engine friendly, cross browser compatible, fast to display and responsive (meaning the layout adjusts depending on your screen size). Try it for yourself: visit Glass Splashback Colour, resize your browser and you will see fonts and images change size, content moves around the page and some items are hidden and others appear.

With the massive worldwide increase in visitors using mobile devices, we now design all of our websites to be responsive. We believe the visitor should have a great experience no matter what kind of device is being used to view a site. There’s nothing that annoys visitors more than having to scroll sideways as it interrupts the flow of reading.

You may notice that although the HTML validates, the CSS does not. This is mainly due to vendor prefixes which are currently required to get CSS3 features working in older browsers. As time goes on and people upgrade their browsers, this kind of code will become more and more redundant but for now, it’s a necessary evil. While I’ve got my web designer hat on, it’s probably a good time to remind you to ditch Internet Explorer for a better internet experience.

When we’re designing a site, validation isn’t top of our list. Our view looks something like this:

User experience
Search engine optimisation
Load time
Accessibility
Valid code

We’re not alone in this view, some of the most popular websites of today do not validate: Apple, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, Number 10, Digg, The Times, Microsoft and ebay all have pages that don’t validate. That’s not to say you shouldn’t bother trying, just don’t put it above all else. After all, valid code doesn’t mean good code just as invalid code doesn’t mean bad code.

If your website could do with a makeover, be it in look and feel, to make it responsive or just for SEO, contact us today for a no obligation quote.

What are QR codes and how to use them

We’ve had lots of questions about QR codes recently… What are QR codes? How do I use QR codes? Are QR codes just a fad? We’ll answer these questions and more.

What are QR codes?

A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is essentially just like a regular barcode that we’re all used to seeing on every product we buy. You don’t need any special hardware to scan a QR code, all you need is something you probably have very close to you right now… your phone. There are apps for scanning these codes for all the major platforms and we’ll list some of them below.

The beauty of a QR code is that they can link to almost anything; a bunch of text, a website URL, a telephone number, full contact details (vCard), a Google Maps location, wifi connection login and much more. The other great thing is that you can easily create them yourself with one of the online QR code generators also listed below.
Continue reading “What are QR codes and how to use them”

Scrollable box without using an iframe

Here’s a super simple CSS tip to create a scrollable box on your website, without having to use the dreaded iframe tag. Scrollable boxes are great for cramming lots of content into a small space. They are perfect for announcements or short news feeds.

The solution which forms the basis of this technique is the overflow attribute. It can be set to .scrollable { width:250px; height:300px; overflow:scroll; }

Give a div the class you specified above and you’re good to go.
<div class="scrollable"> [Put your content here] </div>

Example 1:

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Lorem ipsum sea ad molestiae similique repudiandae, qui et habeo reque nonumy. Placerat efficiantur vim ex, eam nulla maiestatis definitiones ei. Duo et inermis definitiones, an vix omittam offendit. At cum noster aliquando constituam. Suas eripuit qui eu, et eam copiosae dissentiet. Labores delicata ad sea, in soluta definitiones eam. Et mea solet nonummy.

The problem with setting overflow:scroll is that it creates both vertical and horizontal scroll bars and often the horizontal bar is not required (or desired).

A better idea is to set overflow-y:scroll (or overflow-x if you need horizontal only scrolling) leaving you with the desired effect.

Example 2:

Let us know what you think in the comments here or on Facebook.

Firefox 5 Final available for download

The latest version of Firefox is available to download from the Mozilla servers, before the official release date. Readers might remember that the same thing happened with version 4 just a few months ago.

The official launch day is Tuesday 21st June and as usual, Mozilla are planning some fun stuff for the day. This is all part of the move to a rapid release schedule, getting the latest features and enhancements out to users as soon as possible.

So what’s new?
It’s certainly a much less dramatic improvement over version 4.0, which was released on March 22 after a development time of more than 13 months. In
fact, at first look, you will not be able to tell a difference between 4 and 5. The layout is identical and the overall look and feel will not reveal any differences at all. There is a list of improvements, many of which most users may not care about. It’s not an impressive list for a completely new browser version, but a closer look shows that Mozilla has fixed almost 1000 bugs in total and there are actually more new features than Mozilla says there are.

The major points include improved support for HTML5 and related technologies, a slight speed gain in JavaScript as well as idle connection tuning integration, which should speed up the page load performance of Firefox considerably. There are 38 new “features“, my favorite being CSS3 animations, keeping Firefox inline with the Webkit browsers when it comes to web standards.

Firefox 5 Direct Download Links:

If you’d rather wait for the official release, it will be available here.

Let us know what you think in the comments here or on Facebook.