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E-book Download Icons

E-book icons example — An example of the e-book icon set in use for a book available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobi formats.

I recently set up a web page for downloading an e-book that is available in multiple formats. I had already been using a small document icon to decorate PDF download links, and now I wanted matching icons for the mobi and EPUB format too.

A Google search didn’t turn up what I was looking for so I created my own based on the PDF icon from the Fugue Icons set by Yusuke Kamiyamane. He so kindly released his icons under a Creative Commons attribution license and now I’m doing the same with the extra two icons. Continue reading E-book Download Icons

iOS 5 Safari Now Has Native HTML5 Date and Time Pickers

This falls under the category of sometimes it’s the little mundane things that can get me excited…

I’ve been wanting mobile Safari to have native date pickers ever since I started creating Web apps for iPhone. Every time I dealt with date fields I had to create pickers with javascript that were just not as good as those for real iPhone apps. I had been checking to see if native pickers were included in each iOS release but forgot about checking iOS 5 until now. Continue reading iOS 5 Safari Now Has Native HTML5 Date and Time Pickers

Getting the Bad Behavior Extension to Work with MediaWiki 1.17

Update: This procedure should not be needed with current versions of MediaWiki. Just grab the current version of Bad Behavior and follow the Bad Behavior MediaWiki installation instructions.

I recently updated my robotic lawn mower site running an old version of MediaWiki to the current (as of this writing) version 1.17.0. The wiki had been filled with a bunch of spam users so after cleaning that up I thought I would add in the trusty Bad Behavior extension to keep some of the bad guys away. Long story short: it didn’t work and despite much Googling I couldn’t find a current solution.

So for my own future reference and to help anyone else dealing with this, here is how I made it go. Continue reading Getting the Bad Behavior Extension to Work with MediaWiki 1.17

Loading WordPress’ Thickbox Only When Needed

I like to use Thickbox on my site to display images and videos in overlay windows. In WordPress, it’s easy enough to use wp_enqueue_script( ) and wp_enqueue_style() to load the built-in version of Thickbox. It automatically takes care of including jQuery, putting the css in the header, and the javascript in the footer.

But there’s no need to have the bloat of Thickbox and jQuery loading on all pages when most of them don’t even use it. That’s why Joost de Valk detailed a nice tip to only load thickbox when needed by checking the page content for references to it. All it takes is a few lines of code in your functions.php file.

Unfortunately, you end up with some broken images because the built-in Thickbox defines their locations in thickbox.js as relative paths: Continue reading Loading WordPress’ Thickbox Only When Needed

GPS Geolocation in Safari on iPhone OS 3.0

I just updated my iPhone to the shiny new OS 3.0. Apple did a great job addressing a few shortcomings and adding new features. Others have already told about the common features so I won’t rehash them here.

But let me tell you about my favorite new feature: Safari can now get your GPS location via javascript! Continue reading GPS Geolocation in Safari on iPhone OS 3.0