Quick Links for 21 September

A few unrelated things from around the web...

• 5 simple ways to open your blog post with a bang (might try using some of these suggestions one day!)


• MS Office 2007 technical refresh available. Worth grabbing of you're using Office 2007 Beta 2.


• Portable, accessible form styling from A List Apart. I really like this one. Forms can be a pain in the proverbial!

Email Plugin for Wordpress

Thanks to Jamie for sending me this fantastic plugin: Subscribe2.

Basically, visitors to your blog can add their email address, and this little plugin will automagically email them whenever you add a new post!

You can customise the message and a few other details. Simple to install and set up - and you can see it working by clicking the Subscribe link in the sidebar. (Or here if you're too lazy to look over there for it!)

Upgrading from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 Beta

Took the plunge and upgraded my Outlook 2003 installation to Outlook 2007 last night. It had seemed to work fine for others in the office, but after my upgrade I couldn't open it at all. Kept hanging. Then wanting to open in Safe Mode. Then wanting to run Detect and Repair. But nothing seemed to fix it.

Until...

From Start -> Run, type outlook /profiles and click OK. Then create a new profile name, and make it the default profile (by clicking the Options button). Then you can go about attaching your old PST files and setting up your email accounts.

Seems that there are some instances where there is something in the old profile that new new version doesn't like.

Initial thoughts are pretty impressive. They have done some really good things with Outlook this time around. Calendar treatment is really nice. The To-Do Bar at the right of the screen is very handy.

So far, a big thumbs-up!

Visual jQuery

Not sure how long this has been online, but here's a very handy visual reference for jQuery. This is a really cool way to present online documentation - not much reading required - just gets you straight to the bits you need.

Time to Get Cracking With IE7

Microsoft have released a pretty comprehensive list of changes implemented for IE7, as well as IE7 Release Candidate 1.

With IE7 being pushed to XP users with auto updates turned on in the 4th quarter of this year, the pressure is now firmly on to get everything behaving.

We've got a few issues we're aware of, just need to make the time now to get them all sorted!

AHAH! It's jQuery!

This was going to be a post about my first stab at AJAX. But, as technically it's AHAH, I thought I'd use the lame title above...

This snippet uses jQuery - an excellent little piece of Javascript that makes this sort of trickery relatively simple.

Firstly, have a look at the basic syntax here: jquery.com/docs/ajax

A couple of things that I stumbled on:

1. Content loaded via the .load call doesn't have any event handlers attached, so in the Callback function you need to use .find() to look for any elements you want to assign events to.


2. Getting the ID of the element clicked ended up being pretty simple: this.id


3. Getting the value of a form field involves a simple walk around the DOM - as the form isn't actually "Submitted" - use document.GetElementById("fieldID").value

Then you should end up with something more-or-less like this:

Don't Be Content Without Content

Excellent post over at Blue Flavour bringing attention to the amount of time we spend on content for websites we're developing.

We've all had trouble getting content from clients, but really, what are we doing to help them prepare it? Do we just say, "It's your problem, sort it out" or do we direct clients to good resources to help them get it together?

Some excellent comments on this post too, including a reference to providing clients with a content brief.

Food for thought...