This sprite’s not so refreshing after an all-nighter and it likes to feel the wind in it’s hair.

But less of the little green fella. Don’t know why but it’s taken me some time to actually get round to using CSS sprites for the background images here on Toxic Web, after all I think the first article I saw about them was on “A List Apart” and that is just over 6 years old. Added to that I’ve used them elsewhere, mainly for such things as menu lists with a rollover effect, but in a smaller individual basis.

In fact even on this site, with the rollover effect for the submit button on the comments form (below). Pretty much every image to do with the site’s layout is a background image so I decided to go the whole hog and create one huge image, which turned out not as workable so I ended up with two sprites.

I tried a couple of the Sprite generators but they didn’t exactly work out for me, the SpriteMe bookmarklet looked like a good one – there are more in this Smashing Magazine article – but in Firefox it produced a strange box that covered the working are making it partially unusable.

So it was down to a bit of DIY, importing the images into a big transparent background image, marking all the coordinates and making sure that there’s no overlapping when rendered on the page.

First one an image for all the borders (in the main content area), boxes (red & orange over there on the right) and all the little icons (again over there on the right next to ever list menu oh and down below and the date on the left), it came out at 150px high and 15,000px long but was only 21kb and replaced 37 individual images that in total were about 5kb more. The second image was for the navigation menu tabs at the top, one the left and at the bottom, this weighed in at 6kb replacing 16 images totally 10kb.

But it wasn’t the size of the images that I was bothered about, this day and age of broadband what difference does 9kb make? Bugger all.

It was partly just to do it and see about getting 53 images down to just 2 and thus reducing the number of HTTP-Requests by at least 50.

Using this post as a test subject (mainly because it is just text, no videos or images), Firebug shows that before the sprite there was 133 HTTP-Requests, after it was down to 78. The total download time was reduced by about 33%.

Then I looked at the site a Linux Mint live disc and of course even though it’s Firefox, it’s not the same as in Windows. Great, top nav is miles above where it should be. Hmmm positioned absolutely, obviously not measuring the same from the bottom of the containing div. Positioning it from the top gets it to work but of course the search box on the right drops down below where it should be.

And all this started when I was thinking about CSS3ing the whole site after changing back from Flock to Firefox when the latter moved to v3.6 – more on that later – and viewing a number of examples that would negate the use of images all together with nice border radii, alpha transparencies, glossy style boxes which of course won’t work in the most used browser.

Bloody interweb, can’t live with it, can’t hit it over the back of the head with a shovel and bury it under the patio…

Click here to view the embedded video.

© Toxic Web

Neko Case was back at the Ò'ran Mór in Glasgow on Monday night with her band, nearly three years since the last visit, illness prevented me getting down to the London show earlier in the year.

They (Neko Case: vocals, tenor guitar, 7 string acoustic – Paul Rigby: guitar – Tom V. Ray: bass double & electric – Kelly Hogan: vocals – Barry Mirochnick: drums – Jon Rauhouse: pedal steel, guitar, banjo) put on another great show in the old church’s basement, from the classics, “Favorite”, “Deep Red Bells”, to tracks from her current, excellent, album “Middle Cyclone” all top notch stuff.

Actually remembered to use my camera before it was time for them to pack up all their gear, can view some dark blurry pics like that on the right either at Jon’s site or on flickr.

Also got a couple of videos from the sound check, here’s Jon and part of Paul…

Click here to view the embedded video.

…the rest of Mr. Rigby’s is again either at Jon’s site or on YouTube.

There’s still a number of dates to go on the tour in England, one in Scotland tonight and one in Amsterdam so if you want to hear some damn fine music check if there’s somewhere near you now, tickets are a very reasonably price and enjoy… can’t guarantee the same price I paid, little pass with AAA meant it was a little cheaper than usual.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

If you didn’t manage to make the Newport Festival – Festival at 50 – over the weekend then you’ll have missed Neko Case with me good mate Jon Rauhouse on the Fort Stage.

Well no problem you can download (or stream – though don’t know why you’d do that when you can have it for keeps) the whole set free and legit at NPR.

Set list:

Set list:

1. “Things That Scare Me”
2. “Sparrow”
3. “People Got a Lotta Nerve”
4. “Fever”
5. “Animal”
6. “Teenage Feeling”
7. “Hold On, Hold On”
8. “Middle Cyclone”
9. “Pharaohs”
10. “Tigers”
11. “Wish I Was the Moon”
12. “Polar Nettles”
13. “Red Tide”
14. “Don’t Forget Me”
15. “This Tornado Loves You”
16. “Vengeance”
17. (Band Intros)
18. Encore: “Train From KC”

Download it now at NPR.

You can also check out a few more free Neko gigs at NPR:

Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club on April 9th, 2009

From Nov. 16, 2007, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

From 2006 at Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

First prize has to go to the poor soul who typed the phrase “pictures of peoples dicks sticking up” in Google and then hit the search button.

Somehow I don’t think they were quite ready for what Google handed them with the first result of the search.

A blog post about the band Bad News with nary an dick up or indeed down in sight, neither male or female as the searcher was looking for “peoples dicks”

Ahh Teh Interweb it promises sooo much, most of the time it delivers but sometimes it just leaves you frustrated.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

The feed for this site is handled by FeedBurner who are of course owned by Google. I hadn’t moved the feed over to my Google account until the other day and while doing it I figured why not take advantage of being able to stick some Google Adsense ads in the feed.

You can subscribe to the feed by email (over on the right just above that big orange “Subscribe” button), now I signed up, when I first stuck the option up on the site, to check how well it worked but never bothered to unsubscribe when I checked it was fine.

So earlier on I scroll down the FeedBurner mail of the feed from yesterday’s post marking the 15th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks and what do I find at the bottom but this ad…

Bill must be spinning in his grave, it’s everything he ever railed against, advertising and marketing…

Click here to view the embedded video.

…dumb ass god botherers…

Click here to view the embedded video.

…and crappy, insipid, weak, banal pop music…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m sorry Bill, I doubt Google will be following up with their own apology.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

Now usually when certain well known “Hallmark Holidays” rear their ugly heads the visitor numbers for this place increases as folks search for Tesco Value Cards.

It went a bit nuts just before last Xmas as the financial woes of the land took hold, but two months on into a new year with Gormless Gordon’s inability to save the world from global economic meltdown it’s seen a huge influx with Valentine’s Day tomorrow. All the posts mentioning the cards are recording numbers 10 to 20 times the norm, most have been on the end of more views this last couple of weeks than their total views from when they were originally posted, most over a year ago, to the beginning of February. Today the visitors at 1pm were about one and a half times the total amount from yesterday and yesterday’s were the same amount greater than the day before that.

Well thanks to a commentator the other day the link’s are all correct and they now have an even bigger selection for nearly all occasions.

Today’s Toxic Top Tip: Want to cause trouble?

Say for example a mate has got himself attached to some annoying bint you can’t stand, send either or indeed both of them a Valentine’s Day card – use different handwriting of course if sending to both, it does work best if they live together – with a very lurid and telling anonymous message. It’s all bound to come out in the wash at some point.

Now your mate will be able to enjoy himself on nights out, so many birds killed with one stone.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

By the the things people searching for on teh interweb to end up at this place.

Yes there’s the usual lot for Ronnie Barker’s “Four Candles” and “Mastermind” sketches, still the bizarrely high number for Bingo from the Banana Splits, the increasing number for AIS scams, with a new addition of “Oh sod it! The bloody thing’s stuck again” from the Clangers.

But the number one search term is for “Tesco Value Cards“, now round this time of year the number does go up but not to these levels and it started very early this year. So click the link and print it out and figure to yourself, well it’s the thought that counts.

A big thanks Gordon, it’s a good job you were such a good chancellor and are now such a great leader of this here country.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

All of a sudden there seems to be a great interest in finding stuff on teh interweb about Bingo from the Banana Splits. Well don’t know if the searchers are happy finding a post about a very poor Billie Piper TV show, a number are searching for Chazbaps herself so they might have got excited by the Billie Piper Playboy shot, you never know, or will they be as disappointed as I figured that person searching for “Sheffield swingers club” was when they got a post about then Yankees slugger Gary Sheffield mouthing off about the team.

So Bingo has over taken the Two Ronnies “Mastermind” and “Four Candles” posts as currently the most popular, though there’s still a number out there that want to view those classic comedy sketches, especially the former.

Van Halen and specifically Wolfgang Van Halen are accounting for a number of search engine hits, since they got back on the tour. Then A-Rod’s stripper friend Joslyn Noel Morse reared her head again for some reason and those pics (NSFW) were the main target of searches.

One search that certainly did make me laugh, rather loudly it has to be said was for “bono is a twat t shirt”

But I figured in the end it must be a teeth thing that people are after, Bingo, Piper and and from just over two years back loads of you strange individuals searching for info on Dennis Waterman’s teeth.

He doesn’t have to write the theme tune, it’s already been done but he could sing it, all together now…

Tra-La-La, La-La-La-La
Tra-La-La, La-La-La-La
Tra-La-La, La-La-La-La
Tra-La-La, La-La-La-La

One banana, two banana three banana, four.
Four Bananas make a bunch and so do many more.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

So the new version of WordPress was released on Saturday and it’s all fine and dandy with new frills ’til you find that one important plugin that won’t work.

Luckily I tested 2.5 on my own PC and not live on a site, made sure the plugins were up to date, used the WP automatic Upgrade plugin to see if it makes things easier.

And it did, everything backed up, deactivated, installed and reactivated with the minimum of fuss, except the Viper’s Video Quicktags that I use for the YouTube videos, which couldn’t be activated, quick squizz at their site, ah problems with the comment form plugin I’m using which I’d overlooked in the plugin upgrades, once that was installed VVQ worked fine – I see VVQ has been upgraded.

Great, until I clicked around to make sure everything else worked and I started getting the 404 error page instead of the categories – Advance Permalinks plugin has gone totally tits up, where it worked perfectly with 2.3.x.

Now with a bit of messing about I could get the categories and posts to work but then the pages flagged up the 404. This plugin was a god send after I moved the blog from it’s own directory in the last version of the site, keeping the blog post URI as /blog/date/post-title/, so much so I used it on another site when I moved it to being run by WP.

And is that the moral of this story? – don’t rely on one plugin

Looks like more hacking about is required, oh happy happy joy joy

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

I had been using the “Identify External Links” since the redesign of the site, it adds that little icon next to the links and and opens them in a new browser tab.

But I could never get it to work correctly, especially with links to the BBC news section, it seemed to have trouble identifying them as external though only on this host, it manages OK on another site on another host server. Here it struggles with URIs that are news.bbc.co.uk and the changes I made meant all links were identified so cites from the Quoter plugin opened a new page, instead of just jumping up to the quoted comment

All kinds of fiddling made no difference, so I changed it today to the Semilogic one. Which of course required more fiddling with the code.

Didn’t want the stylesheet called into the head, easy enough to delete all those lines but it gave you the option of just having the external links in the main body of the post identified or all the links on the page, well I wanted more than the former and less than the latter.

I didn’t want the links in the sidebar done but did want those in comments identified, luckily I could swipe a bit of code from the original plugin to add so it just works in the main post body and comments. Just change the target=_blank to a jscript onlick and the class name and it seems to work better, figures out the BBC links but then I remembered linked images and of course it buggers them up, especially the ones with the nice border floated right.

So more hacking about to buffer out any images that are linked, using the code that’s already in the plugin and now it looks like it works, there’s bound to be something wrong somewhere though , no doubt when WordPress upgrades to v2.5

One of these days I’ll have to learn all this malarky

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

Well certainly not Google who have decided that there’s no point in people who live outside the Americas or Japan offering Adsense Referrals on their sites.

So yes I got that email yesterday saying…

As part of ongoing efforts to optimise revenue opportunities for our publishers, we’re constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as well as tweaking those products already available to our publishers. This is the case for referral units directing visitors to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this programme over the past year, we’ve concluded that there are other products that are of higher value than this programme to publishers in your region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense programme will be retired in the coming weeks.

- The Google AdSense Team

Ah retired, off to god’s waiting room…Florida…for a well earned rest.

Obviously signups based in the US, Brazil or Japan are better if they come through a link from a site that’s run by someone in those countries

There’s a few slightly miffed individuals out there who have seen income wiped just like that, especially those that have signups that could reach the $100 just after the scheme runs out, or indeed those in the Americas or Japan where the pricing structure has changed, i.e. they get less.

Looking at my stats today I noticed they’ve wiped all the data there for Adsense Referrals so I can’t even check to see how many clicks and conversions I got over the last couple of years.

So off to delete all the Adsense Referral code from this site, and others, wouldn’t want to send them traffic that they obviously have no need for or indeed actively don’t want.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

Awoke this fine afternoon, christ it’s miserable outside, not feeling the best after a bad night to find this place had gone haywire overnight and that everyone was being punished for bad behaviour.

The Scrobbler plugin that posts my recent tracks from last.fm was being banned. Rutty mailed me to say he’s been banned and he was getting a message like this one.

Tried a comment myself and even I was banned, as Dougal would say…

What! – What? – What!… Man the lifeboats!… Ban the bomb!…
The dam’s burst!…Is me nightie on fire?… Vote Conservative!…
Keep off the grass!… What! – What? – What!…” - Dougal

No idea what was going on, I hadn’t really changed anything, couldn’t be adding the theme switcher and the themes nah, was the place hacked, well I hovered over the “fix this yourself” link, didn’t want to head to a site that might be responsible for any hacking.

Ah I sort of recognise that URI it’s sommat to do with the “Bad Behaviour” plugin, a quick deactivate later and there we have it, problem solved.

Well partly as BB does keep out a lot of scumbags and their bandwidth thieving spamming ways so I kind of like having it on, quick search about and find it’s not the only case and all is explained at the Bad Behaviour site, duly upgraded to 2.0.11 and things seem to be back to normal now.

Well ’til the next problem…

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

After Rutty’s comments about the new design being a little too wide for his laptop I figured I’d better look at a few stats and getting things to fit a bit better.

So a quick squizz at The Counter’s global stats shows that for the last year the screen resolution of 1024×768 accounted for between 50 and 53% of visitors they tracked.

Ah right so 50% of possible viewers would more than likely get a horizontal scrollbar, not good, I really should have checked this all out before and I normally don’t make fixed width sites any wider than about 970px. It was that little side nav that did it, that’s who I’m blaming anyway.

Right that meant a bit of cutting and cropping, a few pixels here a few pixels there, making sure it’s not too tight a fit for all the sections.

So there’s now a choice of themes for those with little 1024 screens and those with nice big browser acreage. The smaller theme is set as the default with the wider version being available from the theme switcher.

So a little Ctr+F5 might be in order.

Pain in the arse to see at The Counter that Internet Explorer 6 still accounts for about 50% of viewers, upgrade now you muppets.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

But I’m leaving it now for the night.

Stuff it if things aren’t working right, a complete disaster FTP the thing, with folders ending up all places they shouldn’t, stuff not transfering, I just knew I shouldn’t have updated FileZilla before this place.

Oh well sod it, see how things go through the night, bound to be a load of problems, I knew there was a reason nowt hardly gets done on here on a Tuesday.

© Toxic Web

Play Your Favorite Song Better

Couple of site problems with WordPress, seem more likely host than software.

So just seeing if posting works before I ramble out a pile of crap.