Month: December 2006

How to Fake Background Opacity

Flipflops 5 Comments

The more observant among you will notice that the background of the website has changed recently. I love my butterflies but since I’ve been putting up a lot of pictures of art lately something had started to bug me.

The site is built with a simple centered container – I wanted the background of the website to show through but very faintly (at about 5-10% opacity). When you just have text this looks great, but as soon as you start to add photographs you start to run into problems – the background shows through the image – this is because the opacity effects everything within in.

For example if I have div id=”container” etc. with an opacity of 95% applied to it, all the child elements of thatdiv will also have opacity of 95%…There is however a CSS solution – a trick – you need to create two background images and position them very carefully.

Here are the detailed instructions and CSS.

 example 1 example 2 example3 example 4 example 5

Wierd WordPress Function

Flipflops

Well here is a wierd thing. At the moment I’m trying to write my first WordPress plugin (for an image gallery). Everthing I posted to the database seemed to be getting wrapped with tags. After 20 minutes of tearing my hair out, here is why:

I was using the following code:
$gallery_name = $_POST['gallery_name'];
$gallery_name = escape($gallery_name);

$result = $wpdb->query("INSERT INTO...;
This saved say ‘

monkey

‘ to the database when all I wanted was ‘monkey’ – the answer? Well i should have been using:
$gallery_name = $wpdb->escape($gallery_name);
Who would have thought so stupidly simple and such a bugger to find. Still the most useful bit of PHP I know is:
echo(' 

'); 
print_r($_POST); 
echo('

');
After all if you are going to tear your hair out it is better to be safe than sorry.