Category: Web Things

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.

Code is Poetry

Flipflops

Lately I’ve been building both my first WordPress Plugins and my first diddy little applicationlets in CakePHP.

Both have been good – WordPress is doable and not grim to work with although the quantity of functions to wade through is quite bewildering at times, but at the end of the day it’s just like the stuff I do all day at work.

Cake however is a revalation I feel I have to mis-appropriate the WordPress moto and apply it to Cake – Code really can be Poetry – but the best part is it just works.