Now for some Web Nerdiness (which is what I originally intended for this site…oh well). sIFR – Scalable Image Font Replacement. This isn’t new, but I just found it. I’ve been looking for a way to dynamically output titles in my websites in fonts other than the standard Arial or Times New Roman.
Mike Davidson uses Flash! I’ve always been wary about using Flash in web work because I didn’t know how prevalent Flash is in the public, but he states “…that every new version of Flash penetrates over 85% of computers within 14 months.”
He uses a combination of Javascript and CSS to detect Flash. Without going into a lot of web development nerdiness (you can read the article if you want that), if the browser has flash the cool font you wanted is displayed. If not, the regular font still shows up.
I expirimented with it and it was so easy to work with that I implemented it into timches.com already.
You can see the results
Compare it to the way it used to be
You can see the difference it makes in the titles and dates of each update entry. Before I have little images for each and every title if I wanted a nice looking font. Now, I can just type out the text in the code! It’s only a matter of time until I start using it everywhere, including this site.
Read the article on sIFR–it’s really interesting.
Using Mozilla 1.7.5 on Linux
This is good because most times flash is used, there’s no graceful degradation for browsers without flash. It’s important to offer the same information (in a less pretty way) without having to go to much trouble.
Using Mozilla 1.7.5 on Linux
Make it go away!
It looks all right, but it pushes up CPU usage to 100% for seven seconds on my older laptop.
No thank you!