Category: ICT

Transparent background with My Avatar Editor Object

Posted on by John McLear


If you are using the javascript swfobject method for the hosted My Avatar Editor object you can use this code to give your avatar a transparent background:

<script type="text/javascript">
        //<![CDATA[
        var avatarvalue = "<?= $avatarid ?>";
        var avatarURL = "myavatarcharacter.swf?avatar=" + avatarvalue;
        swfobject.embedSWF(avatarURL, "avatarSWFContainer", "160", "200", "10.0.0", null, {hosted:"true"},{wmode:"transparent"});
        function setFacialFeature(){
                var avatarSWF = document.getElementById('avatarSWFContainer');
                avatarSWF.draw();
        }
        //]]>
</script>

The only bit you need to change from the default code is the parameter which is the {wmode:”transparent”} bit

Creating your own Safe Search – A call to teachers!

Posted on by John McLear

Searchy Pants is a new exciting way for schools and parents to create their own safe search home page.

We focused on three main benefits:

  1. Include your family/schools branding/logo
  2. Include a message to your kids/pupils/teachers
  3. Include useful links

We kept the admin interface as simple as possible (Just 3 pages and a wizard style setup)

Please do sign up and test it, we are happy with it so far but we know that feedback over the next few months will get us to a point where we can do a formal launch to all schools.

We kept Searchy Pants as safe as possible with various bits I will talk about in the future, most of you will be aware of the Safe Search engine we have maintained for the last 4 years with great success.

SearchyPants is pronounced – Ser Chee Pants  – Like SmartyPants but that domain was gone 😛

Thanks to Matt Lovegrove for the testing so far.  If you think Searchy Pants is a good idea then please share it!

Making Etherpad content indexable by Search Engines

Posted on by John McLear

Engineering drawing of a binocular spy-glass

Etherpad contents very rarely shows up on Search results.  But with forums and wikis moving over to it I wanted to find a way to give etherpad a bit of an SEO edge..

Firstly I looked at the twitterstyletags plugin which creates an rss feed or all pads..  This is a perfect solution for a sitemap so that’s that box ticked 🙂

Next I knew that Etherpad served pad contents in an iframe so I looked at better ways to get content for search engines to index.  Etherpad includes Read only versions of each pad, these read only versions push the content to the user without displaying it in an iframe so it is a perfect fix for the problem.

My final step will be to find someone to modify the twitterstyletags plugin RSS feed to create a sitemap.xml and to create a plugin that allows users to easily link back from read only versions to currently active pads.