Blogger Dynamic Views – “Sidebar” with vertical scroll

Switching this blog to Dynamic Views a few months ago I thought that would make for a nicer user experience, but then I recently realized that most people don’t know that in Sidebar view there are more posts on the left that what you see, and that you can scroll through by hovering and then using the wheel, or by clicking an entry to the start or the end of the list and that will make it automatically scroll showing more posts.

After sending the feedback to Google – which even if they will consider it, it will take a while to get it in – looking for ways to change and customize the Dynamic Views I found a lot of useful tips at http://www.southernspeakers.net/, all by simply by using additional custom CSS styles.

Then it hit me, I may be able to force the vertical scrollbar with CSS code! The solution is not perfect, as it is only renders the scrollbar for as many entries as configured to load in a batch, but it’s something and sort of plants the idea that there are more posts in there.

You can add the custom CSS style in Blogger in Template > Customize > Advanced > Add CSS.

div#sidebar { overflow-y: scroll !important; }

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_overflow-y.asp
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/cascade.html#important-rules

As a tip, you can find these bits with F12 developer tools (very similar in all current browsers) and then use the pointer in the toolbar to focus the element you want to work with.

ECMAScript 5: The New Parts – Douglas Crockford(MIX11)

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/MIX/MIX11/EXT13

The first complete implementations of the first revision to the JavaScript, I mean ECMAScript, Standard in 10 years are now coming online. This talk will introduce the new, mostly good, parts.

PHP HTTP compression (gzip)

Hosting your PHP web application on server that doesn’t have compression enabled at the web server level? No worries, enable compression in your application by placing this code at the top of your page:

  <?php
  ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
  ?>

http://php.net/manual/en/function.ob-gzhandler.php

ob_gzhandler() is intended to be used as a callback function for ob_start() to help facilitate sending gz-encoded data to web browsers that support compressed web pages. Before ob_gzhandler() actually sends compressed data, it determines what type of content encoding the browser will accept ("gzip", "deflate" or none at all) and will return its output accordingly. All browsers are supported since it's up to the browser to send the correct header saying that it accepts compressed web pages. If a browser doesn't support compressed pages this function returns FALSE.

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Related posts:
http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2010/04/http-compression.html