There are a lot of good reasons to lambast MySpace, but how many of us have an account on the site in spite of them? With that in mind, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a cross-browser, alpha-PNG talk bubble, that can be attached to various portraits, auto-generated, and pasted into a MySpace profile page (for example).

MySpace Bubbles – Available Here

I realize this post doesn’t have a very creative title, but when you’re writing for Google, it helps to try and summarize the problem in a straightforward way, using keywords others afflicted with the similar problem might use when searching.

So, what is the problem I speak of? This morning, I learned about the Yahoo Maps API, which is very exciting, and which deserves its own post, at a later date. (Ok – one digression: what makes the Yahoo Maps API exciting? One word: geocoding.)

Like the Google Maps API, the Yahoo Maps API allows the placement of marker points. This is basic stuff, but, for some reason I was having difficulty getting the marker points to display. Even when using Yahoo’s basic example code, nothing would display. Undaunted, I decided that perhaps the problem was the website into which I was attempting to integrate the Yahoo map. I started stripping away HTML, CSS, and finally other JavaScript.

And that’s when I found the solution. I am using the very popularity prototype javascript library in this particular web application. Well, for whatever reason – and bonus points for someone with enough time to dig through both libraries and find the cause – loading the prototype library prior to loading the Yahoo Maps API will cause your points not to display. Simple fix? Disable prototype on pages where you’re embedding maps with marker points.

Due to the popularity of the prototype library, and coolness of the Yahoo Maps API, I imagine I won’t be the only one who encounters this problem. Hope this post helps someone else. Oh, and if you want, point to cool examples of your Yahoo maps web apps.

As those who stumble onto this website can see, Electricstate.com hosts a few small projects, like the iPod bartender, and LinkFinder. Well, I’ve added another one to that mix. This one is called Patron Grid

What is Patron Grid? It’s a way, ala Million Dollar Home Page, for website owners to display those who have donated to their projects. It’s data file is a plain XML file, which is parsed – AJAX style – and displayed. A Wordpress Plugin is in the works. It will be freely available. In the meantime, if you want to hack around with something, the code is also available on the some page.

My favorite? Probably #4, which is table-less forms, by the always impeccable Peter-Paul Koch.

Will this article get me to finally write down my own list of the CSS tips and tricks I’ve learned, after being exclusive to CSS and (nearly) exclusive to table-free design since 2002? We’ll see.

I actually noticed it intermittently last night, but Slashdot has finally made the move. Kudos to them.

While I really want to make a “Thanks for joining 1999! LOL!” remark here, I can’t bring myself to do so. Perhaps that’s because I don’t want to think about what a terrible process it must have been to convert all those old, statically generated stories from HTML to CSS. It’s hard to even imagine.

Oh, and to all of you people complaining about Slashdot not moving to XHTML Strict – why would they do so? Well-formed CSS has obvious advantages. But XHTML? What’s the point? (And that’s from someone whose site does validate as XHTML strict.)

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