JFlip Fix for IE Browser

Have you ever used the cool jquery plug-in called jflip? This plug-in developed by Renato Formato simulates page flipping for image gallery. 

If you are not cautious in using the plug-in, you may notice that internet explorer (IE8 in my case) does not display the images along with the supposed cool flipping effect. You may notice that the browser yields an error like 'G_vmlCanvasManager' is undefined with reference to the query.jflip-0.4-min.js.

You may get suggestions like use <!--[if IE]><script type="text/javascript" src="js/excanvas.js"></script><![endif]--> in the HTML header tag. That might solve the problem for some, but if you get another error, try using the excanvasX.js to fix the browser bugs further. Just place it your site directory and don't forget to reference it in the header, before the jflip script. It may look like this: <!--[if IE]><script type="text/javascript" src="js/excanvasX.js"></script><![endif]-->, it depends on your directory structure.

Check again your flipping image gallery in IE to see if that fix really works.

Social Awareness Campaigns Through Facebook and Other Social Media

Social networking (sites) has found its massive role in making connections among people across the globe. We get reacquainted to many of our long lost friends, found new pals, shared interests, exchanged thoughts, participated in discussions and many other social activities. These of course are done in-front of your computer or mobile gadgets with the power of internet.

Another important usage of social medium like Facebook is that it's becoming a popular outlet to create awareness or raise funds for a cause. I have seen some Facebook pages that seek to raise funds for the operation of children suffering from deadly diseases. The campaign for raising funds can become viral across social spectrum because tagging of friends is just a click a way.

There was also an awareness campaign before that was supported by women Facebook users. It was made known in their status messages! You probably seen it from your newsfeed the kind of posts that starts with "I like it on".  Yes, it was an awareness campaign, about breast cancer, that is. It went viral very fast!

Just recently, another awareness campaign virally popped up on Facebook! This time it is an awareness Campaign to End Violence Against Children. Facebook users who support this campaign had their profile picture replaced by cartoon images. This has something to do with the right of children to enjoy childhood, and life itself, safe and far from violence.

The putting up of a space for campaigns for a cause is one of the greatest achievements of the social media over the internet. It is a rather subtle, convenient and speedy way to advocate great causes. One of the reasons why Internet was nominated  for Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Image Replacement Through CSS and its SEO Issues

In our web design training, we were taught about the importance of providing alt attributes to images embedded using the <img /> tag. This is for providing some kind of description to the image when the browser has its display image turned off or so that those visually impaired people can have access as to what the image is all about. And for the logo or banner images (wherein they are embedded in CSS and not through img tag) where the company name and its business tagline is etched, we were taught to provide text equivalent to the lines of text in the image.

The CSS technique of replacing the image with text can be accomplished by using the display:none attribute-value or by making the text-indent equal to outside of the screen display (say, -9999px). Basically, what these techniques do is hide the html text from appearing in the browser (remember that those text are already in the image) yet still providing accessibility  for readers (intended for blind). Those hidden text are not visible in the browser but in the source code they can be read by search engine spiders or crawlers.

When I gain some knowledge of SEO, especially on-page, I came to understand that this technique has been tagged as black hat SEO technique because one can then put hidden keywords in web pages. It is admonished to provide text content (keywords) not visible to users but visible to search engines (cloaking!). Putting invisible keywords may result into getting banned from search engines when they discover it.

In todays websphere, some website owners are struggling to rank their site on major search engines. Ranking keywords for your site requires tremendous amount of effort and patience. It is better to adhere to white hat seo practices than to get yourself banned by search engines.