Not all of the Content that comes out of Captain Cursor Creations is an art project, or a site. Some of it is technical experimentation, other parts of it is pure folly and hubris. Here are some of the technical projects that I’ve worked on.
Captain Cursor Weblog
You’ve probably already read through some of this if you’re here. I’ve jumped on the whole weblog bandwagon. It’s my thoughts, my hopes, my dreams, my own private thoughts about various web protocols. As well as interface, design, and content.
Signal2noise
This was originally the studio page for Anna and I until we changed our name to UndoAnimations and formed the company. It’s my thoughts on internet storytelling, with a focus on games, animation, and comics. I’m still fiddling with the design at the moment.
Webmonkey Dreamweaver XSSI Extensions
This extension to Dreamweaver allowed page authors to use the popular Apache XSSI scripting language in Dreamweaver. Aside from just inserting the statements into the source, the extensions translated the content into what the server parsed outcome of the page would be. This was challenging as it involved communicating scripting concepts through a graphical interface. Alx worked on the translator (basically a port of Apache’s Mod_include, Yeah OSS) and Nadav Savio and I did the interface.
Webmonkey Javascript Code Library
I helped found the Webmonkey Javascript Code Library with Nadav Savio. Perl programmers have CPAN for finding solutions to common coding problems, but Javascript programmers were left to reinvent the wheel every time. The Webmonkey code library was envisioned as a way to help share knowledge of javascript. Here are some of my favorite functions:
Font Scaling Routine
HTML can only handle so many ways of dealing with the expandable nature of page size. You can pop open a new window, fix your table size to a fixed amount, or you can give up control. The font scaling Routine is one method of coping where the size of the text on the page will scale based on the size of the window. When constructed with relative images widths you get an effect similar to flash, but with HTML. LiveWired was built using this as a foundation of the design.
Netscape CSS Resize Fix
Netscape 4.0 has an annoying habit of losing all the style information when the browser window is resized. This makes it almost impossible to use DHTML for any kind of page that real people have to use. In my DHTML tutorial I offered up an ad-hoc solution. Matthew Baird wrote me with a better methodology and I incorporated it into this routine. Presto – chango you can use CSS and specifically positioned elements in Netscape with (relative) impunity.
DHTML foundation library
Like Scott Isaacs’ cross platform DHTMLLib, or the FreeDOM project. My version was a lot less ambitious in scope, all I wanted out of my library was to get a correct object reference for the two different ways of referencing a layer.