Harry Vance-Law

Mac Clipboard History

harry — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:50:18 +0000

Clipboard history let’s you see the last few things you’ve copied. In many cases this doesn’t make much of a difference to productivity. But sometimes you’ve meant to paste something but got distracted, or you have three separate words to copy to from one page to another. That’s when that history is useful. Instead of copying, switching windows, and pasting three times. You can those three words, switch windows, and then paste those three words using your history. After a while, that saved time adds up.

There are a ton of free programs out there that add different kind of cliboard history features. However, I’ve always been an advocate for minimalist, elegant solutions that don’t overcomplicate or hog system resources. So after experimenting with a few, I settled down with Jumpcut. It does what it’s supposed to, no more, no less.

Open PDF links in a new window with JQuery

harry — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:56:01 +0000

One some system/browser configurations a user will click a PDF link and lose their place on the website. They can of course just use the back button, but I’ve had client’s ask me before to open these links in new windows. I can see their point, especially when the browser uses it’s own PDF viewer to open it. Here’s a snippet to make sure all those links open in a new window.

$("a[href*=.pdf]").click(function(){ window.open(this.href); return false; });

wp-content slider

harry — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:18:40 +0000

I’ve moved on to a different slider now, but I wanted to address an issue I’ve had with another slider in case anyone else has had the same issue.

Getting the fade to work with the wp-content slider is a pain.

This plugin is great and is very customizable but one strange problem is that the captions don’t appear when you use the fade in/out transition effect. For some projects, this isn’t acceptable.

The Solution:

Reduce the number of squares to 1 up and 1 across in the plugin settings. Then go to line 224 of coin-slider.js and change the duration of the fade.

You can see the finished version at drayden.com .

New Website

harry — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:39:24 +0000

As a web designer, you’re just fooling yourself if you think your current online portfolio is going to last more than a year or two. Ideally, I think we’d all like the time for a redesign a few months after the last. With that in mind, my new portfolio has a minimal and spacious layout. Plenty of white-space and potential for future inspiration. Hopefully, instead of a time-consuming redesign, I can build and adjust visuals to my liking over the next while.