The author of the web comic Help Desk, Christopher B. Wright, recently switched from a Wordpress driven to a Drupal-powered website resulting in broken links in my “yet-never-2-be-released-and-famous” sidebar plugin Help Desk Embedded.

However the update was surprisingly easy, and everything should now be working as normal. The updates from Tuesday and Wednesday earlier this week have already been included, and the next step concerns the auto-update which I hope is still working as intended.

Even though you’ll get the latest comic here I strongly recommend checking out the Help Desk archive, and also another comic by the same author under the name Kernel Panic. Make sure to click his ads as I’m sure Mr. Wright is eager to get some encouragement (in the shape of $/€/£) after spending numerous man-hours converting his whole website

After taking a closer look at the genius jQuery JavaScript Library I decided to post an example on how easy you can create a nice looking, space-saving navigation menu.

It’s nothing fancy (yet) but can easily become very good-looking indeed. Take a look at the tiny Navigation Menu Example and judge for yourself. The example is based mainly on the jQuery plugin: Accordion, and the only main difference is the up and down arrows included in the “slightly modified” CSS.

I’m thinking of implementing this plugin in my new WP theme (which is currently only available in my head) in order to display more info in less space. Another thing worth mentioning is that the code itself degrades beautifully on browsers without Java support as this only results in all menus being shown in “expanded” modus.

Note! If you’re wondering why I’ve set the anchor tag href to javascript:; it is to basically make nothing happen rather than the common do-nothing insert to use for the href property which is a pound sign (#). Even if that would work also it’ll also move the user’s scroll bar to the very top of your website, which can get quite annoying.

Update: Based on user feedback I’ve added an example showing how to add a second level within the list.

This tutorial explains how to create a collapsible DIV with JavaScript and CSS. A simple trick that needs to be used more often. Just as I thought I’d publish a link to the tutorial it appears that the website (WordPress in particular) is experiencing extreme difficulties. When this is sorted however you’ll be able to read all about how to create a collapsible DIV.

In the meanwhile you might want to check out some other cool show/hide CSS/JS tricks.

Read more

This article explains how to configure and run multiple MySQL installations under Microsoft Windows.

I’ve now MySQL 5.0.37 and MySQL 5.2.3-falcon-alpha set up on my PC. I could easily add more versions but for my testing purposes this does the job. The installation procedure is explained in detail in my post about how to install MySQL5 on Windows.

NOTE! During set-up the installer asks you if you would like to Install As Windows Service, and in case you are planning multiple installations you should provide a unique name for each service corresponding to the version number. My default service (MySQL 5.0.37) is named “MySQL5” and my test installation (MySQL 5.2.3) is named “MySQL52” - you get the picture. For any installation that you don’t want Windows to initiate during start-up, uncheck the “Launch the MySQL Server automatically”.

While looking for something completely different I stumbled across this article by Jeffrey Zeldman. It explains in detail some issues related to the DOCTYPE which I’ve never thought of.

You’ve done all the right stuff, but your site doesn’t look or work as it should in the latest browsers.

You’ve written valid XHTML and CSS. You’ve used the W3C standard Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate dynamic page elements. Yet, in browsers designed to support these very standards, your site is failing. A faulty DOCTYPE is likely to blame.

This little article will provide you with DOCTYPEs that work, and explain the practical, real–world effect of these seemingly abstract tags.

What I really was after is explained in detail at Pat’s Place in the article about how to Attach icons to anything with CSS. I’ll post a follow-up on that subject later as I’ve just implemented the technique described on this site.

I will during the weekend spend some time looking into the DOCTYPE issue, and maybe get some answers to why IE does strange things when you least expect it.