Small Fix for IE. CeeTip v1.0.1

Announcing without much fanfare CeeTip, a basic jquery tooltip plugin which works smoothly with CeeBox (v2.0.9 and higher).

I couldn’t find one I wanted* which also worked properly with CeeBox**, so I borrowed code from vTip, turned into a jquery plugin and modified it as follows:

• moved all the css to the javascript (it’s so minimal that it seemed silly to have another css file.)
• added some optional settings.
• added a minimized version (only 1.6KB).

Download CeeTip 1.0.1

You can also find CeeTip on Github

* the problem I was having finding a tooltip is that several were either ugly or their file size was way too big.

** Other tooltips can work as long as they either somehow keep the title tag intact or they store the title in linkelement.t on the link in question.

Erg. Note to self Safari (webkit) wrongly considers typeof /regexp/ == ‘function’ when all the other browsers use typeof /regexp/ == ‘object’

CeeBox 2.0.7 released with bug fix for Safari/webkit that effected video embedding. Hopefully that’s the last of the bugs.

On a side note, I changed comments on my blog to be in reverse chronological order and put the comment field at the top as a temporary fix to the “OMG there are so many damned comments!” issue on some of the posts. I will likely revamp comments with a nested comments plugin or something when I revamp catcubed.com.

Again I had nifty idea. Use an external JSON file to add more video support so that I and others could release additional video support without releasing the main jquery.ceebox.js file and without increasing to the bulk of ceebox. Makes it easy for sites to add support selectively too so that CeeBox is more an adaptive tool rather than a heavy do everything.

Get it all working too for in the new CeeBox 2.0.6… which also include a bug fix for video galleries. Missed a bug in my checking during the 2.0.5 release.

It’s my first time messing with JSON. Pretty nifty cool stuff.

I released version 2.0 of CeeBox earlier this month. On the way to 2.0, I most likely completely rewrote the thing 3–4 times as I learned new and better ways to do things. Numerous times I would be riding on my bike and suddenly have inspiration for a new solution. Other times I would just dive into another javascript tutorial and find the answer laying there.

The development of CeeBox It’s been a long road and has taken a lot more of my time than I originally anticipated, but it’s been a great learning experience. I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn more javascript  to create a plugin for their favorite framework. Personally I recommend jQuery though they all have their strengths. Tripwire magazine has a great writeup on all of the main javascript frameworks.

I just released 2.0.5 today which fixes a bug that was submitted by one of my readers (I am thankful for everyone who submits bugs) and adds the last bit of functionality I wanted to include: namely, the ability to add additional video player support (relatively) easily. This last bit was made possible by some knowledge I gained from John Resig’s awesome and simple Learning Advanced Javascript tutorial and a better grasp of regular expressions.

Anyway, I think I’m finally happy with CeeBox as it stands:

• It’s pretty small for a script with this much functionality (12KB minimized). There are lightbox style scripts which are smaller but they have less functionality.
• And there are lightbox style scripts that are bigger and also have less functionality
• Really, I think it has become is one of the best full functional lightbox clone scripts out there for two main reasons:
  • The only one that tops it for support of various video sites is the mootools based mediabox advanced which is a pretty impressive plugin (though it’s 18KB). But then again additional support can be easily added to CeeBox.
  • There are few that offer galleries for videos and none that I’ve seen that make it so easy to create galleries (there is no need to add gallery names in the class or rel for every damned link, just activate the ceebox function on a parent element)

There are a couple things it can’t do which I may add later, but I don’t need them at the moment, so I’m solidly gonna take a break from adding more functionality:

• It doesn’t currently support direct links to quicktime, wmv, or mp3 natively but you can use the public function $.fn.ceebox.popup to do that if you want.
• A number of video players are difficult if not impossible to add native ceebox support for because of the automatic detection method I use for video embeding.
  • Daily Show (and a number of other sites) don’t include a id in the link to their video page, so I can’t automatically create the src link.
  • Flickr video does include the id, but there is no way to differentiate from the link itself which is a page with a photo and which is a page with a video. It would be fairly easy to add support for video but then it would assume every link to flickr was a video link. Clumsy to say the least.

I will continue to issue bug fixes when required, but the feature additions will slow to a trickle. Most likely I I will let it sit at 2.0.x for a while until I’m confident that every bug is squashed, and then I will promote it to 2.1.

With CeeBox wrapping up, I have a number of additional personal web projects that I’d like to get to.

• CeeTip – a basic small tooltip that works with CeeBox. (I already have a working version of this that I use, but I’d like to rework it and release it officially)
• CeeBox wordpress plugin – I have a half-assed CeeBox WP plugin that I use for this site, but I need to learn more php to do it right. If anyone with more WordPress plugin knowhow wants to help with this that would be great.
• Color Animation – I have an inkling to improve the color animation plugin, as it has been sitting there stagnant since 2007. It’s got a few issues that others have submitted and could use a little improvement, but it’s been ignored by it’s creator. Supposedly the jQuery UI has better color animation support, but I don’t need the whole UI library for every project.
• CatCubed overhaul – In the upcoming months I will be overhauling this site.

Anyways, I’m out. This post turned into something much longer than expected, but then again I’ve been working on this a while so it deserves a solid post to mark the conclusion.

CeeBox is now a full fledged jQuery plugin. I’m pretty proud as this is the first full fledged jquery plugin I’ve ever coded.

You can download it directly from github: Ceebox 1.4 Make that CeeBox 1.4.1 (I found a small error in the minimized css file and then decided to reorganize the css file a bit to make it easier to change graphics)

Make that

If you are running CeeBox 1.3.4 and it makes you happy feel free to skip this upgrade. There is no additional functionality (though it is slightly more usable as a jquery plugin). I did however do a bit more code optimization reducing the size of the minimized version to 8.4KB which is smaller than a majority of the lightbox-like plugins out there—it’s even slightly smaller than Thickbox which this was originally inspired from.

Screenshot of it in operation (Note the next button which is the right side of the image is rolled over):

I am also working on making a WordPress plugin out of this. Actually I did create a basic CeeBox wordpress plugin already but it is not ready for release.

I guess I needed to exercise the geek part of my brain after all that art recently. Last Friday and today I dove into upgrading CeeBox to 1.2. This release includes a bunch of fixes and uses the swfobject jquery plugin instead of the normal swfobject.js which allows it to be much smaller and cleaner. As a result, with the use of the jquery plugin and with the new minified version of ceebox.js it saves 13KB which is huge.

The new version supports vimeo and daily motion along with all the others it did before. Also, it allows for flexible auto sizing of the modules (video or html) based on the browser window or you can set a static base size for either.

There are also a bunch of little bug fixes and code cleanup. CeeBox may be based on a mashup of Thickbox and Videobox but most of the code is radically changed and I feel improved.

You can download the new version and find more details at: CeeBox – Thickbox/videobox mashup for jquery.

My next step with this is that I’d like to make a wordpress plugin version of ceebox. Not any time soon though.