Plugins are cool…
Well… they are. Again, someone has spent some time to solve problems that I need a solution for. Granted if there weren’t a solution that fits my needs, I would write it on my own… this isn’t one of those cases.
Problem:
My wife and I have a blog that we keep up to show our families our progress on our house. We have pictures on every post. We would always pop open a new window to show the photos in full scale. Since the majority of our families aren’t all that computer literate, they would have a hard time figuring out how to get back to the site. I wanted a clever easy to understand solution that wouldn’t navigate them away from the page, and a single click would bring them back to our site.
The Solution:
I figure if I surround myself with smart people, I will only become smarter too. I am still waiting. Anyway a friend of mine here at work has his own site. I love to keep an eye on it as he has much more time than I do for some reason.
He wrote an article about a tool called lightbox. Defined: “Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.” Needless to say, I had to give it a shot. It was amazingly simple to implement and works very well on most browsers. It comes with everything right down to the loading.gif.
Simply put you add “ref” and “title” attributes to your anchor tag. The title will show in the description and the href image will show in the picture frame. Too easy right? Well, check it out below.
Example Image (click to biggerize):
Example URL:
Click me…
To learn more about the plugin… visit the creators page here: http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
Thanks to Savage Turtle for the info to get me going.
Word,
Matt
on January 25, 2006 at 7:58 am
Permalink
One thing I have noticed is if you refresh the site and click on your image before the javascript has been loaded into the browser, you will just be redirected to the image. Not really that big of a deal, but something that is good to know.