slayeroffice - web experiments gone horribly awry

02.15.2006 - Ugh...

I think I've written a number of fairly kick ass things for this site over the years, and while they get a decent amount of traffic, I'm no where near using up any bandwidth allocations here on slayeroffice.

So imagine my surprise when I got up this morning and found that a long deprecated, embarrassing piece of obtrusive, inaccessible javascript had been dugg and had thrown more traffic this way than anything ever. Horror would be a better word than surprise.

For what seems forever now, when someone has asked me about the old image cross fader script I would explain to them that it's still listed for historical value but shouldn't be used. I'd then point them to Patrick Lauke's improved version. I'd long meant to add a notice to the page redirecting to Patrick's version, but...well, you know - no one was really looking at it and I had other things going on and never got around to it.

What I find really interesting is that so many people have found the original code a good example of how to do something like this. It seems the unobtrusive scripting camp has a lot more work to do. It makes my stomach hurt to consider myself as part of the obtrusive scripting problem, so I've re-coded the thing as it should have been in the first place and will be vigorously pruning the older content here (some of it has been de-listed entirely) and putting notices up where they belong.

My apologies to those who dugg the original.

Comments

Thanks very much for the elegant re-write! I hope you don't mind my use.

Kindest -- Bill
Posted by Bro Bill on February 15, 2006 @ 10:44 pm

Very nice. Just to be picky but the line "current = imgs[current+1]?current+1:0;" could use nIndex instead of computing it again, not that it makes any difference though ^.^;

take care
Posted by Matt on February 16, 2006 @ 12:20 am

Looks great in Opera9 :)
Posted by Steve Clay on February 16, 2006 @ 1:25 am

hah...just the other day i thought about fixing a niggling issue with my version. your code is slick, congrats.
Posted by patrick h. lauke on February 16, 2006 @ 2:43 am

This is unbelievable stuff ... you should go work for a big IT company :)
Posted by Silly on February 16, 2006 @ 4:50 pm

Hi Steve,

Great script! Thanx for the rewrite working in Firefox 1.5, IE7b2 and Opera9 Beta!

Regards,

Stan.
Posted by Stan on February 16, 2006 @ 5:03 pm

Excellent work Steve, i'd only just found your old version but the new one is nicer!
Posted by Richard on February 23, 2006 @ 11:03 am

Your timing couldn't have been better! After searching for an elegant alternative to flash for a certain project, I'd almost given up on anything that worked outside of IE with a fade, and then I must have hit the right google combination! Thanks! xoxo
Posted by Alison on February 26, 2006 @ 1:11 am

This _is_ great stuff. Like Alison, I had been searching for a Flash alternative for a long time, and this seems perfect. Still working out some crashing issues in Safari, but it looks promising.
Posted by Greg on March 7, 2006 @ 2:18 pm

thanks for the great code. I am not a programmer and was wondering if there's an easy way to modify the code to have the fading slideshow stop when the last image in the imageContainer div is reached?

thanks
Posted by nate on March 21, 2006 @ 7:58 pm

I had been looking for an explanation on how to use the createDocumentFragment method. Your 'alternatives to innerHTML' article really sums what I've been looking for. Thanks.
Posted by Rolando Garza on March 26, 2006 @ 4:38 am

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