Over the past few years there have been quite a few instances where I have needed to use Modal Windows to display images or other content. Depending on the functionality desired, as well as what was the “cool thing” at the time, I had to choose between a number of options. With that in mind I decided I would share my experience with 7 of the solutions I have used.

I have chosen the following for the comparison (simply because these are the ones I have used): Lightbox2, Thickbox, Lytebox, Facebox, ModalBox, Prototype Window, and Slimbox. All of these options provide varying levels of functionality, and may require dependencies to function as well. As part of the comparison criteria I have also noted whether a WordPress plugin is available, as this can come in handy for those running their own blogs.

Although I will give my thoughts on each of the scripts below, I have also put together a detailed chart that compares size, dependencies, functionality, etc. for each of the scripts. If you want a quick overview have a look at it now. On to the candidates:

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So a few months ago I picked up running again. I have been an on-again off-again runner for years. When I went to get back into it I realized that my old GPS watch (a Garmin forerunner) no longer functioned. So I had to start using MapMyRun to calculate distance.

However I also wanted a place to keep track of my workouts, etc. and to be perfectly honest MapMyRun just wasn’t cutting it (not to mention being filled with ads). After a Tweet about one of my daily runs I got a new follower: dailymile. Right on its heals was an invite to participate in the private beta of their new service, a sort of combination between workout tracker and social network. Although I still have to use other services to track distances (more on that below), dailymile is one of my new favorite apps, and I am on it almost daily. Let’s look at the good, and the not-so good.

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Over time you get accustomed to writing CSS/XHTML. And as you do you notice yourself developing habits: maybe you indent each CSS property with a space, maybe you keep your divs in a clean, tree-like structure. One thing I have noticed is that I have begun adding 3 classes in my CSS file before doing anything else, and it has made my life infinitely easier. If you aren’t doing this, well then you should be.

The Left Class

While some people are all about using absolute positioning, I have always been partial to simple floats, defining margin and/or padding if necessary. For this reason, “the left class” is one of the first that goes in my stylesheet.

.left {
 float: left;
}

That’s it. You can now use this class throughout your project. Want a picture displayed in your paragraph with the text wrapped? Stick a class=”left” on the image tag. Want your list items to come out in a horizontal list? Tag on the left class to the li tag.

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As you may have seen in the sidebar I work as a Project Manager for change:healthcare. Well, in addition to providing an amazing application for healthcare consumers, several members of the team also recently wrote a book: My Healthcare is Killing Me. Essentially it is a survival guide packed with tips for the American healthcare consumer. It is available as a free PDF ebook, and for purchase on the site or at Amazon.

I’ve read the book, and even as a rare user of the healthcare system (I’m thankfully pretty healthy ::knocks on wood::) it is a great read with great tips; everything from negotiating a lower price to understanding those crazy EOBs your insurance sends you. Apparently CNN was pretty impressed with the book and our company too. Today they wrote an article on 6 ways to save money on drugs and doctors and featured both My Healthcare is Killing Me and the change:healthcare application. Oh yeah, and they plan on talking about us again on-air on Saturday.

The article was linked from the main page of CNN (and still is at time of writing), and both the book site and application saw a big influx of traffic today. Thanks to our great “acting-as-sys-admin” (who shall remain anonymous) the servers handled everything beautifully, and there was little if any noticeable slowdown on any of our sites. Overall it was an exciting and great day for change:healthcare.

Just wanted to give a big congrats to the entire change:healthcare team, keep up the good work!

Recently I have been helping good friend Ted Sanft with both his personal blog and his hockey team’s site. In the case of the hockey site specifically I helped Ted get setup and introduced to the Wordpress platform in addition to providing the design. Since then he has seemingly fallen in love with Wordpress. Along the way he has had several good questions that I think would be helpful for anyone to hear that is getting started with WP, and that’s what I’m presenting here.

Note: This article assumes you have at least a small amount of knowledge of css/xhtml, etc., and can follow copy/paste php instructions.

As soon as your site goes live, change your permalink structure.

Permalinks are how your URLs are presented for posts, categories, pages, and so forth. Out of the box, the urls Wordpress provides are pretty ugly, for example instead of the url you currently see in the url bar, if permalinks were set to default here it would look like this:

http://muelface.com/?p=105

Using a permalink structure that actually corresponds with the content on the page being viewed is helpful for search engines, something that is especially important when you are starting a new blog and praying for traffic. Although I have often read that using something that ends in “.html” is best, in my personal experience ANY permalink structure that presents the title of the post (and possibly the date if you are a news-related blog) is just as good.

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