Recently, Blogger began appending a tracking gif to the content of each entry in their Atom feeds. The URL used in the image src uses https, most likely to avoid warnings when it's rendered in a https context. For some reason, when rendering the feed content containing the tracking image, the Flash player can crash, taking the browser with it on certain platform/browser combinations. We found the problem in FireFox 3.0 on OSX, but only on PPC Macs. Go figure.
In our case, we are proxying the Atom feed through a PHP script so we can display the feed contents to user agents without the Flash player. This made it fairly easy to iterate through the entries, and with a simple bit of regex, strip out the offending markup from the contents.
Blogger is wrapping the image tag in a div with a very specific CSS class, which makes our job easy:
Depending on what you're using to parse the feed, you may or may not need to be concerned about decoding and encoding html entities during this process.
I just ran across a really annoying problem with Thickbox after upgrading from jQuery 1.3.1 to 1.3.2. The gallery functionality in Thickbox broke after the upgrade - instead of opening with the first image, the loading animation displayed forever without loading any content at all.
Turns out, the @ selector syntax was deprecated in jQuery 1.3, and was removed in 1.3.2. Simply removing the single occurrence of the @ character in the Thickbox js solved the problem.
I knew you wouldn't believe me, so I made a movie to prove it. This is on a macbook pro 15" with a 24" cinema display. The dock and menu bar are running on the laptop display. If I mirror or move the dock and menu bar to the external display, the problem disappears! If I plug it into another external display, it does exactly the same thing.
ClipStation is a free lightweight solution for writing to your user’s clipboard from an HTML page. Using a small SWF that is embedded dynamically via JavaScript, you can pass an unlimited number of content clips onto the clipboard.
ClipStation is designed to be lightweight, flexible, and easy to implement. What makes ClipStation different from other clipboard SWF solutions is the ability to decode HTML character entities, allowing you to pass complex HTML markup to the clipboard from within form elements, divs, pre tags, etc. We developed ClipStation for use on a widget sharing page we've implemented for a client. After looking around for a good lightweight cross-browser solution and coming up empty handed, we decided to build our own. We're now happy to offer it to you at the low, low price of free.
Version 2.0 includes changes to allow access to the clipboard in Flash Player 10. Adobe changed the security requirements for clipboard access in version 10 of the player; now a user action is required before a SWF may access the clipboard. Instead of using a single hidden instance of the ClipStation SWF, we embed an instance for every clip that the user clicks to perform the clipboard copy. A source distribution is available, so you can change the design to fit your needs.
