RSSYou Write The Play site launched
This morning we launched a new viral microsite for the Daring Pairings 3 writing festival at the Hampstead Theatre in London. The site, www.youwritetheplay.com, is an attempt to break the world record for the highest number of authors for a single play.
The people at the Hampstead Theatre came up with the idea to create a play using content completely written by visitor submissions and then to perform it at the theatre during their writing festival. Every visitor to the site can see the last five submitted lines and then add their own line to the play.
Please visit the You Write The Play site and submit your line. There have been some hilarious lines submitted already and the final play is set to be fantastic, if not a little bizarre.
Thanks!
Posted in News | 
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Why IE6 will probably out live IE7
Microsoft’s outdated and non-standard web browser, Internet Explorer 6, has no doubt had you ripping out large clumps of hair in frustration. I know it has brought me to the point of despair on several occasions. Whether you are a web developer or not, I’m pretty sure you are aware of the array of quirks that IE6 brings to the table when trying to render the most basic of CSS rules correctly.
There are several well supported campaigns running in the web design community (and beyond) to bring the end to this life sapping browser. The most notable are the Death to IE6 and the Bring Down IE6 campaigns, both of which receive my full support for trying to change the web for the better. Most of the big names on the Internet are getting in on the action as well with Facebook and YouTube (amongst others) displaying messages to users who visit their sites using IE6.
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Display your latest Twitter update with jQuery
I’m pretty sure that it has not escaped your attention that Twitter is an invaluable tool if you want to communicate with your clients and peers. As you are spending all this time tweeting, it makes sense to display this information on you own website so you can draw in more followers on Twitter and get your voice heard.
There are quite a few tutorials available on this subject and several jQuery plugins that will display your tweets for you, all of which are very good in their individual way. However, this tutorial will show you just how easy it is to use the Twitter API tools with a tiny bit of jQuery to display your latest tweets in a fully customisable, simple and functional way.
First we will create a very basic HTML document to display our latest tweet. Then I will show you how to get the Twitter JavaScript code which will translate the returned data for us. We will be using our Twitter account, @carronmedia in the examples, please feel free to follow us.
Posted in Tutorials | 12 comments
Carron Media website updates
First of all, many apologies for the lack of blog posts/tutorials recently. We’ve been rather busy in the last couple of months (which is by no means a bad thing!) on various client projects and we simply haven’t had the time to keep it up to date. We have some great articles planned for the near future so please keep checking back. If you have any suggestions or requests for an article, please get in touch and we will be more than happy to help out.
Ever since we launched Carron Media in March, there have been a few little bits of our site which we a) were not happy with or b) didn’t get around too in the first place. The main part of the site that required updating was the contact form. Although the Wordpress plugin we used has been around for ages and is used by millions of bloggers, it didn’t give us the flexibility we were looking for. So now we have hand coded our own forms and along with a new standard contact form, we have launched a new online get a quote form.
The second element that was in need of an update was the footer of each page. We believe the new style footer not only looks better, but is easier to use and provides a lot more information and it gives us somewhere to include our latest updates on Twitter.
We would love to here any feedback you may have about any aspect of the new features or of Carron Media as a whole, so please comment below. Also, you can follow us on Twitter.
Thanks!
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Extend Google Analytics with jQuery
For quite some time now Google Analytics has been leading the way when it comes to gathering free statistics about the web traffic of your website. I’m sure that you many of you have installed the Google code on your sites and are already using the great reporting tools it provides. However, there are a few limitations to the standard service which you may or may not have come across yet. Using the standard code, we can only track views of pages where the tracking code is installed. It becomes a little bit more difficult if we want to track file downloads and external links, where we cannot add the Google JavaScript.
The aim of this tutorial is to show you how you can modify the standard Google tracking code using the power of jQuery to get extra information from your Google Analytics reports. With jQuery, we can get Google Analytics track your file downloads and clicks to external sites without having to trawl through your code and write any extra mark up.
We are also going to use a new feature of Google Analytics which are known as ‘Events’. This should give you a good base for you to build your own code and extend the power of Google Analytics even more.
Posted in Tutorials | 21 comments