Tuesday 23 March 2010

Spending ages trying to find the causes of problems

This morning I checked my email and wrote a description for the pano I finished processing yesterday evening. After that I looked into affiliate advertising on facebook, and found reports from people saying it was very hard to make any money doing it.

I decided to try and get my 360VRs website up and running, so that I could write up some blog posts for my photo website and include some 360VRs in the posts. I started off by looking at other's sites to see how they worked, and it seems that they mainly use posts with images of the 360, which you click on to load up a page with the actual 360, or to load up a lightbox with the 360 on the same page. Hans Nyberg's site and Panorama Blog are two good examples.

So in other words, the 360s don't automatically appear in the page, and they require user interaction to load. If they didn't do this, then a page of 360s would take ages to load and slow the PC to a crawl.

Next I took a look at some lightbox scripts, and tried to get them working with loading a pano in them, but unfortunately I couldn't get them to work how I wanted. So I decided to try writing the lightbox script myself. I thought this would be quick and simple, but I came across numerous problems which took ages to debug, and just getting the script working in a basic form took me all day.

I got the pano to load up in a lightbox fashion okay, and even got a close icon in the top right hand corner working okay. I got the pano to exit when pressing the 'esc' key on the keyboard, but in IE6, after opening the pano, you needed to click on it for the escape button to work. I looked into this, but couldn't find any fix.

Next I tried adding the controls plugin to the flash panorama player. But whatever I tried, I couldn't get the controls to appear. Then I tried the example page that came with FPP, and it worked fine. So I spent ages trying to find out why the FPP example worked while my code didn't. Eventually I found out that the FPP example page worked just as well as my code - the problem was that I was testing my code in FF in Ubuntu, where the controller didn't show up, while I had tested the FPP page in Windows FF, where the controller would show up.

I'm not sure why the controller plugin works in FF Win but not in FF
Ubuntu. The controller plugin can be made to work in Ubuntu FF by removing the wmode="transparent" parameter from the object/embed, but this then means that you can't place HTML (like the close button) on top of the Flash.

The next problem I had was that my close button wasn't showing up in Opera. After spending ages debugging this, I found the problem was with the container of the Flash object and close icon being set to the width of the window. I'm not sure why this caused the close icon not to show up, but decreasing the width of the container to less than the width of the window made the button show up again.

In the process of debugging the missing close button in Opera, I tried changing the way that I was writing the object HTML for the Flash. However, this had a problem in that it made the close icon disappear in Webkit based browsers. I found the problem was because I was using an outer object for IE with an inner object for other browsers (previously I was doing it the opposite way round). The solution was that I had to add the wmode="transparent" parameter to the parent (IE) object as well as the inner (other browsers) object. (I was using conditional comments to hide the inner object declaration from IE, but not to hide the inner object's parameters).

There were probably some other problems as well, but those three were the main ones.

Grandad died in the afternoon (in hospital).

In the evening, I also watched an episode of Star Trek with Mauser and L.

The weather was a mixture of sun and clouds in the morning and first part of the afternoon. Then it clouded over and was overcast for most of the afternoon. In the evening it rained.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Choco Moons Cereal; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on Toasts; Apple; Slice of Genoa Cake; Mint Chocolate Biscuit; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Spag Bol; Mushrooms; Parmesan; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was a Large Choc Chip Cookie. Coffee; 2x pieces Sainsbury's Truffle Chocolate.

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