I’m searching for a way to realize the following behaviour:
On page load, a HTML box fades in and partially overlays the page’s contents. The box contains either randomly chosen images or (like an iframe) shows a randomly chosen URL.
By clicking on that box, it should link to a given URL (based upon the randomly displayed image or HTML content).
Furthermore it would be required to have the possibility to close the box manually (maybe by clicking at a given area within this box).
Once it disappeared, it should not open again within the same browser session, even when reloading the page (easily done by checking a session cookie).
I don’t know of any combination of existing Actions which could do
this for you (except maybe for Protaculous + a huge whack of hand-
written code). If you simplify your requirements a bit, then it
becomes easier to imagine how you could cobble this together with
existing Actions – drop the cookie requirement, drop the external URL
and keep it all in the originating domain, then you can use a timed
show/hide layer.
The requirement that you be able to load an external site (which means
dynamically generating an iframe to hold it) complicates this
somewhat. That’s not hard by itself, but it is fussy to do in a cross-
browser manner. You can see an example of that in action here: Lookup
(follow the directions to see the effect – it’s not an automatic
thing on load).
The real challenge will be modeling this in a manner where you can
update the page without having to dig into that aforementioned huge
whack of code.
Walter
On Aug 15, 2010, at 5:11 PM, tobiaseichner wrote:
On page load, a HTML box fades in and partially overlays the page’s
contents. The box contains either randomly chosen images or (like an
iframe) shows a randomly chosen URL.
By clicking on that box, it should link to a given URL (based upon
the randomly displayed image or HTML content).
Furthermore it would be required to have the possibility to close
the box manually (maybe by clicking at a given area within this box).
Once it disappeared, it should not open again within the same
browser session, even when reloading the page (easily done by
checking a session cookie).
In order to achieve the effect I look for, I put three images at a table applying the action to each one. For each image, it’s possible to set a custom URL, so that works great.
However (yes, there is always something there are two problems (or let’s call them space for improvement):
Each slideshow is limited to ten images. But that’s a minor thing.
Most of all, I would need a way to add some custom text near each picture (like captions). When you visit Dynamic Drive DHTML Scripts- Ultimate Fade-in slideshow (v2.0) (that’s the “engine” the action relies on), they come with an option to use captions. But unfortunately this feature wasn’t implemented.
Perhaps you want to take a look at the action; I think it’s a great base, useful for various applications. It just has to be a bit more powerful.
Or do you have a recommendation for an other action that works similar ? At least at actionsforge.com I had no luck finding something.
