Shifting Pixel » Side Projects

Greased Lightbox v0.18

Joe Lencioni — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:28:58 +0000

Make sure to uninstall any old versions.

Change log

Updated Wikipedia regular expressions
Improved Image Socket support
Removed Facebook support
Improved ImageFap support
Fixed bug involving race conditions

Spread the word

If you have a blog or a website and enjoy using Greased Lightbox, please help spread the word about this great little script by linking to it, perhaps with a little review.

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L.A. Trip Winners

Joe Lencioni — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:34:43 +0000

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to everyone who submitted a famous death scene.

The Winners

Bekah Eileen Havens — Spaghetti western piece
Heather Schlegel — Her takes on Of Mice and Men and Rebel Without a Cause
Eric Liu — His stop motion Lego version of Jurassic Park
Andrew Bennett — Quick and the Dead inspired submission
Carlton Brightly — His interpretation of The Blair Witch Project

The Film Premiere

The film will premiere in Los Angeles on October 14. If you are going to be in L.A. then or if you have any questions for Spike Lee, let me know.

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Win a Trip to a Spike Lee Movie Premiere in L.A.

Joe Lencioni — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:42:53 +0000

I am giving out one ticket (including round trip airfare) to join me at the Los Angeles premiere of the collaboratively created film under the direction of Spike Lee. To decide the lucky winner, I am having a contest. Here’s the scoop.

How to Win

We want you to recreate your favorite movie death scenes in a Be Kind Rewind style, using a mobile device (like your cell phone). Submit as many scenes as you like. I will pick the best submission based on effort, originality, and creativity. Airfare is only available to people within the United States. Sorry everybody else!

Recreate your movie death scene.
Set up a profile on Nokia Productions.
Upload your movie death scene to Nokia Productions (or here if you have problems uploading).
Tag your movie death scene with “famousdeathscenes”.
Leave a comment on this post with a link to your submission.

Bonus!

But wait, there’s more. Since your death scenes will be submitted to the Nokia Productions movie, they may end up in the final cut of the Spike Lee movie. How cool is that?

Get Filmin’

The deadline for submissions to this contest ends at the end of the day on Wednesday, August 20, 2008.

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Make a Film with Me and Spike Lee

Joe Lencioni — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:31:54 +0000

Do you have a cell phone? Can it take pictures or video? Do you like to make music or write? How would you like to collaborate with Spike Lee on a film? What if you could also win stuff?

Spike Lee has teamed up with Nokia to create a massively collaborative-social film composed entirely out of content created by people like you. The theme is humanity and the idea is that anybody can create filmworthy content on gadgets that they already have (e.g. cell phones and digital cameras).

Any submissions that don’t include copyrighted work are elligible. If you need some inspiration, you can follow the project on Twitter. And you can contribute to the project even if you don’t have any new photos, video, music or text to submit. You should definitely take a moment or two to get involved–you might end up with your name on a Spike Lee film, and that’s pretty cool.

The second round of submissions are under way, so be sure to act fast. A few artists from across the country (including myself) have been brought on as Assistant Directors and we are hoping to see a lot of good content come across. I am excited to see what you come up with so if you submit anything, please post a link here in the comments.

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Greased Lightbox v0.17

Joe Lencioni — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:46:17 +0000

Go get Greased Lightbox v0.17.

Make sure to uninstall any old versions.

Change Log

Fixed compatibility issues with Firefox 3 betas
Added support for images on Blogger/Blogspot blogs
Added re-centering feature when window is resized

Spread the word

If you have a blog or a website and enjoy using Greased Lightbox, please help spread the word about this great little script by linking to it, perhaps with a little review.

Stay up to date

To stay up to date on the latest developments, make sure to subscribe.

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Amazon Search Plugin with Search Suggestions

Joe Lencioni — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:33:02 +0000

One Firefox feature that I am in love with is that doodad in the top right corner that lets you search different sites like Google and Amazon from any page at any time. It’s the search box and it has been a real time-saver for me.

When Firefox 2 came out, developers were given the ability to augment their search plugins with suggestions as you type. Out of all the search engines I use from my search box, the top two are definitely Google and Amazon. While Google quickly took advantage of this new feature, Amazon did not.

Because I use Amazon so often, I decided to write my own search plugin for Amazon that will give you search suggestions as you type. Hopefully you will find it useful as well. And, as a bonus, if you use it and buy anything from Amazon, you will automatically help support Shifting Pixel.

Requirements

Firefox 2+
IE7 (suggestions are not supported by IE7)

To install

Firefox 2+

Remove the default Amazon.com search engine from Firefox.
1. Click on the search engine selection icon in the top right corner (most likely a Google icon).
2. Click on “Manage Search Engines…”
3. In the Search Engine Manager, click on “Amazon.com” and click the “Remove” button.
4. Click “OK.”
Add my Amazon.com search engine with suggestions.
1. Click on the search engine selection icon in the top right corner.
2. Click on “Add Amazon.”

Internet Explorer 7

Click on the search engine selection icon in the top right corner.
Under “Add Search Providers” click on “Amazon.”
A box will pop up asking you to confirm. Click “Add Provider.”

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Smart Image Resizer

Joe Lencioni — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:08:35 +0000

A ridiculously easy-to-use PHP script for resizing images the smart way.

One of the challenges that comes with maintaining a graphic-intensive website like Shifting Pixel is finding a way to get high quality images throughout the site with as little effort as possible. To tackle this, I developed the Smart Image Resizer and have been using it around the site for the past few months. I couldn’t be happier.

The major advantage of this script is that it allows me to resize and crop any image on my website without touching the actual image or writing any code. I upload each image once at a high enough resolution and can then reuse it at any size I want, anywhere I want. It doesn’t matter if the images are in a post, on a page, or in a template file–it just works. All of the magic is done through the query string part of the URL in the src attribute of the img tag.

And, if this wasn’t a big enough time-saver for me right now, it’ll be a huge time-saver the next time I decide to redesign my site. It’s a relief that I won’t have to go through to resize and re-upload a thousand photos to make sure they look right–I’ll just have to change the links to them and I’ll be all set.

Features

Resizes JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs
Intelligently sharpens for crisp photos at any size
Can crop based on width:height ratios
Can color-fill transparent GIFs and PNGs
Built-in caching keeps image variations for optimal performance

Requirements

PHP 5.1.0+ compiled with GD (a version that supports imageconvolution(), such as the bundled version).

Download

Download Smart Image Resizer v1.4.1 (Released August 6, 2008)

Tip jar

To Install

Unzip on your web server
In the same directory, create a directory called “imagecache”
Make your imagecache directory is writable by the web server (usually chmod 775)

Troubleshooting

Try visiting the URL that you are using as the src attribute of your img tag directly in the browser. If there is an error message here, it should be quite helpful.
If that doesn’t give you any information, turn on error reporting (add error_reporting(E_ALL); to the top of image.php) and see if that gives you any information. It is possible that the script is trying to use a function that doesn’t exist in your installation and configuration of PHP.
If you can’t get the script to give you any information, try peaking into your error logs.
Finally, if you can’t get any information out of any of these things, run a phpinfo() and send me a link–if I have time I’ll take a look at it and tell you if anything looks out of the ordinary.

License

I love to hear when my work is being used, so if you decide to use it, feel encouraged to send me an email. Smart Image Resizer is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license. All I ask is that you include a link back to Shifting Pixel (either this page or shiftingpixel.com), but don’t worry about including a big link on each page if you don’t want to–one will do just nicely. Feel free to contact me to discuss any specifics.

Examples

These examples use my photo of this coffee bean. For more fine photography, browse my “Must See” photos or subscribe.

Resizing a JPEG

Resizing and cropping a JPEG into a square

cropratio=1:1&image=/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/coffee-bean.jpg" alt="Coffee Bean" />

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Greased Lightbox v0.16

Joe Lencioni — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:59:19 +0000

Go get Greased Lightbox v0.16.

Make sure to uninstall any old versions.

Change Log

Optimized initialization code using XPath
Fixed centering issues
Optimized many regular expressions
Resolved an incompatibility with the NoScript extension
Added support for FFFOUND!
Added Swedish translation (thanks Magnus!)
Updated Japanese translation (thanks KATO Kazuyoshi!)
Updated Traditional Chinese translation (thanks Arphen Lin!)
Updated MySpace regular expressions (thanks Hamilton Cline!)
Updated search engine regular expression to fix compatibility with Google toolbar (thanks Michael Smith!)
Updated Wikipedia regular expressions (thanks CereS!)

Spread the word

If you have a blog or a website and enjoy using Greased Lightbox, please help spread the word about this great little script by linking to it, perhaps with a little review.

Stay up to date

To stay up to date on the latest developments, make sure to subscribe.

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Unjustify

Joe Lencioni — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:22:01 +0000

Justified text on the web, at this point, is almost always a bad idea. When designing a website, it’s simple enough to not use the dreadful text-align: justify; but what is the casual browser of the World Wide Web to do?

If you are as fed up as I am with rivers of whitespace flowing through the blocks of fully justified text on the web and sweeping your attention away from the important stuff (the content!), there’s no doubt that you’ll want to take matters away from good-intentioned amateur designers and into your own hands.

Just drag this link, Unjustify, to your bookmarks toolbar. Next time you come across some justified text, you get to zap it.

Try it out

From the Heart Sutra as translated by Nalanda Translation Committee:

Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment.

If you like this, why not stick around?

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Redesign

Greased Lightbox v0.15

Joe Lencioni — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:01:30 +0000

Go get Greased Lightbox v0.15.

Make sure to uninstall any old versions.

Change Log

Added version number to script name to prevent new versions from installing over old script and discarding preferences.
Updated Image Socket regular expression
Updated deviantART regular expression
Updated subVariance regular expression
Updated MySpace regular expression (thanks Drew Burden!)
Updated Facebook regular expression (thanks Nick Wisniewski!)
Removed Textamerica support
Added ImageFap support
Fixed doubling lightboxes (thanks eXtreme!)
Disabled pre-fetching for Opera as a temporary fix (thanks Britt Torrance!)
Added timed slideshow (thanks fearphage!)
Added Slovak translation (thanks Ezimír Totislav!)
Now excludes links that contain question mark characters (thanks Jason Sundram)
Additional minor bugfixes (thanks Stoen!)

Spread the word

Please Digg this story. If you have a blog or a website and enjoy using Greased Lightbox, please help spread the word about this great little script by linking to it, perhaps with a little review.

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To stay up to date on the latest developments, make sure to subscribe.

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