Isaac Keyet

If you’re using Skype regularly, perhaps even on an everyday basis like I do, you might have noticed an annoying new feature that is shipped with Skype: “Mood Messages”. If you’re expecting new chat messages from someone and the mood messages kick in your first reaction will be that you have received a message – so you open the Skype chat window with a confused look on your face (because there are no new messages) until you realize that once again the lovely “Mood Messages” have foiled you.

I still don’t understand what these messages actually are. And who at Skype made them enabled by default. But let’s just try to solve the problem instead.

For some reason the setting to disable these messages is not in the Preferences dialog of Skype, instead it’s hidden pretty well. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Open Skypes main window (the buddy list).
2. In the top you’ll find the “Show History” button, which changes to a notification counter if you have new unread notifications. As for me, I have 1 unread notification, a dreadful “Mood Message”. Double-click this message and it will open in Skypes chat window.
3. In the chat drawer, right click on “Mood Messages” and select “Chat Notification Settings…”
4. A dialog opens, simply select “Do not notify me” and also remember to check “Mark unread messages as read immediately”.

That should do it.

Recently I was updating a JavaScript function which simply added another element to a page, complete with content. The innerHTML function was used. However, I was very confused that some HTML elements I’d added using innerHTML were stripped on rendering.

Problem: I was trying to add a new row plus cells to an existing table on a page. It seems like innerHTML in Firefox strips new rows and cells (tr and td). Example:

<table id="table1">
<tr>
<td><h3>Existing header</h3></td>
</tr>
</table>
<script>
var newRow = document.createElement("tr");
newRow.innerHTML = '\
<tr>\
<td><h3>New header</h3>\
</tr>\
';
document.getElementById("table1").appendChild(newRow);
</script>


This would simply output:
<table id="table1">
<tr>
<td><h3>Existing header</h3></td>
</tr>
<h3>New header</h3>
</table>


…Which is incorrect by web standards and is not much to work with.

Solution: Instead of inserting the new element (the <tr>) after the innerHTML string is added, I did it before. It seems like the browser doesn’t like that we add elements that are strictly associated with tables unless it actually knows for sure that they’ll be added to the correct structure.

This is the simple solution for disappearing tds and rows:

<script>
var newRow = document.createElement("tr");
document.getElementById("table1").appendChild(newRow);
newRow.innerHTML = '\
<tr>\
<td><h3>New header</h3>\
</tr>\
';
</script>


Just wanted to post a note about the awesome meetup I just got back from in Quebec, Canada. I finally got to meet the rest of the Automatticians (well most of them) and had a great time overall. Everyone is just so intelligent, successful and cool to talk to that it was almost intimidating. We went mountain biking and gokarting, both of which I really enjoyed and I hope we’ll do more next year.

Oh, and my team for the week came up with a really cool update to a certain something that I’m not sure if I should mention right now. Will post more about this later though. It’s a-w-e-s-o-m-e!

I’m in pain right now. My PS3 broke down big time, keeps throwing what I’ve learned is the dreaded “80010514″ error which basically means you’re f*d and have to return the machine to the vendor to have either the HDD or the BluRay drive swapped. Major bummer.

In other news: It’s been (and is) a great, warm summer in Sweden. I’ve moved into a new apartment where I’m going to stay for a while and I’m still cranking hard with IntenseDebate. Watch out for new cool updates to the plugin soon!

There are three short films in the Bendito Machine series (so far, don’t know if more are planned). This one I discovered just now, and I’m amazed by the detail and perfection in the artwork. Check it out and fall in love.

A few days ago we went live with some new user menus for the IntenseDebate plugin. I’ve made the design of course, and while they’re meant to resemble the looks of the old menus in a lot of ways, there are some notable differences. The most striking change is of course the avatar being a part of the popup as this was not the case before. An enlarged avatar gives the reader a more personal and complete insight in a user profile.

The goal for the redesign was to remove non-vital elements from the menu, items that you’re probably not interested in until you know the other stuff anyway. It now shows the username in large letters, along with the reputation meter. If you have enabled your latest twitter messages, and have a description as well, now both will show – not one or the other like it was before. This is true for the IntenseDebate.com profile as well.

Of course I’m going for pixel-perfect, clean, and with fancy effects once you notice them. Hint: The “border” around the avatar is actually a semi-transparent sweet-looking box, and all buttons have fancy :hover and :active effects. All in a single CSS sprite of course. Hope you like it!

This blog is not all about YouTube, I promise.. But this video was just awesome.

If you’re reading this in a reader, you might want to click through to the actual web page (www.isaackeyet.com/blog) to see the beauty. It’s a minor update but still refreshing if you ask me. Will touch it up a bit again soon when I have the inspiration. A design update is coming to my personal swedish blog as well.

I was actually pleasantly surprised when I discovered this new advertisement type on YouTube the other day, it’s a large bar that goes across the bottom of the video that tells the name of the song, displays some artwork if available AND links to services where you can buy and download the song. How awesome is that? Go YouTube!

So this is pretty cool… The Wordpress platform was nominated in the Webware awards anno 2009. If you love WordPress as much as I do, you don’t hesitate to go vote for your champ!

Seriously though, I’m proud. The whole team behind WordPress is truly amazing.