Glenn Jones of Mapsurface.com just sent me my login details for this cool tracking tool.

Try it now by pressing ALT+X on your keyboard (seems not to work in Opera though).

What I love about it:

• The slick interface
• The validity – it stays in the head of the document as two includes and doesn’t do any document.write nasties in the body
• The on-demand nature – you might not want to wait for my tracker to run

What I think needs to change:

• You should be able to password – protect the stats

If that were the case, I’d try and approach a lot of clients with this goody.

Following a comment I put on the amazing redesign of Veerle’s Blog, she answered that she needed to use two links – one for a text and one for an icon to make the icon clickable.

It can be done in one link in various ways (embedding an image for example) ,but the coolest seems to be to use a background image in CSS, and add enough padding to show it as a background. This also allows you to easily create a rollover state with CSS and an appropriate picture.

Check the example page

The code:

articles RSS

And the CSS trick:

p.rss a:link,

p.rss a:visited{

padding-right:28px;

line-height:17px;

font-size:.85em;

text-decoration:none;

color:#9b9c93;

height:25px;

float:left;

background:url(rssani.gif) top right no-repeat transparent ;

}

	
p.rss a:hover,

p.rss a:focus,

p.rss a:active{

background-position:100% -91px;

}

Following feature requests in the comments below via I updated DOMtab once again. You can now link to tabs via the URL and get previous and next links!

DOMtab is a JavaScript that turns a list pointing to different content sections (like an FAQ) into a tabbed interface. Users without JavaScript will still get all the functionality, except they will have to scroll the page. DOMtab automatically removes any “back to top” links when the tabbed interface can be achieved.

• The look and feel is completely styleable
• You can use as many tabbed menus in a page as you wish to use.
• Creation of a link that shows all the sections – for example to print out the page.
• Automatic highlighting of tabs via anchors in the url (this also allows to use forms in the tabs – just add the anchor name to the action) new
• Previous and next links for navigating through the tabs – in case you want to have a step by step approach new

Go and check DOMtab version 3.1415927 now

According to news.com, Microsoft will stop Active-X controls like embeded media or flash to start automatically in the next security upgrade.

This is very bad news for Flash designers (and may give DOM scripting another boost). Microsoft recommends as a workaround to Activate the control dynamically by writing it out via JavaScript. The examples given are rather messy, and I wonder if Bobby van der Sluis’ Unobtrusive Flash Object wouldn’t have been a better example to promote as a fix.

Andy Budd reported yesterday about mapsurface , a new site statistics tool that does all the others do, but with the difference that it shows the data live on the site without the admin or statistics-interested visitors having to log into a backend editor.

I really like what I can see on Andy’s site and signed up for a test drive. However, I really hope that there is a chance to password-protect the stats, as for now it is a good blogger or web admin “pat our own back” tool, but will be hard to sell on the market.

Nearly every client I ever had wanted statistics tools, hardly any did anything useful with the collected information, but what all agreed on was that they didn’t want their competitors to see their stats.

Therefore it’d be a clever move (unless that is already anticipated in the full version) to allow for different levels of access – with a preliminary log-in on the site.

You can test mapsurface on the developers blog: Glenn Jones on his very own mapsurface or sign up for a test run on http://www.mapsurface.com.