Saw details of this yesterday. It’s a bit like a social networking site, but one where you exchange information about the software you run on your PC. Naturally, I’m giving it a try.

After setting yourself up a profile, you have to download a small piece of software that monitors your program usage – nothing about what you’re doing with them (so no need to worry about stolen passwords, etc), but simply that they’re being launched.

You can then sign into the Wakoopa website, review your software and see what else people are using.

The site isn’t as straight-forward as I’d like and I’m confused over what you can do with other users. I’d like to be able to see other users that have similiar tastes and see what else they’re using. Maybe I can do this, but as yet I haven’t found out how.

I’ll stick with it, have a play and report back in a future post. Meantime, I’ve added a Blog badge to the side which shows my current top 10 most-used programs (most of these are start-up programs, hence why they’re appearing) and you can view my profile at any time.

Update, 23/12/2007 – I’ve left the service. It simply didn’t give me anything. More software recommendations from other users would have been useful.

I’ve often been criticised for using tables in my website. I only really use them where I’ve found it necessary, but never-the-less, one table is often one too many for some. “Bad design”, etc, etc.

Well, I’m working on a re-design of the Copy+ site and have been attempted to banish tables from the site entirely. All looked well as I tested it in IE. Then Firefox. Oh my. It was a real mess. I tried to sort it, I really did, but eventually became stuck.

A post to discussion board yielded the following answer.. “the top menu ‘catches’ on your logo_box DIV.” The answer is to add “clear: both;” to my DIV.

So I asked how I was supposed to know this. The answer…

Same way as me. You do something, it doesn’t work, so you google it!

I use it so often that I have it defined as a constant in my PHP.

The other thing that I have done is that I get so fed up of fudging inconsistencies between browsers that I now detect the user’s browser and give them an appropriate css file, not a jack of all trades with indecipherable hacks in.

The conclusion… I’m not supposed to realise this. Instead I have to hack about to get the DIV’s right, probably losing sleep and hair in the process.

But, if I use tables I can get it right first time, without any of the above. Hmmm. Guess what I’m now doing to the new site??

For some time now I’ve been using a great JavaScript utility named Lightbox 2.0. Basically, it displays photos on a web page, but in a very stylish way. You start with a thumbnail, click it, and it expands, the rest of the screen fades out, and with version 2.0, you can then scroll through multiple photos.

If you go to the Lightbox home page, there’s a pretty good demonstration on what it does. I use it on the BMTG site quite a bit, and I’ve used it elsewhere too.

The only problem with it was its use of the Prototype Framework and Scriptaculous Effects Library, which made the whole thing a bit, erm, bulky for what it did.

Now, there is an answer…. Litebox. It’s based on Lightbox 2.0 but it utilizes the 3kb Javacript library moo.fx in association with prototype.lite.

On top of that, Bravenet published their own “theme” for it, making it all look a little swankier.

Well, you can’t keep a good utility down. Just as I used to compress the original Lightbox down to a more managable size, I’ve done the same to Litebox. The result…. Literbox.

What have I done? Well, I’ve compressed the Javascript and CSS. I’ve also compressed and colour reduced some of the images (not that you’d spot the different). It’s saved another 8k. You can download my modded version below, which includes the original demo packaged with it (which I’ve not compressed in any way). There’s also a second package, which is the same thing again but with the Bravenet theme (and again, I’ve compressed the Bravenet changes).

Download Literbox 1.0
Download Literbox 1.0 – Bravenet Theme

Update 1/12/08 – I’ve removed the links to my modified Litebox as I know longer support it. I’ve now moved over to Slimbox, which also uses mootools, but doesn’t require a modified BODY tag (something which was causing me problems).