The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Going once … going twice …

After The Company meeting today, we ran into RW, a customer of ours. He mentioned in passing that a major domain name auction is happening tomorrow, and did we have any domains we might want to auction. Smirk had a few, and then I remembered one I have—pornfinity.com.

I had registered it years ago for a project that never materialized. Then a few years later I thought of another project it could be used for, but I took too long in getting it set up and the window of opportunity passed.

RW liked the name, and asked what I would like for it. I said $5,000. If I don't hear anything back in a few days, I'll assume the price was too high. Hey, it can't hurt to try, right?

Stupid CSS tricks

I thought of maybe trying to spruce up Pornfinity to maybe make it more attractive at auction (and no, I didn't spruce it up—I got distracted as you'll see) by adding some links or something.

I wanted to do a bit more than just present a simple list of sites. I mean, sure, I could do something like:

(And no, these aren't porn sites, these are blogs that I read. I'm using them for an example. If you want porn, you'll have to go on your own and find some)

A lot of sites now have a favicon so I thought it might be nice to include them with the links (yes, that's the extent of my “snazzing up” the list of porn sites). So, first off, is it possible to change the default glyph used for lists?

The answer: yes. By using the CSS attribute list-style-image, you can have custom bullet points.

Now, I have noticed that Firefox will store the favicon when you bookmark a site. Curious as to where that information was stored (if I already have the data (and yes, I do have one or several dozen porn sites bookmarked—ahem) why bother re-downloading it all again?), I found that Firefox stored the data in a rather curious looking URL—the data: scheme.

Hmmm … I wonder … would this work?

<li style="list-style-image: url(data:image/x-icon;base64,AAAB...A==);">
  <a href="http://www.flutterby.com/">Flutterby!</a>
</li>

Well … what do you know? It works:

Well, probably not under Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I don't care about that browser.

Pretty neat trick, actually.

Well … I thought it was anyway.

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