Free HTTPS image hosting with Dropbox

Jan 23, ’12 11:34 AM

If you only want the solution, jump right to it.

A while ago I was asked to “design” a facebook page for a client. As I did not have the time to dive into developing a full-on app, I instead opted for the really simple static html solution. their app works wonderfully for the most part, but one issue remained: facebook requires you to provide all your images via HTTPS, which neither I nor the client had at the time. I searched the web and a couple of free image hosting sites turned up. I figured this was good enough until the client had made up their mind about paying for their own certificate. I went with https://freevps.us/img/ at the time, which did not have a limitation on size or dimensions, which was good.

it worked well for a few weeks. Three days ago their service shut down. So did all the images on my client’s facebook page. shit.

today I went to work again, trying to fix this quickly and if possible, for free. all the other free hosting sites had a ridiculous size limit for images. then I came across a great …

D.I.Y. SOLUTION:

I used the public folder of my dropbox account (which is a great service by the way, and free!) to host the five images needed for the facebook page. In order to do this, you simply copy the public link and change the protocol to https. done. I did not know about this. It works great. I’m amazed and wanted to share this.

the URL may look something like this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345678/filename.jpg

there may be complications if your facebook page causes too much traffic on your dropbox account, but for the most of my clients, this won’t be an issue, I guess. I may look into an Amazon S3 solution, which seems like a viable option for little money.

original idea via http://hughbriss.com/

Comments (0)

Unnerving IE6 box-shadow filter bug

Nov 29, ’11 8:25 PM

I realize it is futile to complain about bugs in year-old software. Still, I have to get this out there, so I know it is documented. I have encountered this numerous times, but most recently during my work for Deutsche Börse (in my function as web developer for ultrabold).

The bug I’m referring to occurred, when I was working to find a replacement for CSS box-shadow, one preferrably employed using CSS and most important, working in Internet Explorer 6 and up. Don’t ask.

I was pretty happy when I came across a solution that used the dreaded filter property to create multiple drop shadows around a given element. It looks nasty compared to the real thing, but better than anything else I had come up with so far.
After I had implemented this rather wordy technique in CSS on multiple occasions, I thought I was done.

To my dismay, tests in various versions of IE (6-8) showed a bug that I had no idea how to fix: with elements using this filter, form input elements inside had their text cursors offset by the width of the fake box shadow. which is very much unacceptable of course. you were still able to focus and type, but the text showed up outside the field.
After some research I gave up, as there were few reports of this happening, and no solutions. I had no choice but to replace every instance with more, non-semantic markup, an image-based shadow (which in IE 6 required a PNG alpha fix— facepalm) and a few javascript fixes.

Let us hope that those days are behind us, now that IE9 turned out quite nicely, rendering regular CSS box-shadow as expected intended.

My advice is, this time, no advice. Go without the box shadow filter if you can, and if you are a daredevil, go for it. But think of the form inputs.

Comments (2)

Form F26-A

Aug 21, ’11 12:50 PM

I don’t get how formal complaints work (and it is kind of hard to find information on them online). But they seem to be a lot of fun, if you do them right. And I wanted in on that. But as far as I know, Germany doesn’t have a F26-A. This is hard to believe and I hope the Government is working overtime to fix this. But for now, I’m stuck. That is why I rebuilt the F26-A, simply traced it (by hand! I do have standards.) from the photos provided in the 27b/6 post, and tried to make them look alright. The PDF is not perfect, but I think it will get things rolling. I will try to introduce them to my workplace over the next couple of weeks. I do a lot of complaining already, we’ll see if this gets me fired. But in the end, it’s just good fun. To me anyway.

Get the F26-A PDF Document.

PS: If there is an official template for this already, I’d appreciate a copy. Also, I could not figure out the correct spread dimensions from the photos, so I made the PDF fit DIN page sizes. It could use some more work, but as I said, this is a test run. I will update this post, if I make or get improved versions of the document.

Comments (0)

IPv6!

Jun 20, ’11 9:00 AM

Ich erfreue mich stets an neuer Technik und scheue mich in der Regel wenig, den Fortschritt in meinem Freundeskreis auch mal zu forcieren. Darum bin ich überaus glücklich, euch oelna.de ab Juli auch über IPv6 – dem Protokoll der Zukunft, wie man sagt – zur Verfügung stellen zu können. Jetzt kann ich kaum abwarten, bis sich die v4-Pools erschöpfen. Glaub ich.

Comments (1)