a novel in the making

Posts tagged “wordpress”

Defeating Progress Bars

You know, once upon a time I used to work in IT support. I’m not saying this so you can ask me silly questions about computers. I haven’t worked there in years and by now I know nothing of such things. This little detail might explain my obsession with progress bars though. If you grow up with computers and end up spending a lot of time installing software, like you tend to do in IT support, you come to hate these little bastards. They get stuck at 99% and, although it says 1 minute to go, they don’t move forward at all. Somehow they still give you the impression they’re moving, because they want to torture you and drive you mad. Progress bars are crazy little things. You come to stare at them for hours, especially if you install whole operating systems. Looking at progress bars is just silly though. Just as silly as looking at every new recombination and mutation step in an evolutionary algorithm, something I’ve done too many times as well. It tells you absolutely nothing and instead you should go and have a cup of coffee, somewhere without the screen in sight.

I hate them little progress bar bastards, I really do.

So, why am I putting progress bars on my blog and why am I happy about the progress bars in Scrivener? Simple: I’m in control there! You are free to imagine a maniacal laugh at this point. In Scrivener the progress bar is a direct result of my actions. I write and it changes. It doesn’t just sit there while I wait for magic to happen. No, I’m in control! It’s really quite a power trip!! Same goes for my little progress bars in the side bar of my blog. I can make them say whatever I want!!! Look here:

91372 / 80000 (114.22%)

 

Of course I’m not that far in my struggle with all these words, but I’m still in control of the progress bar. What a joy!

Now, if you want to add one of those little progress bars to your wordpress.com blog as well, I suggest you run over to this little site, which I’ve come to cherish: honorless.net

There you can create the progress bar and it gives you the HTML code once you click ‘Refresh Code’. The code it gives me for the progress bar I created up there is this one:


<div style="margin: auto; text-align: center; width: 30%;" title="114.22%">
<div style="text-align: left; margin: 2px auto; font-size: 0px; line-height: 0px; 
border: solid 1px #FF0000; background: #DDDDDD; "><div style="font-size: 0px; 
line-height: 0px; height: 3px; min-width: 114.22%; max-width: 114.22%; width: 100%; 
background: #0000FF; "></div></div><div style="font-size: 8pt; 
font-family: monospace; ">91372 / 80000 (114.22%)</div></div>

You can then insert this code into a text widget in your sidebar or into a post. Up to this step it’s easy and doesn’t need any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Here comes the trick though:

Right now, and this might change back to normal one of these days, wordpress started stripping the div style width from the code. So instead of the correct first line it will save the code without the width: 30%;" part. This will make you lose control over the width of the progress bar in relation to your sidebar or to your space for postings.

To resolve this little problem, just change width to max-width before saving and all is fine again. You can play with the percentage to make the progress bar longer or shorter now. The last step is to also start laughing maniacally about having defeated those nasty little bastard progress bars! MUAHUAHUA!!!!1!!001!2

Have fun!

March 24, 2012 | Categories: meta | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment