mybigadventures.com

I actually have very little to say but thought I'd make an effort to make more regular blogs. We are currently in Prague on what feels like a very flying visit. We only got here on Tuesday night and we're off again tomorrow to Heidelberg. Prague has been fantastic, the weather has picked up again and we've had to delve deep for the suncream thats been buried at the bottom of Dani's bag since our tour of Scandanavia!

Still no pictures I'm afraid, they're certainly starting to stack up and we shall endeavour to do something about it (soon(ish))! On the off chance that Mike, whom we caught the bus here from Berlin with, and spent the day with today checks . . . . welcome to mybigadventures.com! Please feel free to spread the word . . . and that goes for the rest of you too! Right thats all for now, cheerio ta ta!!

A couple of weeks ago I gave the existing hand coded lightbox an overhaul and replaced it with the much better looking JQuery FancyBox 2 plugin fancyapps.com/fancybox/. It was very quick and easy to set up and was soon working. It wasn't long however before I started tinkering. Previously I had a comments section in place, and it wasn't clear how to make this work with the new fancybox set up. I had a look around on the Internet and found a few implementations that customised the title section for each photo, but this wasn't quite what I wanted. In the end I decided on a custom comments box to the right of the screen (You can see this in action by browsing any of the photo albums).

The first job was actually getting a box on the right side of the screen. This turned out to be a little more challenging than first anticipated. In the end, it was achieved by specifiying a margin in the fancybox options, and then using the aftershow callback to populate the comments. I've included the code below for those that are interested:

$('.fancybox').attr('rel', 'gallery').fancybox({
    margin: [20, 300, 20, 20],

    afterShow: function(){
        var commentsContainer = "<div class='lightboxcomments'></div>";
        if ($(document).find('.lightboxcomments').length == 0) {
            $('.fancybox-overlay').append(commentsContainer);
        }

        //CODE GOES HERE TO POPULATE COMMENTS
     }
});

Each time it loads a new photo, it checks to see if the comment div exists and if not, it adds it to the DOM. It then uses a JQuery getJSON() call with a callback to populate the comments when loaded from the database.   I'm sure there are probably better / more efficient ways to achieve the same thing, but it does the job well for now. 

. . . hello from Amsterdam, today we went to the Heineken Experience where we got the chance to see how a beer bottle lives. Looked awesome! Lots of rattling, zipping around conveyer belts, and then wiggling into boxes where you get to sleep for a while, then you get cracked open to momentarily enjoy the party before getting tipped down some drunkards throat, awesome no?

Anyways Amsterdam is rather nice, and the weather hasn't let us down with lots of sunshine again! Its very scenic here with lots of old buildings and such like. Tomorrow we go to Bruges in Belgium for a few days before finishing off the trip in Paris hopefully including a trip to Euro Disney! For those that are familiar with the planned route you may have noticed a few changes, we were supposed to finish in Amsterdam but accomodation has been a bit troublesome.

Anyways that'll have to be all, internet time is heavily limited here, see you all very soon - only 9 days left I think .  . .cheerio ta ta