So although I’ve said before that I was working on my first plugin, I’m actually going to release my first plugin. it’s the first one I’m letting out into the wild - not the first one I’ve written

So here it is - my jQuery Expandable Comment Replies.
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Yes, I said “evil”. Because it is.

I belong to a couple of awesome networking lists. On one of these lists, recently, someone was asking about a possible solution to what is truly a common problem for us designers/programmers who provide CMS solutions for our clients. The problem?

Microsoft Word.

All of you reading this…how many of you have create an awesome site design with pristine code and gorgeous formatting, and your client is all “hooray!”…and promptly starts writing their content up in Microsoft Word, and the C&P’s the stuff into the CMS you’ve just made for them? (Come on, I know you’re out there. Raise your hands.)

I have two clients, currently that do this. No matter what plugins I’ve installed, and no matter how many different ways I instruct them on how to do it correctly (even with using their beloved Word!) they don’t do it. They just keep C&P-ing from Word, and keep calling me when the site breaks because of it.

Now, to why I am evil.
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Ahhh…sIFR - also know as “Scalable Inman Flash Replacement”. I’m not going to go through and tell you the history and all that - there’s plenty of information on it out there for you to peruse at your leisure. Me, I’m a “get to the point” kinda gal - as you all know.

For a long time, people have wanted to move away from he “standard” fonts found in a particular browser, and use a nice font for headings, titles, and such on their sites. Usually, the way around this was to create said text as an image file, and plug it in on the site. But oh, how lovely would it be if this could be done dynamically, rather than creating an image for every single piece of text you wanted to replace?

I’ve done it before, using dynamic text replacement, which creates PNG images on-the-fly. This is a popular method for people who want to have this ability, but don’t have access to Flash. But I’ve noticed if you use it for a lot of different things (like a recent client who wanted EVERY link replaced, as well as headings and certain pieces of text) you’re gonna back things up like eating a pound of cheese on constipation day. (yes, as if we all have a “constipation day”. Mine’s on Friday. LOL)

Ahh, how I wanted to use sIFR. And now that I have my shiny new Mac with CS3, I can finally do it. So last week, I started to try it out for the first time. And I failed. Miserably.
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