September 18, 2020
September 18, 2020
Many years ago I saw Eric Clapton at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan. All through the show, I kept hearing Dire Straits. Finally, I grabbed someone's binoculars, and sure enough, there was Mark Knopfler! Since then I found out they are great buddies, and tour together a lot. Clapton was so cool, he let his tour guitarist have the final encore, this:
For a while now I've been working on the WordPress plugin that does the slideshows. I had re-written the php back-end from NivoSlider, and then I decided to rewrite the front-end. The front-end is driven by jquery, so it was a good opportunity to get familiar with that. It's actually pretty simple.
Over a few months of tinkering, I added several hundred slide transitions, grouped in families to make things manageable. Eventually, I pretty much exhausted all the things you can do by animating css with jquery. So I turned to inline svg image masks. You can do much more with real graphics than just css, but there is one hitch - svg is poorly supported in Chrome and all its derivatives, including Opera, Edge, and Brave. But if you load this page in Firefox or Safari, it will demonstrate what you can do with svg.
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