Lee-Barnewall, Michelle, 1966- author

Senior, Donald, author

Edwards, Katie B., author

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (Rasiah S.), author

Pyper, Hugh S., author

Hollier, Joel, author

Siker, Jeffrey S., author

Roth, Dieter, author

Hall, Crystal L., author

White, Ellen, 1978- author

Speech bubbles are a popular effect but many tutorials rely on presentational HTML or JavaScript. This tutorial contains various forms of speech bubble effect created with CSS 2.1 and enhanced with CSS3. No images, no JavaScript and it can be applied to your existing semantic HTML.

The CSS file used in the demo page is heavily commented so that you can see which lines of code are responsible for each part of the effects.

Demo: Pure CSS speech bubbles

Support: Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, Chrome 4+, Opera 10+, IE8+.

Progressive enhancement with pseudo-elements

With HTML as simple as <div>Content</div> or <p>Content</p> you can produce speech bubble effects like this:

Add a child element, for example, <blockquote><p>Quote</p></blockquote> and you can even produce speech bubble effects like this:

I’d encourage you to adapt the examples to your needs and use any other associated elements available to you in your existing HTML document. The key is to use the :before and/or :after pseudo-elements to produce basic shapes.

By applying CSS3 properties such as border-radius and transform you can produce more complex shapes and orientations. This is how the heart-shape in my CSS typography experiment was created.

Example code

This is an example of how to create a basic speech bubble with a few enhancements. For further examples see the demo page and the heavily commented CSS file that it uses.

/* Bubble with an isoceles triangle
------------------------------------------ */

.triangle-isosceles {
  position: relative;
  padding: 15px;
  margin: 1em 0 3em;
  color: #000;
  background: #f3961c;
  border-radius: 10px;
  background: linear-gradient(top, #f9d835, #f3961c);
}

/* creates triangle */
.triangle-isosceles:after {
  content: "";
  display: block; /* reduce the damage in FF3.0 */
  position: absolute;
  bottom: -15px;
  left: 50px;
  width: 0;
  border-width: 15px 15px 0;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: #f3961c transparent;
}

A note on progressive enhancement

This approach is one of progressive enhancement. Styles are built up in layers from simple coloured boxes, to boxes with a “speech tick” of some kind, to rounded rectangles or circles with gradient backgrounds. Browsers render the styles that they are capable of rendering.

Browsers (such as IE6 and IE7) that do not adequately support CSS 2.1 or those (such as IE8) without support for the necessary CSS3 properties will not look broken; they will simply not get the full speech bubble effect. However…

A warning about Firefox 3.0

Firefox 3.0 supports the necessary CSS 2.1 pseudo-elements but does not support the positioning of generated content.

Some of the examples are close to what I consider to be unacceptably broken in Firefox 3.0. It is the only browser above 2% market share — currently at ~4% as of March 2010 according to NetApplications — that cannot handle even the basic speech bubble effects.

Before applying this technique, consider the importance of Firefox 3.0 support and the percentage of your visitors currently using this browser. Eventually it will become a rare browser but due to it’s partial CSS 2.1 support you should be aware that there is no graceful fallback for Firefox 3.0 when using this technique.

I’ve started using a backup strategy based on that originally described by Jamie Zawinski and subsequently covered in Jeff Atwood’s What’s your backup strategy? article. It works by incrementally backing up your data to a bootable clone of your computer’s internal drive, in order to replace the internal drive when it fails.

This script is maintained in my dotfiles repo. Please report problems or improvements in the issue tracker.

This post is mainly to document – for myself as much as anything – the process I went through in order to implement an incremental backup strategy in OS X 10.6+. Use at your own risk. Feel free to suggest improvements if you know of any.

Formatting and partitioning the drive

With your backup drive in its enclosure, connect the drive to your Mac and open the Disk Utility application.

1. Click on the disk’s name. This should bring up a “Partition” tab in the right panel.
2. Click on the “Partition” tab.
3. Under “Volume scheme” select the number of partitions you need. Probably “1 partition” if it is to match your internal disk.
4. Under “Name” enter the volume name you want to use, e.g., “Backup”.
5. Under “Format” select “Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)”, which is necessary if the disk is to be bootable.
6. Click “Options” and check that “GUID Partition Table” is selected.
7. Click “Apply”.

This will format and partition the disk. The partition(s) should now show up in the Finder and on the Desktop.

Enable ownership permissions

The new partition needs permissions to be enabled to avoid chown errors when using rsync. To do this, select the partition and view its information page (using “Get Info” or Command+I). Expand the “Ownership & Permissions” section and uncheck “Ignore ownership on this volume”

Backup script

The backup script uses rsync – a fast and versatile file copying tool – to manage the copying and moving of data between volumes. You need to install rsync 3 (this is easily done using Homebrew: brew install https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes/master/rsync.rb). Rsync offers a wide variety of options and only copies the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination, making it ideal for incremental backups. You can find out more about rsync in the rsync documentation

The following is the contents of a script I’ve named backup. I’m using it to backup all of the data on my internal disk, with a specified set of exceptions contained within a file called .backupignore.

#!/bin/bash

# Disc backup script
# Requires rsync 3

# Ask for the administrator password upfront
sudo -v

# IMPORTANT: Make sure you update the `DST` variable to match the name of the
# destination backup drive

DST="/Volumes/Macintosh HD/"
SRC="/"
EXCLUDE="$HOME/.backupignore"

PROG=$0

# --acls                   update the destination ACLs to be the same as the source ACLs
# --archive                turn on archive mode (recursive copy + retain attributes)
# --delete                 delete any files that have been deleted locally
# --delete-excluded        delete any files (on DST) that are part of the list of excluded files
# --exclude-from           reference a list of files to exclude
# --hard-links             preserve hard-links
# --one-file-system        don't cross device boundaries (ignore mounted volumes)
# --sparse                 handle sparse files efficiently
# --verbose                increase verbosity
# --xattrs                 update the remote extended attributes to be the same as the local ones

if [ ! -r "$SRC" ]; then
    logger -t $PROG "Source $SRC not readable - Cannot start the sync process"
    exit;
fi

if [ ! -w "$DST" ]; then
    logger -t $PROG "Destination $DST not writeable - Cannot start the sync process"
    exit;
fi

logger -t $PROG "Start rsync"

sudo rsync --acls 
           --archive 
           --delete 
           --delete-excluded 
           --exclude-from=$EXCLUDE 
           --hard-links 
           --one-file-system 
           --sparse 
           --verbose 
           --xattrs 
           "$SRC" "$DST"

logger -t $PROG "End rsync"

# Make the backup bootable
sudo bless -folder "$DST"/System/Library/CoreServices

exit 0

Adapted from the rsync script at Automated OSX backups with launchd and rsync

This is the contents of the .backupignore file.

.Spotlight-*/
.Trashes
/afs/*
/automount/*
/cores/*
/dev/*
/Network/*
/private/tmp/*
/private/var/run/*
/private/var/spool/postfix/*
/private/var/vm/*
/Previous Systems.localized
/tmp/*
/Volumes/*
*/.Trash

Adapted from the excludes file at Automated OSX backups with launchd and rsync

Every time the script runs, messages will be written to the system log.

Check that the source (SRC) and destination (DST) paths in the script are correct and match the volume name that you chose when partitioning the disk. Wrapping the $SRC and $DST variables in double quotes ensures that the script will work even if your volume names contain spaces (e.g. “Macintosh Backup”).

The command option --exclude-from tells the script where to find the file containing the exclude patterns. Make sure you either have .backupignore in the home directory or that you update this part of the command to reference the full path of the excludes file.

Running the backup script

You can run the script from the command line, or make it executable from the Finder or the Desktop:

1. Type the following into the command line to ensure that you have permission to execute the script:

   chmod +x /path/to/rsync_backup.sh
   

2. Remove the .sh extension from the script.

3. Create an alias of the script and move it to the Desktop.
4. Double click the icon to run the backup script.

It’s important to run the script regularly in order to keep the backup in sync with your internal disk. If you have a desktop computer, or you never turn off your laptop, you can automate the running of the script by setting up a cron job.

Checking the disk is bootable

Once you’ve run the backup script, you should test that the backup disk is bootable. To do this, restart your computer and hold down the Alt/Option key. Your backup disk should be presented, with the volume name you chose, as a bootable disk.

When I first booted my backup, the terminal displayed the following line:

dyld: shared cached file was build against a different libSystem.dylib, ignoring cache

According to this article, the fix for this is to update the cache by entering the following into the terminal:

sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force

That should be everything you need to start implementing an incremental backup strategy when using OS X.

I recently included the option to add a large cover image, like the one above, to my posts. The source image is cropped, and below specific maximum dimensions it’s displayed at a predetermined aspect ratio. This post describes the implementation.

• Demo: Flexible CSS cover images

Known support: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE 9+

Features

The way that the cover image scales, and changes aspect ratio, is illustrated in the following diagram.

The cover image component must:

• render at a fixed aspect ratio, unless specific maximum dimensions are exceeded;
• support different aspect ratios;
• support max-height and max-width;
• support different background images;
• display the image to either fill, or be contained within the component;
• center the image.

Aspect ratio

The aspect ratio of an empty, block-level element can be controlled by setting a percentage value for its padding-bottom or padding-top. Given a declaration of padding-bottom:50% (and no explicit height), the rendered height of the element will be 50% of its width.

.CoverImage {
  padding-bottom: 50%;
}

Changing that padding value will change the aspect ratio. For example, padding of 25% results in an aspect ratio of 4:1, padding of 33.333% results in an aspect ratio of 3:1, etc.

Maximum dimensions

The problem with using this aspect ratio hack is that if the element has a max-height declared, it will not be respected. To get around this, the hack can be applied to a pseudo-element instead.

.CoverImage:before {
  content: "";
  display: block;
  padding-bottom: 50%;
}

Now the main element can take a max-height. It should also clip the pseudo-element overflow.

.CoverImage {
  display: block;
  max-height: 300px;
  max-width: 1000px;
  overflow: hidden;
}

.CoverImage:before {
  content: "";
  display: block;
  padding-bottom: 50%;
}

This aspect ratio pattern is provided by the FlexEmbed component for SUITCSS. That component is primarily for responsive video embeds, but it’s flexible enough to be useful whenever you need an element rendered at a predetermined aspect ratio. It comes with modifiers for 2:1, 3:1, 16:9, and 4:3 aspect ratios. The cover image component can extend the FlexEmbed component.

<div class="CoverImage FlexEmbed FlexEmbed--2by1"></div>

Background image

The cover image is applied as a background image that is sized to cover the entire area of the element. This makes sure the image is clipped to fit the aspect ratio of the element.

.CoverImage {
  ...
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-size: cover;
}

If you want different cover images for different instances of the component, they can be applied via the style attribute.

<div class="..." style="background-image: url(cover.jpg)"></div>

The image can be fully centered by using background positioning and block centering. This makes sure that the image is centered in the element, and that the element is centered within its parent (when it reaches the max-width value).

.CoverImage {
  ...
  background-position: 50%;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-size: cover;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

Final result

If you depend on the FlexEmbed module, the amount of additional code required is minimal. (See the demo for all the code, including the FlexEmbed dependency.)

/**
 * Requires: suitcss/flex-embed
 */

.CoverImage {
  background-position: 50%;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-size: cover;
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-height: 300px;
  max-width: 1000px;
}

<div class="CoverImage FlexEmbed FlexEmbed--3by1"
     style="background-image:url(cover.jpg)">
</div>

You can add further customizations, such as setting the accompanying background color, or providing a means to switch between the cover and contain keywords for background-size.

Mumbai civil and sessions court gives anticipatory bail to two others who are in quarantine

Stegmann, Juan Pablo

Allen, David T

Goulston, Mark

Oestergaard, Kris, 1973- author

Kee, James Edwin

Taylor, Johnny C., 1968-

Ranjbar, Amir S

Simpkins, Stacy, author

Egerton, Peter, author

Blanka, Christine, author

LeMay, Matt, author

Grinberg, Alex. author