So, in my spare time (like I really have any, huh?) I have been working on and developing an RSS based news aggregation site, called RANCT(RSS Aggregator and News Collaboration Tool). It’s located at www.ranct.com if you wish to take a look.

While I am still working on a lot of additions for it, the core of what the site does is there.
The sites scours the internet for news websites and using there RSS feeds, displays the links to the relevant news. RSS feeds will be able to be tagged as local news by a zipcode. You will then have all your local news on one site.

Popular News uses the assumption that if multiple news agencies are writing on a topic around the same time, then it must be something important and newsworthy. Then it searches for an image that pertains to the story on the relevant sites, displaying them.

Users can share the links they are reading by using a twitter and facebook share link.

So far there has been a couple months into the project and I am ready to start working on some features to make it more friendly to visitors, but for now, the hard stuff is done!

I was working on a little bit of CSS this morning and ran into some problems that I tried researching a solution for.

The problem?

I created a div that contained an image and some text. Then I overlayed another div directly on top of it to protect the image from a right-click as well as to provide a nive hover effect around everything, image and text, no matter the location of the cursor(as long as it was over the div containing those items).

I got everyting work just fine in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer I ran into a problem. In Internet Explorer, a div that is transparent will allow items that are underneath it to be clicked, which made my div not hover correctly on the two browsers!

The solution, set a background image that links to a 1px by 1px gif transparent image!

Here is the code to display the image and text with the overlaying div. NOTE: this sytem was used for a video dashboard display, hence the name of the divs used below:

<div id="eachvideo">
	<img src="myimage.jpg" />
      	<div style="float:left; width:100px; margin-left:10px;">
		<strong>Image caption</strong>
	</div>
</div>
<a href="#mylinkhere" id="eachvideotop"></a>

Then the relevant CSS:

#eachvideo {
position: relative;
width:100%;
height:100%;
background: #DDDDDD;
z-index:0;
}

a#eachvideotop {
position:relative;
left:0px;
top:0px;
display:block;
width:118px;
height:142px;
z-index:2;
margin-top:-144px;
background: url(transparent.gif);

}

a#eachvideotop:hover {
border: 1px solid #000000;
}
#eachvideo img {
float:left;
clear:right;
width:100px;
height:auto;
padding:10px 10px;
z-index:1;
}

Try it out!

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<?php
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