Spent the last couple of nights trying to figure out how to get some image-based links on my site to act like buttons. You know, change slightly as you hover over them. An illusion of movement like those old flicker books. OK, I should know how to do it, but I'm slow… it took me a year to create a graphic link that even looked like a button.
First stop was HTMLGoodies where I picked up a neat bit of javascript which did the trick. Almost. Problem was, it only worked for one button and I have eight on the page I was working on. However hard I tried (and oh I slaved) I could either have one button blink, no buttons blink, or worst of all, the wrong button blink. That last one was quite neat actually. You hover on one button and another image somewhere else on the page starts flashing. Could be useful (if I can find a sensible use for it).
So time to google an answer. No need to actually go to Google of course, thanks to Opera. Google-on-a-plate at the top of the browser. So a moment later I find myself at somewhere called 'An HTML Help Page', and sure enough a multiple image script is there for the grabbing. That's when Opera came to the rescue for a second time. Instead of all that cut 'n paste hassle (highlight text, ctrl c, open notepad, ctrl v, bookmark the URL, copy url into the notepad file in case I can't remember later where I found it) I just highlighted the relevant text, rightclick, notes… and I had the lot, all saved in the Hotlist. Great tool and an absolute boon for researching on the net.
Been playing with the script tonight and now have a fully functioning 8-blinking-button page all of my own. It's subtle, honestly. On most of them it just looks like a small backlight has come on when you hover the mouse over it. You'll have to take my word on this though. It's all part of a site relocation/redesign I'm working on so I won't be uploading some test pages for a couple of days yet. And then there'll still be plenty of work still to do. I plan to run two sites in parallel for a while (mainly to deal with bookmarked links, some hotlinks that will take a while to get changed, and a raft of internal re-linking).
I'll post the link in a couple of days. I bet you can't wait!