No Mod Required

“I hack, baby”, sung to the tune of “I Get the Job Done,” by Big Daddy Kane.

I’m a Feedburner user. One of the tabs in their “publicize” section is a link to a Sping Widgets feed widget that you can use to put your feed on places like Myspace. I thought that seemed like a no brainer, so I did it up real quick and inserted it into my interests. It looked fine, I just couldn’t click any of the links*. Apparently, Myspace disables links in Flash objects, which kind of kills the point of having my feed posted over there. Not to be discouraged, I gave it a few minutes though and came up with a pretty simple hack to at least fake it enough to make the thing worthwhile.

What did I was wrap the whole thing in a DIV with height and width equal to the widget. Inside of that I added an empty anchor tag pointing back here. I figured If I couldn’t link to individual posts I might as well get some links back to the main blog page and people could figure it out for themselves. I styled that anchor thusly:


/*give it its own height and width*/
display:block;
width:230px;
height:280px;
/*set the position to absolute, so we can (a) stack it and (b) out it where it needs to go with pixel precision*/
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:20px;
z-index:20;
/*give it a background color and then blow away the background color with opacity without this there's no "hook" for clicks. It's just an empty box I probably could have achieved the same effect with a transparent background image but this is bandwidth free.*/
background-color:#333;
opacity:.05;
filter: alpha(opacity=05)


You can see what the anchor looks like, in terms of positioning, with this example:

As you can see I left room for the scrollbar and the menu.

One thing that makes this work right out of the box is the fact that the Spring Widget code already sets wmode to transparent which allows HTML elements to sit on top of a Flash Movie.

Here’s some copy and paste code, if you’re into that sort of thing:

*This was just copying and pasting the code as pure HTML I’m not sure if using the Spring Widgets “insert into myspace” button works any better as I couldn’t get it to actually insert the code into my profile.