annual shmamual
in journal
hello. so today is the big thank-god-it’s-once-a-year fund drive at work ~ that’s why it’s 7 am and i’m up. most people arrived at work this morning at 5:30. me? i’m sleeping in and not getting there till 8:30. and then we’ll all be there probably till 7 tonight when the thirteen hour marathon ends. (it actually is called a marathon. huh, never thought i’d participate in a marathon.) my job has been the website so please check out my hard work, it’ll make me very happy: supportpra.org.
i’d been racking my brain for days trying to find a not dumpy but sleek thermometer-goal-reaching bit of code online, you know, to show graphically how much money we’re raising, how close we are to our goal. well, everything i found looked horrible, all pixelated and cheesy, and just not in keeping with the pretty clean look of the website. sometime yesterday afternoon a little lightbulb went off and i thought ‘aha! what about that bar-percentage-thingamajig all those knitting blogs?’ so, i went off in search of it.
(wahoo, just got a call from work, already raised $9000! 8% of our goal reached. phew, it’s going to be a long day. at least i get the fun part of upping that precentage bar every hour.. 
anyhow, so i couldn’t find the original source for the percentage bar thing, i looked all over the place. i know, i could’ve just taken it off a site that used it (like the excellent passioknit – such pretty pictures!) but i wanted the original, sure to work. however, the woman who originally put it out, her blog ‘Anna Knits’ was nowhere to be found. and then, another aha (this is really engrossing to you, i know.. ;P ) and off i went to the internet archive. score! from feb. 2004, here’s the page.
so, to save others that run around, here’s my copying and pasting of that same info:
“You might find something completely different to use it for, but I use it to display the percentage of a project done.
There are only 2 variables to set, and you can integrate it easily into more complex code, like I have here, or update it manually very simply. You can set the color and percentage to anything you want.
To put it on your site:
~ First download the <txp:file_download_link id=”11”>Flash file</txp:file_download_link>. (Right-click and “Save Target As…”) Copy it to your own server. Make a note of where you put it!
~ Wherever you want to put the percent bar, paste this code:
`
</embed>
</object>
`
~ Edit the colored parts of the code, changing the “100” to whatever percentage you would like to display. Change the “25BFE0” to the hex code of whatever color you would like to use for the progress bar. Finally, if you didn’t put the Flash File in your root directory, replace “(path)” with the path to the swf file. If it is in your root directory, omit “(path)” altogether.
~ You’re done!”
update: the anna knits is back up—seems it was only down those few days i desperately needed it ;)—so go there for better, prettier, and the original information.
