The power of Social Media
I recently encountered one of the advantages Social Media has. In my case it was on Google Buzz (of course). However, this advantage is noticeable with every Social Media you’re using like Facebook and Twitter. Okay, I’ll tell you guys what happened. I’m a graphic designer by trade, but also like to do some coding work in PHP and recently I also discovered jQuery. But not being a coder/developer at all, it’s sometimes hard to get done what I want.
The last few weeks I worked on a project which uses jQuery and PHP. In that project I had to get a simple radio button form working. The user just needed to click on the image above the radio button to submit the form. If that worked I could hide the radio buttons itself and use the image instead. It seemed to work immediately in Chrome, FireFox and Safari. Internet Explorer however didn’t worked at all. There it only worked with text labels it seemed. According to w3c and some other website it should also work with an image.
Looking at the <label> tags everything looked like it should, Internet Explorer kept ignoring it however. I became fed up with it after trying different alternatives. So I did some asking around on some forums, but didn’t get a straight answer there either. Then I though by myself: Why not asking it on Google Buzz? So I pasted the code into Buzz and to see what happened…
And what about that!
In just a few minutes I got some response on it by Linda Lawrey. She re-buzzed it through all here followers which are a substantial amount more then the ones I have. Because I’m in a different timezone then most of her followers the pretty stuff happened at night. Followers of Linda went to my Buzz and I got some really good help about the problem! Different alternatives and solutions were provided and there seemed there was a working one provided by Kyle Hu.
Back home I immediately began testing the provided suggestions. However nothing worked. I decided to do I final search on the code Kyle stated and there it was. No solution available at all. It seems it’s an Internet Explorer bug with <label> tags and <img> inside them. A lot of time invested and no proper solution. I redesigned the form however with some provided code to get it work as good as it could on Explorer.
Even if there wasn’t a solution here, the help of others was enormous on Buzz. It works even faster then a community forum which is hard to imagine at some times. Forums do have a lot of specialists available, but Social Media seems to have more willing to help. Next time I need some information , want to ask a specific thing about Photoshop or some kind of code I’ll ask on Social Media first. Certainly I get an answer there faster then anywhere on the web. Just try it yourself when browsing for a solution to your problems.
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