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Swine Fever 2.0!!

Swine Fever is a classic Bookmarklet that i wrote in 1999. Bookmarklets were very short Javascript programs (not more than one line) that could be called on any web page by simply calling them from your browser's bookmarks. They can be seen as the first step in the direction of Browser-Addons, like they are popular today with Firefox.

On 2008-12-13, Tobias Leingruber will open his artistic Addon repository artzilla and asked me to reanimate Swine Fever, as it is apparently the godfather of artistic Firefox Addons. However, until now, Swine Fever didn't even run on Firefox. The last browsers tested were Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5.0. Where you even born when these were popular??

Now witness the complete rewrite of this amazing software, finally compatible with the latest Firefox release!!

Originally Swine Fever was great for usage on typical 1990's websites: These were usually overloaded with loads of images, because designers at that time thought that webdesign meant to draw something in Photoshop and then cut it into loads of small puzzle pieces held together by a table structure. They tried to make pages look as if they did not consist of rectagular areas, but of smooth shapes, drop shadows and freeform lines. They tried to hide that any web page is in fact made from modular elements that can be used and addressed independently. Swine Fever exposed this modular structure and demasked the appearance of a complete, balanced shape: every single of these puzzle pieces would be replaced with the image of a pig, loaded from Pig Fertilisation Station of Weser Ems. (However i think the translation of "Schweinebesamung" to "pig fetilisation" is not really accurate.)

Today, table layouts have mostly been replaced by CSS layouts. Swine Fever will not have a great effect on freshly produced websites. For historic reasons, i did not change it to modify CSS declarartions. So it is best to use it on old pages, or apply it to find old pages with it.

In 2001, this pig fertilisation station had their page redesigned and removed the image of the pig. Luckily i was able to recover it from the cache of Alvar and since then it is hosted on my own server.


Schweinchen


Powered by schweinebesamung.de


To include this wonderful thing into Firefox, drag the link to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Here is a hand-picked list of sites that look great with Swine Fever:


The newpaper TAZ covers Swine Fever on 2000-07-06 (German language).

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