It's highly likely your blog contains links to external sites, as well as to other pages within your own site. iBlog gives you the option to open any hyperlink in a new window. It can be useful for users to know in advance whether the link they are about to follow will open a new window and/or take them "offsite". Here is one way to provide this information by applying a CSS rule to your iBlog stylesheet...
This article refers to iBlog (version 1.x), a Mac blogging client that was formerly used to publish this site. It may refer to design elements and other features that have since been replaced.
It is easy to determine which links that you create using the iBlog RTF entry editor should open in a new window:
The Add/Edit URL dialog box in iBlog
iBlog uses the "target" attribute to label links that should open a new window:
target="NewWindow"We can make use of this attribute to create a CSS rule that will apply only to links that open in a new window. For example, we can add a right-aligned icon as a background image (thanks Dan!). The following rule will do this for active and visited links with the target attribute specified, within the class "entry" (you would omit this if you wanted to apply the rule to all such links):
.entry a[target=NewWindow]:link,
.entry a[target=NewWindow]:visited {
padding-right: 15px;
background: url(offsite.gif) no-repeat center right;
}Click here to replace the current page.
Click here to open a new window.
Tested and works with Safari, Firefox Mac + PC, without invalid XHTML or CSS. Tested and doesn't work with IE6/Win (well that figures!) - but is happily ignored without any adverse cosmetic effects.
Nice, never knew I could do that in CSS. Mind if I use the icon?
James (and others), I don't mind if you use the offsite icon: I merely recreated it using freshly-squeezed pixels from one I found via Google Images.