Popups are the spawn of satan … in fact say so much in ‘the Book‘ … most of the time. Like medicinal marijuana for terminally ill cancer patients who have an adversion to morphine, pop-ups do have some rare, legitimate utility for things like calendar widgets for date-related form entries and/or disclaimer type information. Which is why I’ve linked an article by Elise Bauer entitled “How To Make a Pop-up Window” that shows how to do it right – especially for those of us who like to right click.

Sometimes you might want to link to a popup window from your Movable Type weblog. For example you can make your About page a popup instead of a separate page. Although using the target=”blank” attribute in a hyperlink can generate a new page, using javascript commands for popups will give you more control over the appearance and location of the popup.

Can I have an ‘Amen!?’ Or at least a partial head knod, for while I’m no fan of the target=”_blank” attribute, I do like the idea of giving the users more control of their destiny when it comes to popup windows. This is especially true for those of us slugging it out with the way ASP.Net uses, or should I say abuses Javascript to launch popups and other such controls.

If you’re not sure what I mean you can view a popup of my very first post/press release one of two ways.

• Left click on it and you get a popup
• Right Click on it and you can open a new browser Window (or tab for you hip, cool FireFox users)

It is the ability to right click and do things like open window, tabs, create bookmarks and/or save linkable content that makes Elise’s example so valuable — at least to me — of course your mileage may vary.