Hello Tomorrow™

FLIR is short for Facelift Image Replacement, and it’s a really easy way (waaaay easier than the Flash based alternative sIFR, which replaces each header etc with a separate tiny .swf flie) to generate image replacements for any bit of html text on a web page - that means you can easily use any font you want on a web page instead of having to settle for the classics like Arial or Tahoma etc. FLIR, for example, is the thing that’s making all the headings for the articles on this site use Souvenir as their main font.

If you’ve used sIFR in the past you’ll know that it has it’s drawbacks - the main one for me was that I couldn’t get it work every time and in every instance I needed to. To be fair that was a while back and sIFR’s on version 3 now, but I like how simple FLIR has been to set up (it honestly took a few minutes) and I’ve not managed to break it or find an instance of it not working - so far anyway.

Take a look at the Facelift site here and have a play around with it, or jump straight in an take a look at some examples.

From what I can tell it doesn’t effect SEO and degrades nicely (i.e. just shows the page as it ordinarily would be without FLIR installed) for older browsers or for folks without JavaScript turned on etc.

There’s even a WordPress plugin to make it even easier for anyone to use, but if you’ve got control of all the files on your own server etc it’s just as easy to upload it and set it all up manually anyway.