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Getting Free Pictures For Your Blog
2007-12-19 18:34:00
Just in case it’s what you’re thinking, this is not a sponsored post. This is me talking about the website from the goodness of my heart trying to help other web people out. Although I don’t actively use images for my blog, I’ve often needed images for other websites or other projects. I suppose it’s ...
More About: Pictures , Free , Blog

Devil’s Advocate - Why You SHOULD’NT Validate Your Website
2007-12-17 18:48:00
This will be the first article to kick off my Devil ’s Advocate series, a series dedicated to seeing a point-of-view I don’t necessarily believe and making an attempt to push it. They will be based on past articles that I have written. The Article This week’s installment plays devil’s advocate to my past article on Why You Should Vali date Your Website . If you’re curious as to what validation is, there is some information in that article as well. Let’s get this show on the road. Reasons For Not Validating Your Website If It Looks and Works Fine, Why Bother? - Let’s be serious, a lot of bad code works in a lot of browsers. Making sure you closed your <li> tag or something similar probably won’t be the end of the world. If it looks fine in IE6,IE7 and Firefox, it’ll likely be fine. Time Consuming - You could have worked on a site for a good 8 hours only to find that you’ve got 40 errors. If each of these errors takes a ...

Gift Ideas You SHOULD’NT Give Your Web Geek
2007-12-14 18:47:00
They’re all around us, it can be your best friend, it can be your sibling. Here are some DON’TS from my point-of-view as a web guy and knowing a lot of like-minded people. No Electronics Your web guy is around electronics all day. Likely, he’ll speak about them to co-workers and friends and gather opinions on many brands. You need to be careful because a web guy is likely to be loyal to certain brands. Unless you know your web guy inside out or know exactly what he wants, this is dangerous territory. No Movies/DVDs/Music Most web guys are savvy in finding ways to get a hold of these, and who knows, they might already have them stashed away somewhere. If you have your mind set on getting something in this category, make sure it’s something you’ll enjoy together where the value is placed on the togetherness instead of being able to physical hold the item. Example: You’ve always said that you two should watch Casablanca together. It just isn’t...
More About: Ideas , Gift Ideas , Gift , Geek , Give

Basic Actionscript Code Beginners Need To Know
2007-12-12 19:07:00
I was there. I was a designer who had to start using Adobe Flash. Since I was a designer, I had more of a creative side then a logical side which meant learning to code Actionscript was a whole other ballgame. If you’re like me, here’s some easy Actionscript code you should know to get the most out of your Flash work. Trace What trace does is it allows you to print information to your output window in Flash. This is not visible to those who view the SWF on the web. Trace is especially useful if something goes wrong and you want to figure out why. You can trace simple text or the contents of variables. trace(”Text or variables can go here”); Playhead Control Using simple playhead control, you can take care of a lot animations that you see on the web. These include: gotoAndStop(frameVariable); gotoAndPlay(frameVariable); stop(); Functions Functions are basically chunks of code that you don’t want to have to rewrite over and over again. It saves you time ...
More About: Code , Basic

Getting Ideas for Your Blog
2007-12-11 14:44:00
Have you come across a time where you didn’t have any really good ideas for your blog and needed inspiration? You could write a “Getting Ideas for Your Blog ” article, but I have a few other ideas I can toss around to get your mind rolling. I’ll discuss two ideas and why they work. Analytics Software ...

10 Web Development Tips Part 2
2007-12-05 18:34:00
This article is part 2 of our 10 web development tips series. If you’re interested in part 1, click here. This articles will deal more with some tips that can help you with your asp/php/javascript/etc code. Here are 10 tips that will surely help, regardless of what language you code in: 1 - Refine Your ...
More About: Web Development , Tips , Development , Part

Raster Animation vs Vector Animation in Flash
2007-12-04 18:26:00
Okay, you’ve just jumped into Adobe Flash and you need to animate a corporate logo, do you animate the a gif/jpeg image of it or a vector version of it? I’ll take a look at the pros and cons of each type. I define a raster file as a file where pixels are set. That ...
More About: Animation , Vector , Adobe Flash , Imation

Loading Variables From Query String Into Flash
2007-11-29 16:57:00
The title says it all; I will go over loading variables from your query string (located in the URL address bar) into Adobe Flash . This can serve many purposes. For example, you can set a language toggle via query string. This way, you can avoid a language splash screen and avoid having 4 different files ...
More About: Variables , Adobe Flash , String , Query

How To Send Data From Flash To ASP/PHP Without A Page Refresh
2007-11-28 18:41:00
This article will deal the how to of sending form data from Adobe Flash to your PHP/ASP file so it can be inserted into a database (or manipulated for whatever other reason). The trick is making sure a new window doesn’t popup and the page doesn’t refresh to run through the ASP/PHP code. That’s the ...
More About: Data , Page , Refresh , Send

Upcoming Project Announcement
2007-11-26 18:23:00
In an effort to establish myself as a personality in a web marketing niche, I have a project in mind. It will be a simple one-page website that estimates potential ad revenue based on a site’s existing statistics or on a site’s potential statistics. I’m hoping to get repeat visitors who either bookmarked the resource or ...
More About: Announcement , Project , Upcoming , Anno

Making Your Site Look Credible for First Impressions
2007-11-23 18:49:00
We all do it, we’ve all been trained to do it. We’ve come to acknowledge what a good, credible website should look like and what a bad, fake website should look like. Whether your site looks good or bad can mean the difference between a visitor that stays 5 seconds or 50 seconds or money ...
More About: Web Design , First Impressions , Site , Impressions

7 Tips For Solving HTML Problems
2007-11-21 19:04:00
There’s no really unique way of introducing this list. But rest assured, if you’ve wrestled with HTML because something isn’t showing up or because layout elements are askew, there’s some tips in here that will likely benefit you. 1 - Lose Your CSS (Stylesheet) Extra elements will only make troubleshooting harder. Removing extra elements can be key ...
More About: Tips , Problems , Html , Troubleshooting

How To Do Feathered Masks in Adobe Flash
2007-11-19 18:48:00
If you’re looking to do feathered (or smooth, anti-aliased, depending on your terminology) masks in Adobe Flash , and you are familiar with the program, you’ll notice that it’s not easy to do a mask without sharp edges. Using this technique, you can use images with transparencies (PNGs) or draw vectors in Flash to use as ...
More About: Adobe Flash , Masks

5 Reasons To Buy A Mac; I?m Still Not Convinced
2007-11-16 18:56:00
Some time ago, I wrote one of my more popular articles detailing why I design on a PC instead of a Mac. I’ll follow up with today’s article where I play devil’s advocate. Without further ado, here’s my list. 1 - To Fit The Designer Stereotype The common stereotype is that if you are a designer of ...
More About: Reasons

The Effect Your Post Title Has On Being Dugg
2007-11-14 18:45:00
Let’s start off with me being completely honest and saying I digg my own articles. I don’t digg useless articles, but I do digg the useful ones or the ones I’d think others would find interesting. In fact, I wrote an article on socially bookmarking your own content titled Bookmark Yourself and Don’t Feel Guilty ...
More About: Post , Effect , Dugg , Title

10 Flash Design and Development Tips Part 2
2007-11-12 20:35:00
In case you’ve missed, last week I wrote Part 1 on Flash Design and Development Tips . It was a success (in terms of traffic) so logically, here’s Part 2. 1 - Raster vs Vector Be well aware of the benefits of raster images versus the benefits of vector images. For the sake of CPU time, I prefer ...

10 Flash Design and Development Tips Part 1
2007-11-07 18:39:00
Since my articles with 10 tips seem to do quite well and get positive feedback. Why not keep on going? Today, I’ll talk about 10 Tips for Flash Design and Flash Development . 1 - Don’t Restrict Yourself Just because you don’t know the program well, doesn’t mean you should paint yourself into a box. The tips ...
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PageRank Update False Alarm
2007-11-06 15:28:00
I looked up this blog’s PageRank and it jumped to PageRank 4 from a measly PageRank 0. It turns after over-analyzing the PageRank update that occured on November 2, it turned out my blog didn’t get the update as quickly as my portfolio site. All that over-analyzing, out the window. But that doesn’t mean we ...
More About: Pagerank , Update , Alarm , Ager , Gera

November 2nd PageRank Update?
2007-11-02 17:49:00
UPDATE: I did a little research and it seems there have been posts in 2005 and 2006 on other blogs that mention a PageRank update was occurring. I don’t see any reason why this year would be any different. I was casually browsing the internet and occasionally, I check my blog for a PageRank increase. (Yes, ...
More About: Pagerank , Update , November , Ager , Gera

Beginner?s Guide To Getting A Website On Your Own Domain Name
2007-11-01 17:46:00
This is a question I’ve often been asked and I’ve often had to deal with. It’s not as simple as inexperienced people may think as you do have to deal with some geek stuff, regardless of how experienced you are. If you have a service that handles all of this on their own, all the ...
More About: Website , Domain , Domain Name , Beginner , Guide

Optimizing GIFs - Get The Most Out Of Your Kilobytes
2007-10-29 18:10:00
A little over a week ago, I wrote an article on optimizing JPEGs (JPGs). This week, I’m going to follow up with an article on optimizing your GIF files. If you’re unfamiliar with GIFs, GIFs are typically used for low color images. Usually, if the image is a photo (taken with a camera), you won’t use ...
More About: Web Development , Bytes , Byte

What Do I Do With This Domain Name?
2007-10-26 18:18:00
Approximately three months, as a spur of the moment decision, I decided to buy the domain name: BigGirlfriend.com http://www.biggirlfriend.com/ Not the smartest of my investments, I’ll admit it, but I figured I might be able to make something fun out of it or resell it. It’s pronounceable,correctly spelled, no dashes and is/can be an expression. What I ...
More About: Domain , Domain Names , Domain Name

6 Tips On Getting Good Cheap Hosting
2007-10-24 19:04:00
Searching for hosting on the internet, especially if you’re using a search engine, is usually mess. What you usually get are hosting review sites or hosts that have the best SEO for your keywords. This is absolutely the worst way to go about it. I’ll give some tips on what you should look for. Recommendations ...
More About: Hosting , Tips , Good , Cheap

Four Types of Webpages To Avoid
2007-10-22 19:08:00
This recent installment in the Web Usability series will discuss the four types of webpages that should not exist because they are web usability nightmares. Although these were a little more prominent a few years ago, they’re still occasionally stumbled upon. The biggest culprit for these pages are small businesses that don’t understand the internet ...
More About: Types , Avoid , Ages

Optimizing JPEGs (JPGs) - Get The Most Out Of Your Kilobytes
2007-10-19 22:02:00
Each day, I’d estimate that I make an average of 10 JPEGs (or JPGs, whatever you prefer). I figure that there are many people out there that do similar things. When it comes to web development and web design, I think it’s important to know how you can balance quality versus file size. This is ...
More About: Web Development , Bytes , Byte , Jpeg

Project Case Study: Musterville
2007-10-18 05:01:00
I thought of a great idea for an addition to my section on Ad Revenue Driven Websites, I can talk about experiences with my own personal projects and why they worked and why they didn’t and really open up to readers on their comments on what I did right and what I didn’t. Idea The general idea ...
More About: Study , Project , Case , Ville

10 Web Development Quick Tips Part 1
2007-10-15 15:53:00
Given that my previous article on Web Design Quick Tips was a success, I figure it’s a good idea to follow up with a similar article on Web Development . Without further ado, here are 10 Web Development Quick Tips, in no particular order. 1 - Optimize Your Images Well Know JPGs and GIFs like the back ...
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How To Do a CSS PopUp Without Opening a New Window
2007-10-12 19:10:00
Ever wonder how some people can get little CSS PopUp’s without opening an annoying window? I’ll explain how. One of its advantages is that it’s not blocked by blockers and you can place it wherever you like on your page. Apart from the short Javascript file that you don’t even have to look at, it’s ...
More About: Web Development , Opening , Popup , Window , To Do

How To Do CSS Rollovers Using Background Images or Colors
2007-10-10 18:52:00
I just thought I’d share this technique with you. Even though using images as links aren’t intuitive or user friendly, it’s a good idea that if you’re ever in a situation where you’re forced to do so, you have an easy way out. This example uses a single image (or not image) and simple CSS ...
More About: Web Development , Images , Colors , Background , Rollover

10 Web Design Quick Tips - Part 2
2007-10-09 15:20:00
This is Part 2 of the short series on Web Design Quick Tips . You can find Part 1 by clicking here. In Part 1, the 10th tip suggested following the basic principles of design to strengthen your work. I’ll go into each of those in-depth. Each of these features can unconsciously make a design good. ...