October 31st, 2006
Ok it’s not an Australian thing and quite frankly I’m glad cause in some of our neighborhoods I’d be afraid of the kids being hit by beer bottles as drunken punters run from the oncoming hoard of ghosts.
BUT…
No late night horror movie on any free to air tv station????
In past years we’ve seen nightmare on elm street 1, 2 and 3 or Friday the 13th or surprise surprise Halloween but this year the closest we come (apart from an old Simpsons halloween special) is:
Power Rangers Time Force - When sinister beings create chaos in the past and in the future, Earth has only one hope for survival - Power Rangers: Time Force. Adventure reaches dangerous heights as the legendary Power Rangers face more action, adventure and adversaries than ever before in an exciting new era in history.
I’m the first to admit that sounds scary as hell but where’s my horror movie!!!!???? Least they could have done is have something with Dean Cain in it.
Oh and while I’m at it I just found this guy - It’s For Wimps - he is a crack up - have a look at his site and tell him I sent you so he won’t call me a wimp!
A example of one of his posts:
Lord of the Rings
It ´s for WIMPS to see LOTR and feel yourself identificated with the blonde wimp elf, a REAL MAN feels identificated with the bad-tempered dwarf that wants to kick everybody ´s asses.
BAHAHAHA - Here’s the link
Popularity: 3% [?]
Categories: Television |
Tags: australian television, australian tv, films, halloween, horror, Movies, nightmare on elm street, Television | 4 Comments
October 31st, 2006
Last post I asked about hit counters and I pretty much thought the way you guys did. I’m old enough to remember when hit counters were the coolest thing to have on your website. So I thought it may be interesting to get everyone’s pet peeves when it comes to websites - I’ll get the ball rolling:
- animated gifs
- animated under construction gifs
- badly put together jpegs - ones with that fuzziness especially around text
I’m looking for comments that when you read them you go arrrrg I hate that too!!!
Take up the challenge - What Are Your Website Pet Peeves???
Popularity: 3% [?]
Categories: Uncategorized |
5 Comments
October 28th, 2006
I was asked the other day by a client if they can put a hit counter on their website. For some reason I’ve always thought this to a bad idea but when I sought out the opinion of others (in Google) all I found were ways to include one. It made me wonder if the mood has changed on hit counters.
What do you think? Does it effect your thoughts on a site if you see a counter. The client only wants it to know what kind of stats he’s getting so I’m going to suggest the server stats page anyway.
But what about a counter on the page is this popular again???
Popularity: 3% [?]
Categories: Uncategorized |
6 Comments
October 28th, 2006
Well it’s been a busy couple of days I’ve upgraded both Internet Explorer and Firefox at the same time and have been working on a site redesign (granted the original was a design done by me over a year ago).
I’m always impressed at how easy it is to update Firefox. Download, execute and customize if you so wish and depending on your connection it is so quick. Now IE was a bit of a different story. Just as simple to do except it took so much longer to do. Don’t get me wrong I’m not bashing for the sake of it - I’m just making an observation. With IE installation it took around 10 minutes or so and really that’s not a huge ask of my time.
Going to play around with them both - my general browsing is always done by Firefox so I use that a bit more. Loving the spell check in that actually. When I upgraded it presented a bunch of extensions that i hadn’t seen so I was happy to load a couple of them. With IE I have to say I’m really impressed by it’s upgrade - to me this is probably the best upgrade they’ve done (in terms of improvement over the last one). I will probably give this a bit more of a go as with it’s previous version was only on my system to test designs and look after pages that Firefox didn’t work with (Brisbane City Library - I mean what’s going on there? I sent them an email asking if they were going to address it and six months later I’m still waiting for a reply.)
The site I’ve been working on is a Kombi Sales site based on the Gold Coast. They were updating their name to Coast to Coast Kombis and we decided it would be a good idea to give the site a bit of a face lift and a spring clean. The main thing was improving the back end for the client and applying CSS instead of it’s table based design. It was really great actually because there was a layout on OSWD that I had my eye on for a while and after a fair amount of modification it fit perfectly.
Someone over at BlogMad gave this site a 1 on the Varb voting system - I really hope it was just someone who didn’t realize that the rating system works with 10 being the highest - it doesn’t make that very clear. If not and they meant to hit 1 that’s fine welcome to the web - I’ll try harder in the future!
On a more positive note Crypt Hunter got reviewed the other day at critiquemyblog and this was said:
“If you want to take an adventure into the world of the Bazaar then check out this blog. I don[’t mean that in a negative way…it’s actually a pretty funny and interesting blog full of wit and humor.”
Popularity: 8% [?]
Categories: Stuff |
Tags: blogging, Brisbane, brisbane city library, firefox, internet explorer, Review, upgrade | 2 Comments
October 27th, 2006
I recently changed sargedesign.com from it’s zen orientated Flash based website to a still zen but now CSS styled site. A couple of my friends had trouble using the old site and I’ve decided to go with a more universal and bandwidth friendly site.
But I saw this website the other day and to me it is the perfect use of Flash - check out http://www.willyoung.co.uk/home/ to see what I mean.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: Flash, using flash | No Comments
October 26th, 2006
Something that has always interested me are those silica gel packs that you find in your shoes when you buy new ones. They’re there of course to reduce moisture thus preserving your moisture sensitive product and keeping mould at bay.
The thing that strikes me as odd is the warning label that you find on them. For me it falls well within the duh column and if you do open your new pair of runners and the first thing you want to do is eat the silica gel pack then perhaps a little drying out from the inside is what you need.
Granted it’s there for kids. Well I don’t know about that either surely this is aiming for that age bracket of kids who can’t read yet or well. So the written warning there is for someone who can’t comprehend the concept of don’t eat the silica gel who probably can’t read it.
It’s for the parents then…
Ummm you shouldn’t have kids if you go mmmmm I wonder if this is a free food like gift that comes with every Reebok?
I imagine we’re looking at a more legal thing - people showing up at the courthouse all dehydrated going ‘well no one said not to eat the stuff’. Under this thought though you’d have to imagine they would already be full of the tissue paper as this doesn’t have the label on it.
See I told you there would be some vague thoughts here.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Categories: Stuff |
Tags: reebok, silica gel pack, tissue paper, vague thoughts, written warning | 4 Comments
October 25th, 2006
Please note that the images in this post are currently missing due to a move in domains - I’ll get them back ASAP or advise that they are gone forever.
On the standard MySpace profile your name is in text in the top left hand corner.
Now what if you wanted to change this to something a little more cool like:
The code you will use is:
span.nametext {font-size:0.5pt; display:block;
background-image:
url(http://yoursite.com/yourimage.jpg);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:center;
overflow:none; background-attachment:scroll;
text-align:center; width:200px; height:50px;
color:white;}
The image itself you’ll want to be careful with it’s background colour so it matches your existing background and also the size - it’ll be cropped if you don’t change the text-align tag to your dimensions. Another word about the size is remember anything you do here will effect the rest of the page - if you put an image too tall it’ll push everything down.
I loaded this into the “who I’d like to meet” section just to keep it seperate from the other CSS we put in the other day - really I would normally put it all in the one CSS but again I’m breaking it all up for these purposes.
The name still appears but tiny and in white so it doesn’t show up against the background colour - you need to change yours to reflect your own background colour (remember leave out the #).
And there you have it you now have an image for your name!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: myspace | 4 Comments
October 24th, 2006
Please note that the images in this post are currently missing due to a move in domains - I’ll get them back ASAP or advise that they are gone forever.
For some reason and I’m not entirely sure why on MySpace they have a 435×75 box with the words “yourname is in your extended network”. This stands out straight away and takes up valuable screen space. In this quick guide I’ll show you how I’m customising this section and taking back this real estate.
A number of people have recognised the value in having a MySpace site in conjunction with their ‘normal’ website. It’s a marketing extension that allows you to take advantage of the extended network. Mmmmm maybe that’s why those words are there…nope you’re still got to go - sorry Tom!
The websites that I’ll be working with are www.quietpaws.com and myspace.com/quietpaws. Fortunately I know the owner and she’ll cut me some slack whilst doing this so I can make future revisions. Normally when skinning a MySpace page I would make an overall look and feel master image to work from but for the sake of these guides I really just want to focus on the smaller changes that you can make yourself. If you visit the site in the future and it’s all different you’ll know why!
If you take a look at QuietPaws you’ll notice it has an obvious style and uses the ‘paws’ imagery as it’s flourish. We’re going to use the main graphic at the top to create a banner that people can see so they know to visit the main site from it’s Myspace cousin.
First off we already have the dimensions 435px x 75px. My web graphics program of choice is Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe). So straight away I’m setting up a blank canvas in those dimensions. One of the things that is good about the standard MySpace page (and I assure you there isn’t that much that’s good!) is it’s plain colours. Anything we do here now won’t really look that much out of place.
I’m not going to go too much into what makes a good banner here because I’m really more concerned about how we get it onto MySpace. It is fortunate though because I did the design on QuietPaws I’ve got access to the source files and images etc.
Here is the design I’ve gone with.
Now how are we going to get MySpace to deal with this?
We’re going to insert some CSS code directly in the ‘About Me’ section in MySpace. The code itself is fairly straight forward though MySpace does do some weird things such as
strip out # in any colour descriptions. At any rate the code you use is:
table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg”); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; }
table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(\’http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg\’); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; } table table table td { !important;} span.blacktext12 { color:transparent; visibility:visible !important; background-color:transparent; background-image:url(”http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/banners/yourimage.jpg”); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:center center; font-size:0px; letter-spacing:-0.5px; width:435px; height:75px; display:block !important; } span.blacktext12 img {display:none; }
Remember of course to change the background-image url to whereever you host your image.
Take that code and cut and paste into the about me section in MySpace:
And all done!
becomes
Popularity: 17% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: extended network, macromedia fireworks, myspace, myspace page | 1 Comment
October 22nd, 2006
I just finished watching Battlestar Galactica Exodus, Part 2 and I was blown away. the show has in recent time really begun to wear thin for me - the political wheeling and dealing and the religious aspects whilst adding depth to the show just wasn’t holding my attention on a Sunday morning (when I sit down to watch BG and whatever other scifi show that’s currently airing).
****Spoilers Below****
I was extremely impressed with the season finale that jumped ahead a year or so - a brave move for any show. Then the first couple of episodes of this season were enough to keep me coming back. But Exodus, Part 2 was just amazing. I’m going to focus firstly on the special effects because quite frankly for a weekly television show they were simply stunning.
- The shots of the Galactica dropping through the atmosphere was great
- the shot of the vipers launching was awesome!
- The shot of the Pegasus opening fire was great
- the shot of the Pegasus ramming the basestar was awesome!
In the storyline itself no one comes away unchanged. Colonial Tigh particularly though stands out. The shots of him and Adama at the end were heart wrenching. Overall this episode has single-handed confirmed me as a regular viewer and may even prompt me to buy season 2 on DVD now!
Popularity: 5% [?]
Categories: Science Fiction, Television |
Tags: Battlestar Galactica, pegasus, season finale, special effects, Television, tigh | 2 Comments
October 21st, 2006
Been a little busy over the last couple of days working on a couple of smaller projects. The biggest of these is Crypt Hunter which i’m pleased to say just goes from strength to strength. Last month we doubled the unique hits on the site and this month we’ve already smashed that figure and going to do around four times as many visitors as last month. With the growth we expanded it a little and now you can buy stuff with the Bowler Hat Brigade (read the site from the start to make sense of this!!). the next thing will be to put up a downloads page where you can download a couple of desktops.
Click Here To Visit The Store!
I was really happy with the ‘Dummies’ mock up I did for that post too - it came up really well (check it out here) .
The next thing I’m going to be doing is a new layout for a myspace profile and blog page for quietpaws (I did the wordpress blog site). I’ve done layouts there before but myspace can be quirky and you have to do a bit of gonzo CSS to make it do what you want! I’ll post here my progress.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Categories: Web Design |
Tags: blogging, crypt hunter, myspace, new layout | 2 Comments
