November 21, 2007, 3:10 AM
Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:
Divide photo in 5,000 pieces with rollover text?
we are raising money and selling support tickets. To show our progress we are going to start with a black and white image split in 5,000 pieces then as each piece is sold we want to turn it into color.
When you roll over each piece the person who purchased that support ticket will have their name show up as well as a personal message.
any opinions on how this should be built? The admin section will all be managed manually, so we’ll just need a backend for the admin person to go in and make the changes manually.
This seemed an interesting challenge to me; not difficult, but with multiple steps that no beginner could hope to properly tackle on his own without some help.
This project calls on almost all the basic skills a competent Web developer should possess: Image editing; database design and simple queries; DOM manipulation; security and back-end systems, and therefore, it gives me my first real opportunity in quite some time to address a project in full scope.
As always, I’ll have a link to a working demo and code you can download at the end of this entry.
Continue reading ‘A Charity Donation Recognition System Using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript And DOM’ »
November 17, 2007, 4:56 AM
I use Firefox because it is a vastly superior Web browser compared to Internet Explorer, Opera and all the other minor browsers out there. But I do check my Web work in all three browsers, and I’ve noticed, for quite a while, that the TypoXP theme has never quite looked right in IE.
Namely, the sidebar links section — which appears fine in Mozilla-based browsers — has been indented improperly in IE. Look at this screencap to see what I mean:
I have been of two minds about the problem. Mostly, I felt I should fix it, because I don’t want my blog to look like it is run by an incompetent. But I also felt that hey, screw people who use IE; I hate it, I don’t care if things look bad to them, and not fixing it is just another way to encourage people to graduate to a better product.
My urges to be professional have won out over my personal animosities. I’ve identified the source of this problem and how to fix it.
Continue reading ‘Correcting The TypoXP Theme’s Sidebar CSS To Display Properly In Internet Explorer’ »
November 15, 2007, 4:15 AM
Asked recently on Yahoo! Answers:
What is the best method to create a multi-lingual website?
Do we use xml, php, or what??? and how, help appreciated.
There are many different ways to go about having a Web page appear in multiple languages, and I may address others in upcoming articles. The approach I am going to focus on in this post assumes you already have your translations in hand, and simply want to give users a choice of languages in which your page can appear.
In the future, I may address ways of determining the default language to present to a user, based on his browser’s user-agent string; translating text on-the-fly via AJAX and one of the free translation Web sites (even ones that don’t have an API), and using alternative data sources, depending on interest in this article.
For now, two demos using PHP: The first will employ an array, the second will use a database as its back end. As always, I will have a link to a working demo and code you can download at the end of the discussion.
Continue reading ‘Multilingual Web Pages Via PHP, Arrays And MySQL’ »
November 5, 2007, 11:21 PM
A common question on Yahoo! Answers revolves around the relationships between inches, pixels, points, dots and picas.
The short answer is, a pixel — the basic dot in a TV screen — is the same thing as a point, the printer’s smallest measure. That one fact dictates all the relationships in online design, from why it is online images are always set to 72 dpi (dots per inch) to how to convert back and forth between inches and pixels.
A pixel is a dot is a point. Remember that and everything else falls into place: Points, pixels and dots are all the same thing.
How many pixels in an inch?
In printers’ measures, there are 12 points to a pica and 6 picas in an inch. So, 12 x 6 = 72; there are 72 points in an inch. And since points and pixels are the same thing, there are 72 pixels in an inch, too.
So, if you want something on screen to be 4 inches wide: 4 x 72 = 288. An element you want to have take up 4 inches horizontally on the screen should be made 288 pixels wide.
Continue reading ‘The Relationships Between Pixels, Points, Picas, Dots And Inches’ »
