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Site updates...

17 Feb 10: All styles now adjusted for 1024x768 - on larger resolutions it looks pretty messy, so I've made them all compact.


05 Jan 10: Rounded corners for the new Christmas style can only be seen in Firefox, Chrome and Safari. CSS3 code.


11 Dec 09: So, if the Cold Case scenes were in black and white, where did that colour picture of Alexandra come from? Well, the answer is right here:

AbsoluteCross

Another excellent tutorial from those guys. Took me a few stages as you can see:

Colorize Colorize Colorize Colorize

Eventually it was tidied up in Adobe After Effects, including rebuilding her right arm - which was in the shadows originally. That was a cut and paste of her left arm, mirrored, merged.

The biggest change is something Oliver picked up on - the transparent sections are actually now PNG files. If you download GIMP, create any size picture, fill it with any colour, change the opacity level to about 50%, save - you're done! It is so neat and tidy I can't believe I didn't see it before. I will try and use it more in the future. The old transparent way was to create a small picture, create a mesh-like fill so every other 'block' is black - Using 256 colours (or less) only, make the black parts transparent, in GIF form. A good monitor will see the 'mesh' though, and it can look unsightly. PNG blows this away.


The style-switcher is still here, just hidden until after Christmas. We had cookie issues that couldn't easily be resolved. Xmas 2009 does fit into the style switcher fine, it's just that it may not be visible unless you force the switch to that style. This way WE force it on you :)


Google ads removed, hence the buttons now on the right as well. Works for us, since Alexandra has so much work under her belt the buttons were creating a lengthy web page. The button move has upset other styles a little, but I'll be fixing them next year (large space at bottom of Blue-1024, for one).


25 Nov 08: That was fun! Christmas 2008 style now added. At first glance of the code it does seem an easy addition, but was far from it lol. Currently, mostly a top and bottom picture, plus dotted-transparent button and container .gif - originally the background was split up into a manic five piece jigsaw, taking hours to try and correct alignment issues here, there and everywhere. I finally realised it was easier to do it in two pieces. The rounded edges have a border - which took a little time to figure out - but the basic round edge effect in Photoshop is explained here.


The style is a fixed width - mainly for 1024x768. The very same snow script, but with different snowflake.gif and changed settings = more snow. I only found the right-hand side picture the other day - the original Christmas pic idea wouldn't really fit, so check the wallpaper page instead. Something similar is there.


Recently I had to fix the buttons in all styles as only IE seems to want to style BR tags, whereas Chrome (new, Google), Firefox, and Opera didn't like it. The fix was replacing the BR's with: 
div class="br"
...CSS code of:
div.br{
	clear: both; 
	padding: 2px; 
	font-size: 1px; 
	margin: 0px; 
	line-height: 0px;
}
...in case that helps anyone.


21 Jan 08: In time I'll explain any major changes to the site, including any site links and info that have helped me in my quest to bring this all together.

Current major change is that all video clips now work in Firefox and Safari. If you check the source you'll find XHTML validated code. Previously, we were missing the 'data' line that allows FF and co to show the video.


For the longest time I've been trying to make rounded-corners workable and never really succeeded, until now - albeit in a basic way. Photoshop has an excellent tool for creating rounded rectangles - but there's slight difficulty in rounding the inner corners. If you check here you will find a tutorial for older Photoshop programs (works in the newer, I have PS v8). Quite an amazing trick. There are plenty of PS demos on YouTube. Check out the AbsoluteCross website graphics - that some serious talent right there, very impressive.

I use a mass of programs when playing around with websites: Photoshop 8, After Effects 7, Paint Shop Pro versions 7 and 9, ACDSee for image conversion. Sites are checked in Safari, Firefox and IE 7 - all on a PC running XP Pro, Dual Core AMD 2.11 GHz, 2gb memory, 120 GB of drive space.


That rather nice font on most styles is called "Asenine" and can be found here.

For anyone that hasn't noticed the Google Ads update, you can now have rounded corners (we don't currently use them, but they look cool) - info here. As for us having ads - we've never considered Google Ads intrusive, so they stay. We'll always say no to popups and all that other nonsense.


The punching monkey wallpaper was actually created by taking the picture from Alexandra's top (screengrab from How to Deal) - then enlarged. Spent a long time trying numerous routines to clean it up, eventually just traced the picture with a second PSPro layer and readded the colour. The reason for so many wallpaper additions is that Oliver bought me a new 19" LCD monitor - this led me to gain more interest in the graphic side of things and clean up some of the mess in the older styles (jpg artifacts and such that I couldn't see on my old CRT monitor). Web GFX work is a lot more fun when you're sitting in 1280x1024 resolution - Adobe After Effects can become quite a busy working area on an 800x600 screen (which I lived with for ages).

Sometimes I work with small images and need to blow them up to wallpaper size, so you can imagine how grainy etc the result will be. A fantastic program to smooth out an image can be found here. Neat Image.


Behind the scenes, what you don't see, is the extensive work undertaken by Oliver - setting up an entire dedicated server to deal with 25+ sites - writing *ALL* the code for the contact form, guestbook, top 20, header/footer cookie-control, footer date-stamps plus systems for emailing us both an SQL backup every week (guestbook entries lives there, for example), the DNS servers, domain control, hit counter, picture displayer.

Oliver also rejigged the style-switcher to almost zero-code compared to the original. Wallpaper page is now automatic, I simply adjust the paper number and upload new pics. There's a whole guestbook administration you don't see, allowing for deleting, approving etc. So yes, my workload is minimal really. I could never have done this much by myself. Not even close. Especially the validation - that was originally Oli's idea (XHTML and CSS) - but I've grown used to it now: Those buttons are mainly for us, to spot errors and problems in the pages.


HR dividers: This brings problems in Firefox, but the fix is pretty simple. A basic HR will show a default size and colour, which is ugly so try using this style line instead: 
hr{
border: 0; 
height: 1px; 
color: #2D3F49; 
background-color: #2D3F49;
}
Color and Background-Color are always the same value.


At the moment nothing breaks badly - for example, when increasing the font size to something abnormal in Firefox will send the layout crazy. I guess that would happen almost anywhere. IE7 is not a problem since it won't resize a fixed-sized font. FF likes to hand all font control over to the user, which I guess is the right thing for a browser to do. The footer contains a fixed-sized font.
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