Voodoochilli Design

I just got this message when viewing my email.

“You are using this feature to spam other users. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features will result in your account being disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page.”

What a load of rubbish! Besides it’s hard enough to cancel your own account!

Ever noticed than Internet Explorer seems to render PNG files a slightly different colour that firefox and other browsers? It’s due to the fact that explorer doesn’t handle the gamma properly. Well there is a work around, simply use this tool and delete the gamma. Simple as! Took me a while to find out that though!

PNG image files are great. They support full transparency unlike GIFs which tend to look blocky. The only problem is IE 6 doesn’t support PNG transparency, and with about 30% of people still using IE 6 this is a real problem.

On a recent project I needed to use PNGs because of their transparencies, GIFs just wouldn’t cut it. I racked my brains trying to think of a solution, and finally I decided to Google it and see if anyone has found a solution.

They have!

On this site the developer found a way of getting full transparency using a bit of Javascript. It works great, but does take a few milliseconds to load. I guess the only real problem is if someone is using IE 6 and have Javascript disabled. I reckon this would be a tiny fraction of a percent.

I have been looking around the net for an easy way to add a live dig button to a WordPress blog. There seems to be quite a few solutions, most of them involving WordPress Plugins, which I think is a bit over kill.

You see Digg has some code that will do this for you, all you need to do is modify a bit of the code so that the dig button knows the url of the blog.

Here is all you need:

<script type="text/javascript">
digg_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>';
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
The <?php the_permalink() ?> part is the only modification needed. Simply put this in your loop on the blog page and your done! You can see a live example below.

Here is something new I haven’t seen before.

Apparently Google is trying out a new way of key wording images, getting humans to do the hard work! I did a search and eventually found this link. Google seem to have made the process fun by turning it into a competition. What a clever idea!

To allow your site to be key worded you need to log into your Google webmaster tools and choose the Enhanced Image Search option. I imagine it may take some time before any of your images actually get key worded, but if your site is image heavy this may bring in some extra traffic eventually.

One of our personal sites, Voodoochilli.net the online artists portfolio has been redesigned. We decided to use full CSS this time (as last time it was a hybrid of CSS and tables). As usual there were a few problems with Internet explorer 6, but we managed to find a work around. Anyway, if you’re an artist or designer feel free to show off you work for free.

I found a great site that has a load of “Web 2.0″ layer styles. The site also has instructions on how to install into Photoshop.

Here is the link.

I think this is one of the biggest technical issues affecting many web designers at the moment. Many designers (probably most) have now switched over to full CSS design, also known as CSS-P. Its potential advantages are a more useable, flexible and compliant design, however from my experience this isn’t happening yet.

There are really three ways to build a site in terms of mark up:

HTML only
This is the old school way of building websites. Lots of ugly font tags all over the place, and a method of building sites that really is quite dated.

Full CSS
Semantic mark-up and a clear separation between design and content is what this is all about.

Hybrid
A mixture of both above.

The majority of projects our company work on are powered by some form of custom built content management system (CMS). Depending on the exact requirements of a project, we will build a system for those exact needs. There are a few features that are required often, for example; image uploads, page creation, file browsing etc. On larger projects there are hundreds if not thousands of files and images that need to be browsed and although they could be shown all on one page or in a drop down list this is not practical.

www.voodoochilli.net, our artist’s portfolio website has a nice little write up in January’s issue of one of the biggest creative magazines in the UK – Computer Arts. The site is mentioned in the round up of the best online design on page 23 of issue 131. Here’s what they said:

“Every once in a while someone fulfils a creative’s dreams and this site comes pretty darn close. Voodoochilli is a resource e-zine for artists, a meta-tagged and searchable database, an online CV and portfolio window, and a superb creative community site.”

The site was also featured in another magazine recently called Advanced Photoshop.