Thursday, March 28, 2024

September 16, 2002– Newsletter #198


Goodies to Go ™
September 16, 2002–Newsletter #198

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
 


 
Goodies Announcement

Just in case you missed it before, the new Beyond HTML Goodies book has just been released!

 

Go beyond the basics and learn how the pros add and use dynamic HTML features
and advanced JavaScript techniques. Beyond HTML Goodies demonstrates dozens of
new and different features readers can add to their existing Web pages using
HTML and JavaScript. The book starts with simple text and image tips, such as
adding a clock to a Web page or causing text to appear when the mouse moves over
an image. It gradually builds to more complex tricks, including manipulating
forms or working with cookies behind the scenes. Throughout the book, readers
enjoy Joe’s snappy style and "to the point" discussion of each "goody" in the
book.

 


http://books.internet.com/books/0789727803

 

 

Goodies Thoughts – An Easy Photo Album

One of the most popular uses for personal websites is to create a family photo
album. This can be a very time consuming process since there is often the need
to build a multi-level index into the pictures themselves. Not only that, but
the pictures you start with are often a variety of different shapes and sizes
and don’t lend themselves at all well to being included in web pages. There are
several things you can to to take the pain out of the
process, however, and I’m going to show you my favorites right here.

Step one is to get the pictures into a computer. If you
already have the
pictures on paper from the place where you get your film developed, you have –
let’s count ’em – one choice! Scan them. Urghh! There goes a chunk of your time!
The best thing to do is to sort the pictures by size and orientation (portrait
vs landscape – i.e. tall and narrow vs short and wide). Now you can set up your
scanning software for one size and shape, scan all of that category and then set
up for the next size and shape, etc. I don’t envy you that task – I did mine and
I am so thankful I will not have to do it again!

If you don’t already have your pictures on paper, but you
have them on film,
take the film, or send it, to a place where you can get the pictures on a CD
along with the developed and printed variety. You will not regret this
relatively small expense.

If you have not yet taken the pictures, this is where you
have the widest
range of choices. Of course, in my humble opinion, there is only one choice to
make: which digital camera are you going to buy? Get a camera with a USB
interface so that it’s nice and fast and versatile. An alternative would be the
floppy disk variety. I am not thrilled with the floppy disk choice, though,
because they are still relatively slow and each one has such a limited storage
capacity. I have a Kodak 4800 and I am thrilled with it. Kodak has now replaced
this model with the 4900, which still has all the good features, plus a couple
of new ones. I like the use of memory cards – they are fast and simple; they
have dropped a lot in price and they have increased in capacity. For less than a
hundred dollars I can buy a card that will hold more than 125 pictures, and
which I can reuse to my heart’s content. Compare that to the cost of film plus
developing and printing!

Step two is to resize all the pictures to make them
uniform. (Hold that
thought!)

Step three is to build a page for each picture to display
the picture – hold
this thought too!

Step four is to create an index page for each set of
picture pages. Yep! I
want you to hold this one too, but since I know you’re running out of hands,
I’ll let you in on the secret.

Steps two, three, four, etc. are all replaced with: pull
out you copy of
Adobe’s Photoshop. (If you don’t have a copy, but seriously want to build a
comprehensive family album, you should give consideration to the investment. It
is not a low cost program for the family budget — my local office supply store
has the full version for about $600, $150 for the upgrade — but you should bear
in mind how much you are currently spending of your film/develop/print library
and compare that to the total cost for an online version.)  Photoshop,
apart from being a wonderful program for manipulating your pictures and being
really creative, has an amazing little wizard tucked away. Go to
File/Automate/Web Photo Gallery. This pops up a wizard that reads all the
pictures in a folder and creates a complete gallery in another folder, pictures
(resized), web pages, index pages, navigation and all! The wizard includes a
selection of styles for the pages, together with option choices for the banner
across the top of the pages, the size and image quality of the pictures that
will be on each page, the size and layout of thumbnail pictures on the index
pages and custom color choices. Also worthy of note: if you open each picture in
Photoshop, you will find under File/File Info a place to add a Caption. You can
then use this as the caption for each picture on both the index page and the
photo page. I recommend playing with the options a few times, looking at the
results and finding out what will suit your personal preferences.

With each series of pictures arranged into an album in this
manner, it becomes a relatively simple task to create a web site in which you
can easily find and navigate the pictures in any particular series. Remember
that once you have the album on a website, not only can you find your pictures
easily when you want to, but so can your friends and family wherever they are
and whenever they would like to see them. Additionally, you could burn a backup
copy of your site onto a CD and put it in your safe deposit box to preserve it.

Remember also, digital images don’t fade over time, unlike
their paper
counterparts.
 


Thanks for reading!
 

Q & A Goodies


Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/
.



Q. I have recently made an e-mail form with the help of the tutorial on
the
site, and my form is made up entirely of text boxes. However, I find that the
text boxes are ugly.. I would like the borders of them to be a different
colour, so they do not have that "greay shadow" look. I know it is possible to
change the colour of them, as I have seen it done on another website, but how
can I do it on mine?


A. The easiest way to do it is to set up a style for the "input" in you
style sheet, since you are only using text boxes. The following will also apply
to any radio buttons or checkboxes that may be in the form. If you add them
later, you may want to set up a class. But for now, add this to your style
sheet:

input { border: 1px solid black; }

You can use change the pixel size, or switch from solid to dashed. For colors,
you can use the text names that are available, or the hexidecimal (#000000).

Q. How do I make a link from a popup window close the popup window and
link back to a page of the main web site?

A. To refer back to the window that opened the popup you would use the
term "opener". I would suggest that you create a function in your popup to load
the page into the main window and then close the popup. The function could look
like this:

function LoadPage(linkid)
{
opener.location.href=linkid
self.close()
}

You can then call this function and pass the page you want to load into the
"opener" window as a value like this:

<a HREF="#" onClick="LoadPage(‘mypage.html’)">Click Me</a>

or

<a HREF="javascript:LoadPage(‘mypage.html’)">Click Me</a>

The second example might be better because IE5.0 has a problem when you use the
"#" sign to void the link. You can also reference function in the "opener"
window from the popup by prefacing the function name with the term "opener" like
this:

opener.function_name()

As you can see you can reference just about anything in the main window as long
as you preface it with "opener".

Q.  When there is no reason to scroll left/right, the scrollbar on
the bottom disappears. But even if I don’t need to scroll up/down, there is a
scroll bar on the right side. How do I get rid of the scroll bar on the right
side of the page, but only if there is no need for it?

A. The vertical scrollbar also disappears when the page is not longer
than
the window. If it is longer, then the scrollbar appears, so what must be
happening is your page is too long to fit entirely within your window.

 

 

News Goodies

 

Shatner Back In Priceline TV Spots
[September 16, 2002] Shades of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ permeate
the company’s first television work in more than a year.


Click here to read the article

 

 

Intel Throws Down The Gauntlet
[September 16, 2002] UPDATE: The chipmaker unveils 11 wireless chips as well as
plans for a new communications chip with twice the speed and 2.5 times the
transistors of today’s communications chips, all at a lower cost.


Click here to read the article

 

 

IBM & Red Hat To Partner On Linux
Services

[September 16, 2002] The multi-year deal calls for Big Blue and Red Hat to
partner on customer service support and services for software and servers
running Linux.

Click here to read the article

 
 
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…

1620, Mayflower Sets Sail From England
With a hundred and two passengers on board, the Mayflower departed from Plymouth
England on this date in 1620, bound for the New World. They arrived in
Massachusetts on November 21st (though they were originally bound for Virginia –
they were blown off course.) In December that year they founded the first
permanent European settlement in "New England".

 



Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!



 


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