Color fades and transitions in backgrounds with CSS

A easy effect that can bring the presentation of your page into the 21st century. CSS allows more control over the positioning and assigning of backgrond images. Also, as the image is called from the CSS file it's self, the search engines will not index or waste time on your background image files.

Basically it's as easy as this:

1: Assuming you want to create a backgound that fades from black to purple, go into Photoshop or what ever graphics processing software and create an image with the desired colors, and make it 1 pixel wide. If you have hassles doing this, you're reading the wrong blog.

2: In your CSS file, create a class with the following attribute (Assuming you are assigning it to a table division element with the class name of "fade") the CSS should look like this:
td.fade { background: url(images/bar1.gif) 0 100% repeat-x;}

The URL is the URL of the 1px wide image that will be called to render the background.
The "0 100%" signifies the initial starting position for the rendering of the background. 0 (The first figure) is the starting position on the X axis, 100% is the starting position along the Y axis. Since I wanted my texture to appear at the bottom of the cell, I set it to 100%. These can be manipulated to achieve the desired effect.
Finally, the repeat-x; signifies that the image will be repeated for the entire space of the cell, along the X axis, that is left to right. If you wanted to have a cell with a horizontal color transition, you would create an image 1px tall with the desired color transition, and specify repeat-y;

It's pretty simple, doesn't have too much effect on load time for the page, and can help make extremely bland pages not look like they were created in the 80's. Because the image is only 1px wide, it only has to be a few bytes big. Use websafe colors and save them as GIF files.

Finally, to make it work in the HTML, when you define your table division, assign the class to it, for example:
<td class="fade">....</td>

It's as simple as that.

Schapelle Corby

This site isn't up yet, but I'm going to put the link up now becuase I won't get around to it this week I'm sure. As you know, we have an Australian on questionable drug charges in Bali. Ron Bakir, a prominent businessman from Queensland is setting up www.schapellecorby.com.au as a home page for the campagn he is running to get her back home. It will apparently accept donations and letters etc. I also assume it will outline the circumstances of the case, which Im not going to do here.
I'd just like to say that Ron Bakir is an inspiration to all young business men. He does not have to do what he is doing, and probably has enough money to comfortably retire for the rest of his life and not give a stuff about anything. He is using his power, money and influence to try and help the helpless.

It costs as much to keep a cat as it does to keep a car on the road.

We worked out last night that it keeps approximately the same amount to keep our cat for a year as it does to run the car for a year. :) it's worth it though.
I will post a picture off my cat here as soon as I get around to taking the work camera home for a few happy snaps.
Just a bit of useless information:)

It's a nice Saturday in Sydney

Well... it's a beautiful day here in Sydney today and I'm stuck in a shop:) but I have a day off tomorrow and am planning on enjoying it, although I do have a heap of jobs to do around the house. Working 6, sometimes 7 days a week I only get one day to do it all and it can get hectic.
My flatmate/housemate just got X-Box live and is pumping through my new broadband. It's quite impressive, you can play against people from all around the world, while communicating with them through the headset that comes when you sign up for X-Box live. Most people are American, as one would expect, and there are people ready and willing to help when you're a newbie. It doesn't seem to chew through as much bandwidth as I anticipated, after 4 hours solid we clocked up 20mb which is not too bad at all. Now I need a switch so we can both use the connection at the same time.
I had it made clear to me the other day, that it's time for a new car. I can't park it in the driveway or garage of my new house, as it leaks oil on the driveway. That's the final straw. It's a great car, (An 84 Subaru station wagon) it's never let me down, but it's slow, doesn't handle and has quite a few things that no longer work such as the windscreen demisters and central locking. The tappets also make a terrible noise. It also reminds me of the dickhead I brought it off, so I think it's time for it to go.

John's Blog is now validated

I've just validated this site, using the W3C validator at the World Wide Web Consortium. I'm working in the shop today and I got a bit bored. It'll be interesting to see if there is any improvement in traffic. This site is listed in G and Y, the major search engines, but brings in about 5-10 unique visitors a day. It's been pretty static for a while, and has very few backlinks. This page had a massive amount of errors in it. It amazes me how badly coded a page can be and yet still display perfectly in Internet Explorer and Netscape.

If anyone has a web developement/SEO/website design related blog, I will exchange links. This blog will be around for a while, and anyone who links up now will be a long term link partner for years to come. First in, best dressed. When this site becomes useful, I will transplant it to it's own domain, or it can hang off one of my existing ones. This may also happen if Blogger decide they don't like my removal of their toolbar.

Thumbs up for wireless broadband

I've come to the conclusion that Unwired internet is good:) I've had it for a couple of weeks now and it's brilliant. I wasn't too keen on the idea of wireless at first, but it's all I can get in my area. I've heard from friends about problems getting a decent signal, but it hasn't been a problem in my area, and it doesn't drop out either. People are saying it's not as secure as cable, which I can understand, but I am still looking into that issue. I've never seen the internet as a safe way to send confidential information unencrypted anyway. I'm not paid to promote Unwired in any way, I will promote companies here that do the right thing by me here, just as I will bag out the ones that don't. Their website is: http://www.unwired.com.au You will not hear me say anything favourable about banks here for example.
The bad thing is I am now unable to go back to a dialup connection. It feels wierd being able to do major tasks on the site from home without spending half a day downloading.

Parking council rangers

Just want to have a winge about parking rangers, particularly the ones here in West Ryde where I work. The council has just demolished the car park for a new building development. There are many businesses in the area, with lots of people parking up for a day at work. There are no trains or busses where I live, although even if there were trains where I live, trains in Sydney don't come on time if at all. So if one is to work in West Ryde, one must park their car somewhere.

As soon as the large car park was demolished, up went No Parking signs all over the place, and rangers come out in force and start booking people left right and centre. I normally park my car in a carpark down the road, although it has a 3 hour limit, it is ALWAYS less than a quarter full, and since it's a built up area with no parking elsewhere, it's the logical place to park. Much safer than on the side of the road.

Yesterday I see a council ranger booking the 5 cars that are parked in a 50+ space carpark. Now if these useless excuses for people are doing anything other than raising revenue for a greedy council at the expense of hard working people, I'd like to know what it is.

Page validation

Page validaton - to do or not do do. I am under the impression that most professional webmasters now validate their pages. When I did some research into the topic I found that there were a fair few older posts saying that "Google has pages that don't validate, therefore it doesn't really matter, if you don't have the time." I think the opinion has changed which has to be a good thing. The web has for a long time had so many different standards, and different ways of doing the same thing from a web design perspective. Making something work in all browsers is sometimes a real challenge, and the "correct" way of doing something wasn't easy to accertain.

Now we have CSS and W3C validation. I was excited when I heard about these things, because now had a way of finding out if my pages were "properly" written. I saw the whole thing as a new tool. You can make a page full of errors and dodgy coding, and it will display in late versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer without a hitch. But if you really want to do a serious site that no spider or obscure browser will have issues with, you want it to be as "correct" as possible.

Looking at it purely from a search engine perspective, many top ranked pages for competitive keywords on both Google and Yahoo do not validate, so it's not like you're not going to get ranked just because your page doesn't validate, but who's to say the search engines won't implement it in the future as a way to draw straws.

I always validate my sites. It also tells me of any careless HTML errors I've made as well. Having said that, this blog does not validate by any stretch of the imagination. I still have a pagerank of zero and getting about 15-20 uniques a day, but somehow I don't think the non validation is the reason for that. Feel free to link to this site:)

Shopping cart software

I've been often asked, "Which shopping cart do you use". Well.... I use a heavily modified version of an open source package called VP-ASP.

By nature, an online store is a complex thing, and although you should never get primarily wrapped up in "bells and whistles", shopping sites in each niche industry have features that are expected, and to be competitive in that niche, you must have them. For this reason, any generic shopping cart solution must be customised from the ground up in order to be effective. The package must allow for this.

I used to use a package called EziMerchant, but it has too many limitations. Ezimerchant is an Australian company who sell a javascript based shopping cart package. It is highly customizable, but it gets really slow with over 2500 products, because it loads all the product data up via javascript when any page of the site is loaded. All the pages are generated as HTML and Javascript on a PC, and are then uploaded to sit on the server as static pages. Orders are stores on the Ezimerchant transaction server until you download them to your PC using the client program. It's a neat, relitively simple package. I'd use it again quite happily, but not on a site selling more than 1000 products, even then, better to keep it below 200, as page load time kills sales. Potential customers will give you the flick after about 15 seconds, especially if they have just clicked on your page among a large list of similar search results.

VP-ASP is much more complex, does more, harder to set up, but is fully featured and customizable. It runs a database on your web server, and uses ASP to dynamically populate pages using data from the database. This means your site is as fast as the server that hosts it, no matter how big the database is. VP-ASP is pretty bare-bones when you get it, but it HAS everything, and more importantly it's open source, so you can make it do anything. The version of VP-ASP I use on our main site is barely recognisable as VP-ASP. It's also a great way to learn the ASP programming language, as by the time you have it the way you want it, you will have been through a bit, but I'm a nerd and I like things like that:)

CSS is the go

I'm gradually migrating all my sites to us CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It's taken me a while to get on board, but I can no longer ignore the advantages that it offers.

I'm not going to go into what CSS is, and what it does here, because it's a pretty big concept, it requires extensice HTML knowledge, and there are better people to write about the intricacies of it. Instead I will focus on the advantages it offers from a SEO prospective.

The biggest advantage I can see is that it allows file sizes to be cut down, especially if the site is 1000 pages or more. For example, if I use a tabe format, and I use the same table format to display each table on all 1000 pages. Rather than having the background color, font, alignment specified in the HTML document for each <td> element, I can specify it once in the CSS file, and just use a class with the element. eg: <td class="CSSclass">. This can be done with just about every tag. This means all the HTML files don't need to have something like <td width="30%" halign="center" valign="top" style="color:#cccccc;"> repeated for every table division. This can halve your file size. Links are another place where this is very useful, especially if you are accustomed to using font tags inside your <a href> tags. When search engines - Google, for example:) crawl the page, they don't look at CSS, just the code in the HTML file. If you have code that contains little more than the actual text that appears on the page, it will be a lot less work for the crawler, and your page will appear to have a higher concentration of information. This has to be better.

Finally, and most important. Using CSS, you can change the color of the scrollbars. This only works on IE5+ but it looks cool.

Just got broadband at home

I got my Unwired wireless broadband modem today, and I now finally have broadband at home, about time too. I got a 512k connection and it works great, I got it on the second story of a 2 story house, which helps I guess, and also there is no other kind of broadband available in this area, so I guess they made sure they covered it well, as there would be a lot of potential customers in this area. But so far so good, everything has been easy, and it works as it's supposed to. The speed seems about right, and plenty of reception.

DON'T USE IPRIMUS - THEY SUCK.

I use IPrimus for dialup and phone. I suddenly cannot use my dialup account for some reason. I try to call these clowns, and there is an endless queue. I tried to call last night and gave up after 1 and a half hours. I've now been on hold again for 2 hours, and I can't get an answer. This is on both the phone and internet help lines. Their on hold message repeats it's self, and has annoying simple "go to the website" messages that repeat themselves. There is no other way to contact them.

Instead of asking them about my connection, I will be asking them to close my account as soon as I get through. This is a joke. They obviously don't want the business. IPrimus can get stuffed, and I suggest you don't use them unless you don't mind waiting half a day on the phone if you want to talk to someone. Literally.

My post came back

After posting that last pissed off post, the one I lost just appeared underneath it:) There we go:) probably still a good idea to make a copy of anything you spend a long time putting into a web form though, just incase it does time out. I'm now going to ring and order a Pizza from my favourite pizza joint next door. It's a little place that makes real Italian pizzas, and leaves Pizza Hut, Dominos and all the others for dead.

STUPID TIMEOUT

I just wrote a massive post, and when I posted it, it said "Timed out" and I lost the lot. I'm now too annoyed to write it all. I might have another go tomorrow.

Make a copy of your text before you click "Publish Post" when using blogger, otherwise you may lose what you have just typed. And the more you have typed, the more likely you will lose the lot. Bloody annoying to say the least.

Well.... Blogger have added a "recover post" button now on the create post editor. Brilliant stuff. I want to make it clear that I was at no time having a go at Blogger (They let me have this Blog here for free after all!), I accept that timeout is a problem with online data entry scripts. They do time out, and when one is using them, one must take care to back up data before hitting the submit button, I was more having a go at myself for expecting it not to have timed out after half an hour. I certainly didn't expect Blogger to address the problem as they have. Well done Blogger.

Moving House

Arrrgh I hate moving house. My 6 month lease just expired, and the owners want to move in. We had to find another place quick smart. Of course, because of the new land taxes, everyone is selling, landlords are selling, and people are looking to rent instead of buy. On top of that, rent has gone up about $20 per week on an average house. For this we can thank Bob Carr's state government. Each house had about 4-5 applicants which makes a lot of work, especially when you have to take time off 3-4 times a week to inspect houses that you are probably going to get declined for.
We got a place at the last minute, and had to move in on the last day, a Thrsday. I couldn't get time off work, so I had to do a 12 hour work day, then go home and move. We finished at about 3:00am. The new neighbours must love us:) All went pretty well, except I lost my desk off the back of the ute:S The Falcon utes are great, but the plastic in the tray is slippery:) We're all in now, and it's a big releif. I signed up for a full year this time, as I really don't want to go through it again any time soon.
I've decided to get broadband in this house, but even though it's a new area, there is no facility for ADSL or cable. I've decided to go with "Unwired" www.unwired.com.au "no wires, no wait, no worries":) We'll see, I get the modem on Tuesday, and I'll post up my review here. The prices seem quite reasonable, and the service simply throttles back when the download limit is reached, rather than billing you through the nose for each extra MB. There is also the option to buy more download volume. As far as I know, it's either this, or ISDN, which I can't afford.
I guess the only issue is the quality of the signal, there is a 14 day money back gurantee if there is no reception. I can't wait, doing web development from a 56kbps modem is a bit of a joke. Now I just gotta get a desk sorted out, or fix the one that fell off the back of the ute. (For all those non-Aussies reading this.... a Ute, or utility is like a car with a tray on the back. See http://www.ford.com.au/showroom/lightcomm/Commercial_Vehicles.asp for Ford Utes.)
We also now have a pet mouse. I found a baby mouse while moving out of the old house, I don't know how it escaped the cat, but it's now in a little cage, and will be getting a nice new cage with a wheel and proper food tomorrow, he's on bread and water now, literally:). I don't think he'd survive outside, he looks about 1-2 weeks old, I used to have mice as pets as a kid, and I just couldn't help myself.