Tanked Up

The GIMP bump mapping tutorial has proved a bit of a hit, with other imaging sites now linking into it.
As it has proved so successful, I have revamped it to incorporate some improvements and reduced the image sizes, to speed up page load times. Continue to the bump mapping tutorial …

Does anyone click on the bloody stuff? Do spammers live worth while fulfilling lives? Do they sleep well at night knowing that I’ve spent most of the day loading anti spam filters, deleting email addresses we’ve used for years, because they are now inundated with 200 emails a day full of complete shite!! Probably.
For some reason the last two days have brought it all to a head with the comments and emails both becoming unusable AND my web host being hit with a DDOS which has crippled it. Why can’t these half wits be prosecuted. It’s getting to the stage where most of your time is spent deleting or finding ways of blocking these fuckers.
I can sympathize completely with Simon Collison of Colly Logic, who coincidently posted this rather amusing rant on the same subject today. And he actually gets legitimate comments sent to him, so it must be infuriating. We’ve had very little feedback so it’s not really a problem to disable comments. If my glass was half empty I’d be depressed at the lack of interest in the posts, but my glass is half full, so it’s no real problem to ditch comments
Unless something can be invented to stop spammers, I give it five years and the internet bandwidth will be mostly taken up by these sad bastards, if it isn’t already.
If anyone knows a good way of preventing spam, please share. Well until this post gets hit too and I have to disable comments again! I’m not even sure if this will post due to the dodgy nature of my web hosting at the moment …

IE7 is out at last and I’ve had a good look at it this evening. Errrr what’s new?

I mean really, what’s new, not copied, but really new? I can’t see any Firefox converts changing back. IE7 is better than IE6, what isn’t, but I get the feeling M$ are only playing catch up now. Would be nice to see them innovate a bit wouldn’t it?

And Firefox 2.0 is out now too, no major visual differences, but more secure. I hope both of them take up Opera 9’s page preview on tab idea. If you don’t know what I mean download and check it out, it’s the best feature I’ve seen on a browser for a while.

A new tutorial has been added to the css section. it gives instructions on setting gradient background images in elements. There are instructions on setting background gradients for paragraphs, pages and on hover. It can be used in conjunction with the GIMP gradient tutorial.

Continue to css gradient tutorial …

Nine new css image rollover maps have been added to the site. They are European league sites including the English Premiership, Spanish La Liga and Italian Serie A football maps. Hover reveals the teams badge and also a tooltip with the teams domestic and European trophy wins. Clicking on the badge will take you to the teams website.

I hope to be updating the Spurs trophy tooltip this season, but after the first 3 games, it’s looking a bit unlikely!! Please God don’t let Pompey finish above us.

Continue to maps Premiership | La Liga | Serie A | Bundesliga | Ligue 1 | Eredivisie | Bwinliga | SPL | Champions League

Is there anywhere that you see on the internet, magazines or advertising hoardings, that drop shadows haven’t invaded?

Well just to expand their viral nature and eventual world domination, I’ve added a drop shadow tutorial under the imaging section of the site. I can’t apologise enough, so I won’t bother. I’ve included a link to the GIMP script-fu, instructions on how to implement it and a page on applying a drop shadow manually.
Continue to drop shadow tutorial …

We’ve changed the menu to make the site more accessable, and it looks better of course.
In the process we messed around with a few css designs, so rather than ditch them completely, they’ve been added for anyone who wants to use them. There are five different flavours which you can use as a template and create your own from.
Continue to css menus …

The following has all been learnt from trial and error over the last 6 months. I’m not claiming this is the definitive article on improving your website traffic, not by any means. But these easy steps have improved the traffic on this website by over 600%, without paying for directory listings. I’ve added links to various free and very helpful sites, which will help improve your site accessability and popularity. Continue to improve website traffic

Another map has been added to the Dahab section of the main site. It is an image rollover map of the middle east. I thought people may be interested in that particular region at the moment, unfortunately.
There’s an explaination of how it works and you can download the html & css for it if you want to make your own.
Continue to css image rollover map

I’ve added a tableless css photo gallery tutorial on the main site. It’s been tested on all the major browsers that I could get my hands on and at screen resolutions of 800×600 upwards. There are explainations of the html and css needed to make it work, along with templates to get you started.
Continue to css photo gallery