Web Development Blog

So I thought it would be cool to add a gallery to this site and to kick it off I’ve added 12 free vortex images. If you don’t know what a vortex image is, here is an example. You’re free to use the images for any non commercial purpose like desktop backgrounds, web site backgrounds, etc (just don’t sell them).

I’ll be adding more of these since I’m kind of obsessed with making them right now. In fact, I’m rendering 60 more as I write this. For those of you who don’t know, 3D graphics is kind of a hobby of mine. I got into Lightwave when I was working for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln a few years ago. I really don’t like making animations very much…modeling and doing still renders is what trips my trigger.

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After IE 7 came out with 24 bit PNG support, I really wanted to figure out how to use PNGs better in my designs. However, the 50-60% of people still using IE 6 just didn’t seem to justify going in new directions with PNGs. I knew you could make PNGs work in IE 6, but I always thought it was difficult and buggy. Well, as I found out, its not as hard as I thought. This tutorial will show you just how easy it is and how you can do things with your designs that are impossible without PNGs. I assume you have a pretty good knowledge of css, and will be able to use the source code of the examples as a tutorial.

I’ll start off with the examples. Click here to see the most awesome use of PNGs for backgrounds ever. Don’t blame me if your eyes pop right out your head

As you can see from the examples the big deal with using PNGs is that you can mix two or more background ‘effects’. All of the examples utilize a gradient fade in a background div, along with a gradient fade around the square that represents where the page content would go. Examples 2 and 3 throw a pattern on the body background and mix all three images seamlessly. As far as I know, there is no other way to do this with centered page content, a fade around the content, and a pattern in the background that is not horizontal stripes.

So how is it done??

Read on to find out…

Pages: 1 2 3

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October was an awesome month for DEVTRENCH. Many thanks to everyone who continues to read this blog! Here are the highlights for October:

• Guest post on CodeSqueeze. If you haven’t read it, check out my post on codesqueeze.com: 25 Signs That You’ve Got a Bad Client
• Over 5,500 unique views reported from Google Analytics (7500+ reported from Awstats), most of this traffic was generated from one StumbleUpon review. Read how I got all this traffic in my post about How to Harness the Raw Power of StumbleUpon
• 12000+ page views from Analytics (65000+ from Awstats)
• After the latest PageRank update DEVTRECH finally got a rank: from 0 to 4. Sweet!
• I was not banned from BlogRush and got one more referral! This is exciting because BR just released v2 of their software and it’s really nice now. My network is really starting to generate some traffic for me now, and if you missed the BR Bandwagon the first timearound, I suggest you join now, or you could miss out on all of the potential traffic.
• One post had over 11,000+ views this month. This was the post I stumbled and apparently “How to Code a Simple Zip Code Locator in PHP” is a really popular topic. This post was a real eyeopener for me as to what kind of content readers want, and how to really use StumbleUpon well.
• John Chow visited DEVTRENCH! I’m sure the John Chow effect has kicked in.
• DEVTRENCH launched the new design at the beginning of the month and Nate Whitehill likes it!
• As I promised a while ago in my post about CodeIgniter vs. Symfony, I’d let you know what I think of CodeIgniter. Well, I launched dedder.com on Halloween, which uses CodeIgniter for a backend. CodeIgniter is awesome!! It’s lightweight, fast, and easy to learn, and there is no way I’d be able to get a site like dedder going in less than 15 hours of coding. There are some things missing out of the box, like a good CRUD framework and Authentication, both those things are covered by Rapyd and FreakAuth_Light.

We’ll that’s pretty much everything that went on in October. Here’s my stats in case you want to take a look:

October 2007 Analytics Report (99)

Hope you had a great Halloween!

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