Attack of the web

Photo manipulation: Alien woman

Gary Davison — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 00:04:46 +0000

A photo manipulation created in Photoshop, original image can be seen here.

College Project: Public Infomation film about nuclear war

Gary Davison — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:34:35 +0000

Whilst looking through YouTube recently I came across an old college project that I created in 2006. Although it’s now over five years old I still feel the video holds up well, there are a few things that I would change such as the American narrator to a British one with a “BBC voice” as it was created to parody the old British “Public Information” films. I used Adobe Illustrator to create my crude drawings and animated them using Macromedia Flash. I also rather embarrassingly used Windows Movie Maker to edit the project and add film grain to the video.

WordPress page excerpt

Gary Davison — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:00:30 +0000

WordPress out of the box allows you to create excerpts for posts but not pages, to add a excerpt meta field to your pages, all you need is to add the following code to your functions.php file:

add_post_type_support('page', 'excerpt');

The above code work with WordPress 3.0 and above.

Quick Coding Tips: IE6 max-width

Gary Davison — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:29:23 +0000

Unfortunately IE6 doesn’t support the CSS property max-width, however you can make it behave using the following CSS:

img { width: expression(document. body.clientWidth &lt; 100? “100%” : document.body.clientWidth > 100? “100%” : “auto”); }

Quick Coding Tips: Rounded corners

Gary Davison — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 22:03:05 +0000

The following CSS added to an element will give it rounded corners:

-moz-border-radius:1px; /* For Firefox */
-webkit-border-radius:1px; /* For Chrome & Safari */
border-radius:1px; /* CSS3 property, for FireFox 4, IE9 and Opera */

Unfortunately IE8 and below have no CSS support.

Sivioco goes live

Gary Davison — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 12:47:59 +0000

The website for Sivioco, a blog/portfolio site for Stoke-on-Trent based designer Sam Jones has just gone live. Sam approached me in November of last year to take his design and convert it into a WordPress theme.

And I’m pleased to say three months later, the site is completed, and up and running, it can be view here:

http://www.sivioco.com/

Client testimonial

“When the time came to hire someone to develop my new website I couldn’t have chosen a better man to do the job. Gary was a pleasure to work with throughout the project, he kept me informed of his progress, made prompt amendments when needed, offered excellent advice, and delivered a great final product. Not only will I be working with him again in the future but I’d recommend him to anyone in need of web design and development services.”

Quick Coding Tips: Remove the scroll bar from a textarea in IE

Gary Davison — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:33:32 +0000

To remove the scroll bar which IE automatically places in a textarea, you add the following to your CSS:

textarea { overflow:auto; }

This will remove the scroll bar from the textarea, put place it back in when the user enters more text than the area’s height (as with other browsers).

How to get Dreamweaver to give you better CSS

Gary Davison — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 21:26:59 +0000

Dreamweaver is often criticised for creating unnecessary long handed CSS, when a user is using the in built CSS editor. For example using the default settings Dreamweaver would create the following when you want a div with a right hand border:


div {
 border-right:solid;
 border-color:#00000;
 border-width:1px;
}

When the following would suffice:


div {
 border-right:1px solid #000;
}

To change the default Dreamweaver CSS settings you can do the following:

Mac
From the top menu select Dreamweaver > Preferences > Category – CSS > You’ll see “shorthand” selection boxes select all of the boxes and make sure that the radial buttons for “According to the settings above” and “Edit using CSS dialog” are also selected and click ok. This will make Dreamweaver use shorthand for the following rules:

Font
Background
Margin
Padding
Border and border width
List style

Windows
Follow the above however to access the preferences you have to do the following:

From the top menu select Edit > Preferences.

New year, new look Attack of the web

Gary Davison — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 21:54:25 +0000

Happy new year!

It’s the start of a new year, and a new Attack of the web, I have updated the source code behind the website, added a few things that should have always of been there such as a 404 page. As well as a Cufon to allow for the use of non web safe fonts as titles and navigation. Any comments or criticisms are welcome.

CFT navigation update

Gary Davison — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:24:33 +0000

This work was done in partnership with Turton Middleton.

I was approached by Turton Middleton to improved the navigation on the client’s website, previously the navigation had been done through a series of images coded into the HTML. It featured no live text, making it hard for the client to update, this is also a big SEO (Search engine optimisation) and accessibility “no no”. As it is difficult for search engines and screen readers to understand the content of an image, it’s a lot easier for them to understand live text.

I created a CSS led solution to the problem, which uses a mixture of live text and two background images. The work can be seen here:

http://www.cftech.co.uk/