Web Cash

Here’s a quick tip for fine tuning your CSS declarations.

You can use attribute selectors to style an html element that contains an attribute with the value that you declare. This allows you to do a bunch of cool stuff - like style different “input” types differently, style anchor tags with titles differently, and etc.
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One of the most annoying things about working with images is getting them into the right size. Screenshots start out huge - and you need to resize them to an appropriate size for your website.

Some blogs automatically resize the pictures for you into a thumbnail - like the image to the right. What if you want the image a different size, though? You could allow the browser to resize it for you, or - better yet - write your own php script to resize the image dynamically.
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You know your site is finally getting around a bit when you start getting comments. Spam comments.

I started a (now defunct) website last year, powered by Wordpress. It never got too popular, and in the beginning I was excited every time I got a “New Comment” or “New Trackback” e-mail. Then I realized they were mostly all spam.
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If you operate a website (like this blog), Google Adsense is probably one of your main streams of revenue. Although you may eventually outgrow Adsense, chances are you’ll have used it at some point.

While looking through my Adsense stats, I noticed an odd trend. This trend suggested a few things about monetizing a site through Adsense - questions that I don’t have an answer for yet, but that I will be looking for.

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While I was browsing through dzone today, I stumbled on this 3d button css tutorial by Dave Woods.

Using some simple css and a little color know-how, he shows you how to turn a square button into a pseudo 3-dimensional button. I’ll take it a step further and add a gradient background image to enhance the lighting effect. Like this…
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Sometimes forms get long, unsightly, and intimidating. It’d be great if you could cut them up into three or four parts - with a few fields on each page.

In order to do that, you need to figure out some way of storing or passing along the information from the first pages. I’ve heard a bunch of crazy ideas - from storing the information in session variables to writing each part to the database.

The easiest thing to do is attach a very brief php function to the bottom of each page. It’ll do all the work for you and continue to post every item the user has entered. (more…)

An old web design adage is, “Content is king.” All the SEO and fancy design in the world won’t help you if you don’t have any content.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for - and not finding.
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You may have stumbled upon the section on writing for Associated Content - for money.

But even if you’re not interested in being published on someone else’s site, AC can be a great tool for you as a webmaster. You can use it to get optimized backlinks and targeted traffic.
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This was the odd problem that I faced when I switched hosts last month. My other website (Babel) was working fine. I uploaded everything to the new host, and every page came up with an “Internal Server Error 500.”

I eventually narrowed the problem down to the htaccess file. I wasn’t quite sure why it was breaking everything… but if I renamed it, the files worked fine.
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The other day I wrote about how to add a gradient background to a css tooltip. So I thought it might be a good idea to walk through how to create the actual gradient image.

Since I recently switched to Ubuntu Linux, I don’t use Photoshop anymore. GIMP all the way. So this tutorial will show you briefly how to create a gradient image in GIMP and then use it as the background of an html element.
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