Deb's Journal

Transparent Images -
Learned more about Gifworks to make an animated graphic transparent. It proved to be pretty easy to follow the bouncing ball. I did however have to research my FTP address for saving to my web pages. I wound up saving to my PC first, but will file away for future reference that I need the /webdocs at the end of the ftp address.

Newsletters -

• Goodies to Go
• Winfiles
• JavaScript Source
• HTML Guide
• Animations

To make it easier to read email, I like to direct newsletters to my second web-based mailbox to read when convenient. Another advantage to having two mailboxes is to avoid the risk of spam cluttering your regular mailbox. It's wise to watch for the boxes allowing you to uncheck requests to send additional mail or distribute to others, when logging on to sites or requesting news.

More Links -
Tracked down menus with different effects at "Magic Menu".* From Farron - A great JavaScript source* From Farron, a neat Java Applets source is durius.com . I especially like the "twirl" and "water" effects. Eagle suggests two sources for setting up multiple users and pages passwords and for good "how and why passwords - " jpass .
*As of 3/2002, these links no longer work

Hints from Bulletin Board -
From Otter, Keep tables at a maximum width of 600-620 to eliminate scrolling for 640x480 resolution monitors, etc. From Granny Wicked, Keep coding for a link on the same line to eliminate the little blue line. From Debbie P, A Gif Split URL. From KevW, explaining relative URL's, just use the name of the file you're searching, not the complete path. The browser checks the local directory first. Some servers require the .../filename.html to indicate a relative URL. From Zonie - to set a subject line in a mailto: link. add the line ?subject="my mail" as in <A HREf="mailto:amuprofs@comcast.net?subject=Cats and Dogs">:My Mail<</A>

Challenge -
DHTML, FLASH, BOTH? and in Dutch! The links on this page are awesome. Would love to figure out how to do this!

Text Over Image-
Using a table, make the image the background, and then have the words within the table. If you need close control over the text placement you can by using shims(1x1 clear gifs) resized in the table to control the cell height and width. Text Over Image

Marquee and Blink-
From Eric C, <MARQUEE> only works in Internet Explorer, but if you tag <MARQUEE> <BLINK>, you will get one or the other - blink in NS and the scrolling effect in IE. Another tip - if you want to put the tag brackets as above, you need to use special characters- for left and right. Now if I could only figure out how to tell you the special characters without turning them into the tags! H-m-m-m. Thanks to Anne and Eagle, they are &nt; for left and &gt; for right. (The previous sentence uses the special character for ampersand before the special character for left and right brackets!)

Cascading Style Sheets and DHTML-
Favorite tutorials are Mulder's Stylesheets Tutorial and Taylor's Dynamic HTML Tutorial. From JD on the class bulletin board, you can view a linked style sheet by viewing the page source and finding the style sheet name - i.e., "style.css." The URL of the style sheet would be www.somesite.com/style.css where "somesite" is the page location. JD also mentions that you can find the style sheet documents in your local cache. If you're running Windows and MSIE, look in the "Temporary Internet Files" folder. In the Windows directory, look for files with the file extension .css, open in Notepad.

Site of the Week -
Graphics viewer/manager This one does a lot - slide shows, thumbnails, batch conversion, etc. It's shareware and is only $25 to purchase. There are lots of great freebies here also - fonts, utilities, and more. Every interesting site seems to have many more great links to follow. It would be easy to go surfing forever! It's like snorkeling in beautiful waters - the scenery is so fascinating, it's only too easy to drift far off the beaten track!