Avalon

I am trying to apply a background image to a <select> element... i.e. a drop-down list of values, not a file select control. Something similar to the one shown below, (the post color selection list from the shoutbox here) as you can see, font colors can be changed, as can font face, size and background color, but I can't put a background image in it. The link you provided does not seem to cover background images which do work in <input> boxes and <textarea> boxes which I have shown in my original post.

Sorry to hijack this thread a little, but how do you protect against this problem? Through ignorance, I may have inadvertantly left myself open to this type of attack.

Mich, I wrote a tutorial about hotlinking here. http://forums.xisto.com/topic/27222-how-to-stop-image-hot-linking-for-a-selected-directory/ In particular it covered how hotlink protect particular directories rather than your entire site. This is useful if you want to allow hotlinking to certain images such as banners but not all images on the site.

Mich, on the front page of my site there is this information regarding banner acounts. Key phrases: "for free", "link-back in return is not required" Here's an example, (for my site) of some of the statistics available with your banner account. Each month can be expanded to show which day the banner was clicked. The whole purpose of the banner accounts is to help others. Hopefully via word of mouth and the occasional link-back it will help my site too. Like you, I gain nothing from the site except the satisfaction of creating something that is useful for others.

My site is http://www.mudmall.com/ and it's on the Custom Search page that I want to format the select box. The site still uses a lot of tables, I haven't got my head around a pure CSS site yet, I will in time. The other problem I had was trying to use a change of opacity effect on a mouseover that would work in both Firefox and IE. I managed to find the answer to that problem thanks to jlhaslip via this link http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ You can see the effect on the any of the thumbnails in my site. I have searched high and low for an answer to my problem with select lists, but I don't think it is possible. Thanks for trying.

I have just a noticed a number in our user ID panel (the section to the left of your post with your user name, avatar, date joined, number of posts, member number etc.) that appears after the value for the date you joined. In my case the number is 190. What is this number and what does it mean? It may have been there for a long time but I have only just noticed it.

Terrorism is a very difficult thing to fight and it affects nearly everyone all around the world to some extent. Fortunately here in Australia we have been lucky so far, but it's really only a matter of time. In the meantime, Australians along with many other people from other countries are attacked all around the world. I don't think sending soldiers overseas will help, how can you attack an enemy you can't identify? This is the same problem with setting up defences at borders, how can you decide who to let in and who to stop?Yes terrorism is a real problem, and the fact the world is 'terrified' about being attacked unfortunately means the terrorists are successful in invoking terror on their targets. Whether this be by physical attacks or just the notion that they might attack someone.So how do you fight terrorism? I really don't know the answer, but I do believe while we should take steps to protect ourselves from attack, we should also try not to be paranoid about it. We should try to live our lives as normal as we possibly can. Of course that is not an easy thing to do if you have been directly affected by a terrorist attack such as 9/11 which affected so many.

Yes you could store the images in the database as binary data, that's true. However, I think there are some major drawbacks in doing that, mainly with the size the database will become with each record being the equivalent size of the image itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that is what will happen. I also wonder what sort of load it will put on the server and how it will affect the speed of the database once more than a few records are added. Tyssen is totally correct about learning to program correctly. If someone is teaching you, they should be teaching you the right way to do things, not just whatever will work. I also agree with Tyssen about the way to start. Decide on your layout, what fields you want to display and possibly use for calculations and then build your database and use those fields in your pages. The fields you see on my pages are not all the fields in the database. In the images table I also keep track of how many times an image is viewed at full size and the date it was last viewed. I have other tables for the banner accounts, searches and page view statistics. The fields and tables you use are totally up to you and what is needed to get the results you want. The database has evolved a little, originally I used to keep tracked of the image and thumbnail names, with careful naming of the thumbnails, I only need the image names. I also used to enter the image and file sizes of the images in the database, now I use php functions to calculate those on the fly. I could also use php to generate thumbnails on the fly, but I have chosen not to so I have a little more control over what is seen by visitors. Start simple and build from there, like any site, you will find it will evolve over time as you learn more. To start you with a few ideas, here is a link to the code (in a text file) for the page that lists the thumbnails based on search criteria. http://www.mudmall.com/other/list.txt As I said the code is most like not totally correct and there are probably more efficient ways of doing what I have done, but it does work. (To those out there that know their php, I greatfully accept any suggestions given to improve my code, I am sure it can be improved upon)

I like the layout of your site, being it is a graphics site it should have a lot of graphics on show and I think you have done this successfully. One little thing I'd like to see is some sort of 'mouseover' effect on your text links. It's personal thing I guess, but I like to see something happen when I hover over a link. I think you should investigate the world of 'Cascading Style Sheets', these will help you a lot in the layout and formatting of your site. Overall a nice job. By the way, if you're interested my site has a free banner rotation service for graphics related sites like yours. The banners are averaging 1500+ views a month, which can only help to promote your site. If you want to accept the offer, go to http://www.mudmall.com/ and click on the 'Banner Accounts' link.

I have done something like this with my site http://www.mudmall.com/ The database contains lnks to each of the images. I suggest you use thumbnails and limit the number of images shown on each page. I wrote the code myself and because I have taught myself it may not follow the correct conventions, therefore I won't show you the code unless you ask for it. I don't want to teach you any bad habits.

Actually it would appear there is a simple way to use opacity via CSS for both IE & FF, thanks to jlhaslip for the information via PM. This link explains how it works http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Quite simple really, doesn't sort out the drop shadow thing though. I guess I'll have to survive without it for now.

This is a post I did on Xisto.com. I'm not getting much response there, I am hoping here will be more successful. While I'm asking, does anyone know of a workaround to make the "Opacity" and "Gray" filters in CSS work for Firefox like it does for IE? For an example of what I mean by these filters, look at this page http://www.mudmall.com/list.php?search=all in both FF and IE and look at the differences in mouseover effects on the thumbnails. When viewed with IE, these are the effects: lowered opacity for unvisited link, grayscale for visited link and full color with full opacity for rollovers. Anyone have any ideas?

I thought I had Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) pretty much under control, but this has me stumped. What I want to do is format a SELECT drop-down list with a drop shadow as a background image, similar to what I have done with the textarea shown below. As you can see, I can't it get to work on the drop-down box. I can change the font color, font type, width and background color but I can't seem to use a background image like I can for an INPUT box. I have tried various things without success, can someone please show me a working example of where they have managed to put an image in the background of a SELECT list? I'm getting very frustrated by it. I had a similar problem trying to put a drop shadow image on a TEXTAREA, but I managed to overcome that one by using a discreet style tag in the textarea tag like this. <textarea cols=36 rows=3 name="alt_text" style="width: auto; height: auto; border-style: inset; border-width: 1px; background-color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 10pt; background-image: url('img/drop_shadow.gif'); padding-left: 4px; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,Arial,'Trebuchet MS'"></textarea>I tried, but that doesn't work on the SELECT list either.

There could be a lot of reasons why the script will run on his server but not at Xisto - Web Hosting. I think the most likely scenario is the directory structure is different between the 2 servers, this could mean the script can't find the required files on the server it needs to run. I also suggest you look in the text of the script and see if it has any settings you need to change before you try to install, typically these will be commented lines for things like "Script Path", "Database Name", "Password" and the like. If you need help with what those settings should be you might need to ask Tech Support at Xisto - Web Hosting.Hope that helps.

Sorry I can't help with a file either, but I'm wondering if the distortion is apparent during print preview or only when actually printing?If it seems to look ok during print preview then I'd suggest it's a printer setting problem, perhaps you need to update the driver for your printer.

While it's not unusual to not know how to handle this situation, this post makes a very good point about this very thing. http://forums.xisto.com/topic/32090-dont-be-late-to-tell-someone-that-you-love-them-tell-herhim-you-love-them/ The question is, when is the right time to tell someone you want more than friendship? I don't think anyone can really tell you, you'll have to use your instinct to know when the time is right. Perhaps you could ask H this, "Do you think it would spoil our friendship if we started dating?" A friend will give you an honest answer. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Very nicely done, that should solve his wait problem. I have to agree with you, it's simple and very cool.

Congratulations to all the winners, each of you thoroughly deserved to win. As BH rightly pointed out, there a lot more than just the award winners that make Xisto happen. The entire admin and mod teams are to be congratulated for the fantastic work they have done to keep Xisto working as well as it does.And finally, a big thanks to OpaQue, without him, none of us would be here. The amount of work he must do behind the scenes to keep this place ticking over is something none of will ever be able to fully appreciate.

@DeveloperXDoes the header() function provide him with the delay he wants? He said he already tried using the header() function but couldn't get it to put a delay in before it redirected. Is there a delay type function in PHP that can be combined with the header() function, something like the javascript timeout() function perhaps? I don't know enough about PHP to answer that question.

This tutorial is aimed at those fairly new to graphics and are wondering how to get a smooth looking graphic with a transparent background. The answer is anti-aliasing! This is not restricted to graphics with transparent backgrounds, anti-aliasing will help to give all your graphics a smooth look. Also using the most number of colors available for the file format you are using, (256 colors for GIF) will improve the look of your graphics. Anti-alising is an option in most graphics programs and some have the additional option of varying the strength of the effect for different situations. About the only time you shouldn't use anti-aliasing is for very small font graphics (pixel fonts), this cause the text to look blurry. To see the difference anti-aliasing makes, look at the emaples below. This graphic uses 2 colors, black for the text and black for the background and has no anti-aliasing. This has the typical jagged edge caused when using this approach. This image is the same as the one above but with anti-aliasing and the maximum number of colors available used. The image looks a little smoother but has a red fringe around it, still not exactly what we want. The next example shows how we can remove the red fringe. In this final example the image is the same as the one above with anti-aliasing used, but this time the background color has been changed so it closely matches the background of the forum pages. This is result we are looking for. Hopefully you will find this tutorial useful.

The address for you to login to your FTP account is ftp.2dyf.trap17.com You can do this via a web browser if your FTP client won't work or of course you could use File Manager in cPanel.

Yes that set definitely looks much better! One slight problem, the link to the ZIP file you have on the page appears to be broken, "Page not found". I guess you can fix all that when you get your hosting here. I can't copy and paste the "tutorial" to the Tutorial section because that would be a double post. I took a bit of a chance posting it here because it should really be in the Tutorial section. Thinking about it, I should have put it the Tutorial section and then posted the link to that here. Ah well, too late now. Hopefully the mods won't growl at me for doing it this way. If you're looking for images to use, perhaps my site will be useful for you, http://www.mudmall.com/ It's a Fantasy Gallery with almost 2,000 images. Good luck with fine tuning all your sets, you certainly have some work ahead of you.

To be honest I have only used ColdFusion for a brief period before my ISP at the time decided going for the free PHP option was a better choice. Personally I didn't see a lot of difference between the 2 programs in what they can do. Sure the commands are a little different but basically it seemed to me that they have similar functionality. Then of course I probably only scratched the suface of ColdFusion's capabilities with just doing basic database stuff. Perhaps going to PHP won't be such a bad thing, (besides all the coding you will have to do), PHP seems to have a lot more resources out there when you need help with a problem. Maybe if you did deeper into what PHP can do you might find it will do what you want anyway.I know that won't help you convince your supervisor, but that's my thoughts anyway.

Assuming you are putting your pages in a directory called rosterfiles/maddennfl06/, your links should be "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ here"When you go to the cPanel file manager or use FTP, the "public_html" directory is considered your "root" directory, anything in that folder is visible to browsers by going to "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;. If you use directories within the "public_html" directory then they need to be added to the URL as shown above. Anything in directories above the "public_html" directory will not be visible to browsers.Hope that helps.

I had a similar problem to this recently, if the post above doesn't work for you try this. This assumes you are using WinXP. Restart your computer, after it has gone through it's BIOS startup, (the text that says things like "Press ESC for menu" or something similar) but before it displays the "welcome" screen press F8 several times. This should launch a menu that will give you various startup options. Choose "Safe Mode with Command Line". Once the PC has finished it's startup you should be in DOS mode with a prompt saying "C:\" or something similar. Now comes the fun part, you need to navigate to the directory the file is in, if you followed the advice in the post above the file might be C:\ directory. If you didn't or you couldn't move the file you will need to find it. I suggest you start looking in the "Documents and Settings" directory and work from there, most files seem to end up in there. To change to a different directory in DOS type the command CD directory name. For example to change to the "Documents and Settings" directory from the the C:\ prompt, type CD Documents and Settings. To go back a directory level type CD .. Once you find the file, type DEL filename.exe Once you have deleted the file, restart WinXP by typing EXIT and everything should be OK. Hope that helps. :EDIT: To view the files in the directory you are currently in, type the command DIR Notice from mayank: Added the line after EDIT. as it is reported