Saint_Michael

Im with the second as well, the background, render, smoke effect, text are not blending well with each other, usually with the smoke effect you want your background to have a grunge look and not full abstract or you won't have good blending.Wit hthe second although a bit better don't stick with one color that usually takes around from the sig thats why its usually good to use more 2 colors especially when you get into blending and what not. Text is ok but could be better, don't worry I still stink at text as well.

But like I mention the problems I had to go through in order ot make CS3 to work properly took this sig that long, but I would the actual design took about maybe 30 45 minutes.

After waiting for several of your sigs to be posted I would have to say the first one you posted and your spiderman are the better ones.Instead going into real big detail on what to do Here is a list of things I usually recommend people to do.Backgrounds-Brushing -You need to work on brushing backgrounds which includes smoothness, depth and lighting, usually oyu want to start with grunge brushes because htey are hte easies to blend well with each other, then you want go to abstract brusing (fractals weird shapes and what not). Next you want to learn on to use vector brushes. I would recommend with brushing that you look at a lot of tutorials that focus more on backgrounds then anything else.-Depth -this takes time as well but it requires that have master brushing techniques, lighting techniques and blending techniques, don't worry about it that much until you have a good grasp of brushing backgrounds-Color -With color you usually want to go with more then one color gradients are the best way to go with mastering coloring, Also make sure to try all layering properties when you do a one layer color so it doesn't take anything away from the background and render-Lighting -This requires trying this out with filters like lens flare and lighitng effects filter, this is especially useful for dark background sigs to help add depth to it.Renders-Never Use renders that have halo's around (second sig render in the middle) that instant destroys the sig.-Don't make renders that small usually you want to have them cover about 50-60% of sig but leave enough room to see the background.-Never have a render under one color you usually want the colors of the render to work with the background and not the other way around.-Render blending is very important in the depth factor again reading tutorials will help on this.That covers a few areas, but like I said to get better read and test out tutorials and even combine ideas from several tutorials to make good looking sigs. This should help you out, I would start with the tutorials on this site and then go to websites that are gfx heavy in tutorials.

Although it took the better part of 12 hours to get this completed (wouldn't believe the problems I had to go through). But finally here it is and hint hint this sig will belong to a member of the Evil Society .

First interesting background you have it work good with the blue colors, but yes a content box will work good since with light background like that will make the text hard to see. I would suggest using the background strip you have for your nav men and put that behind the scores on the right side, with that there you be able to set up boundaries as to how your site will look as you build within those two backgrounds (the vertical strips) as your borders.Fire Fox 2 errorsFirst thing I notice right off the bat is the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom it shouldn't be there, check all your widths and see what you can change to make it go away. this is on 1024x768 on the 800x600 it is beyond just a few pixels. Of course if I got my computer max resolution 1920 x 1200 your nav menu gets split and then pushes everything to the right.Now that isn't so bad for the number of errors to fix within the firefox browser, on the other hand IE is just a mess.IE 7 Errors to fixFirst two things I notice is that your <div> widths need to be adjusted because in IE your right side menu gets pushed down (as seen in 1024x768). Thus your background image gets cut off and we see the blue background that you have.The next thing I notice is your left nav is completely messed up and by the looks of it you have several <div>s going on at once and you only need 1 to do what you need for a left nav/menu.As you can notice your kubuntu logo gets missed align as well, heck your centering tags or divs on that.When I check the validation what surprise me was that all your CSS was validated which mean your site should look clean in either browser but it. HTML wise you have 7 errors most likely due to the flash game.Although not necessary it will good to have a doc type in your html files so as to get better valid and for browsers like IE won't go into qurik mode and thus ruin your design, so other then those minor modifications your off to a good start just tweak your site as you go and remember your designing your website for other people and not you .

I can't pick any names but I would say most of the stars from the 70's 80's and early 90's are some of the great players are at, but if I would say I like the most is the Bird man himself Larry Bird, one of the best 3 point clutch shooters of all time. Yeah I like Michael Jordan he has beyond the norm in basketball skills but I prefer those who are not in spotlight but are just as good.

Well yeah that is true shorthand has been around a long time but how many reports make the mistake to make it a full sentence when they are trying to quickly writing what someone says down? Of course most people that shorthand know to make what they say complete based off a small note they made somewhere.But it's not just the people who hate technology, but in reality a majority of them are teachers whose students are doing this every time . I should have made that point a bit clearer in my first post, but like I mention before not everyone makes that mistake. I would say those who do this on a daily basis like 12 hours a day are the ones who are having the problem with academic writing and or writing in general. Whats funny though, from time to time when I am reading news on yahoo or in the paper I catch a few spelling mistakes.

Thats were I was getting at to see if you done any DB testing for caching and what not is what I was referring to . But what I was getting at is that using the subdomain tool and create a bnuch of sub domains on your site and then set up a DB that lists those domains to be retrieved when a person clicks the link for the first time or does a refresh of the directory.

I would have to agree, their are some good ideas on here even better some are combinable that look good especially the text effects I have seen. If possible I would like to get everyone's PSDs and see what could work for an ultimate design, just send them to my gmail account @ archangel.michael.a[at]gmail.com or contact me by msn at saint-michael[at]hotmail.com. Of course this will would have to happen after the contest but could be an alternate route for making some banners for vujsa.

Although not big news in the sense that it would eventually happen in the near future but big news in the sense that it is possible to get that kind of speed. T0 start some of hte previous records were 6.96 gbps and 8.88, but In just 2 days a team at the university of Tokyo set the record with a blazing 9.08 gbps (giga bytes per second) just a day after hitting a 7.67 gbps. This is the trip that this 9.08 gbps did If I remember correctly the T1 -T4 lines are like 1, 2 , 3 ,4 gbps a piece. But of course in order to have one of those lines you need to have a lot of money. But to think that a average user having a connection like that, lag would be non existing in the sense you would never know it was there. they also mention that they plan to build a 100 GBPS network which I saw go right a head that would mean everyone could see a bigger increase in their connection speed when this system is put into place. EDIT: I have been corrected on the T1 line speeds, T1 line is 1.5 Mbps and so T2, T3, and T4 lines would be in the same area as well in terms of Mbps. SOURCE HERE

Ok to me I consider the sickest form of human idiots ever, bad enough you have some people mocking the shooter but now you got people using spam and hacking computers by using the Virginia Tech shootings, This person should be found and beating for using a tragic event like this and trying to profit from it. The spam/hack goes like this It was also mention that 450 website have been made for VT charities of course it was obvious after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, scammer where making websites to score easy money especially through paypal and what, so I would say maybe at least a handful of those sites are legit by real organizations and the rest are just junk. Although this topic is more of a vent but since it has become a security risk it should be made to even who receive emails and go to websites who are setting up charities and what not. SOURCE HERE

Thought I would bring this topic up after doing research for my paper and of course seeing several articles like this one http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and their was an article that some girl won a text messaging contest and it mention she sent 8000 a month http://www.wayodd.com/teen-girl-wins-25000contest/v/7054/ (article is close enough) With the research I found out, some reports mention that students are not even aware that they use chatroom slang and text message shorts cuts. One story mention a girl filled out a job application and she didn't even notice she did it. From all this reading from these two articles and the stuff I found out I would say world wide that text messaging and chatrooms slang are ruining students effectiveness in academic writing. This is due to the fact that since students are so use to using short cuts when sending someone a message or talking in a chatroom it starts becoming harder and harder for them to properly write a research paper, essay, job application with out all their errors in spelling and even punctuation problems. Now this may not be the case for all and their was an argument that teachers are using blog for students to do their writing or become better, which is all good and dandy but when it comes to using acronyms an actual academic writing student won't realize it till after the teacher lets them know what was wrong with the paper. My stance is that if students can't tell the difference between text/chat lingo and academic writing they should fail, this of course is after the fact they have been told this several times. But if it a serious problem then of course teachers and parents have to step in and cut out the middle man with concern to their writing in the academic world. Now of course lets talk about the money issue now some phone services have free text messaging on a certain amount of messages while others are in the .99 range, lets do a little math here now if she were to pay 99 centa message her phone bill would be like almost $8,000 dollars, which is just insane for a 13 year old to spend. Of course it is obvious those are free because her parents would go insane knowing it cost them that much. But my question is why all those text messages when can easily dial the phone you have and talk to them like that? To me I think thats straight laziness right their no matter what angel you look at it. I only can imagine as she gets older she will have problems with her wrists and hands (carpal tunnel anyone?). So what does everyone else think especially you text messaging freaks out there?

To start off make sure to check the forums I do believe several of your questions can be answered .Now what kind of sub domain editing you talking about? because that is very vague as to what kid of help you are looking for.For ftp you first have to find ouy ftp information in which you do the following:1. Log into your cpanel2. Click FTP Manager3. Click ftp accountsThese list all your ftp accounts that you can use, now in order to connect through ftp you need a ftp client in which I recommend smartftp or if you a firefox user fireFTP. Now in order to connect you need the following urlftp.yourdomain.trap17.com and of course your cpanel name and password. Setting this up is fairly simple, if not just follow the instructions that come with the FTP client.You don't need much to upload stuff, you can either upload through your file manager (just click on file manager in your cpanel and then public_html) or use the ftp method which is a lot quick because you can upload a lot of files in one time. To have files downloaded, do one of the following either put them in a winzip file or winrar file or use a download site like filefront to have all your downloadable files for people to download them without using any web space or bandwidth

Here are some links to help you out. This is a wizard that designs a php drop down menu https://www.thesitewizard.com/wizards/navigationmenu.shtml This is a script that creates a dhtml drop down menu http://www.scriptdungeon.com/script.php?ScriptID=1010 This site talks about what goes into a php drop down menu and provides files as well http://www.phpclasses.org/package/1562-PHP-Generate-a-drop-down-menu-with-HTML-tables.html Hopefully that helps give you an idea on what to look for in designing a php drop down menu GOOGLE KEYWORDS "drop down menu in php"

Now I have seen everything theirs a Favicon validator , but I did find one thing quite interesting and that is on the delorie validators. That is in order to use them you need to have a file that those series of websites in order to use that sites services. I could see a potential security risk since that site has in some sort of way has listed your site somewhere on their servers and that a hacker could use their code and plant something on your site , but interesting either way.

Thier has been some down time to the forums but there have been no reason given as to the reaons for these two down times one lasted 2 hours the other about 30 minutes but most likely it a db issue or to many connections to why the forums were down.

hmm I dunno maybe if that scroll rolled down through flash then maybe. But it would seem that this design is more suit for fantasy related sites and not used to set up your portfolio of sites you done or go to.

From what I observed and only taking a guess on this was that when Cpanel got upgraded the fantastico license had to be renewed/reinstalled in order to for everyone to used it and so it was not loaded. However, with the problems everyone was experiencing with the upgrade, they had to bring back the old cpanel to fix most of the problems everyone was having with their account. If I remember correctly you have to installed fantastico to the CPanel since it's a separate package from cpanel when you purchase it and so when it was downgraded this didn't happen.So most likely we won't see fantastico until either the upgrade or when the admin get the free chance to install it back on to the cpanel again. But during this time I would highly recommend going the manual path of installing software so not only will you be able to figure out how it's done you have the experience to solve others questions when they install it and what not.

I forgot about the due date so just a small reminder/bump entries are due on May 12th at 12 am (west coast-usa time) and then voting will begin, which means you hav plenty of time to design your sig for this months sotw (or is it sotm )

Of course I love red and green lights because then I can sing Christmas carols and what not. I wouldn't doubt that trying to grab those links without a main db from the server would be hard, but of course if this script does get accepted to be implement into the servers then I would assume the difficulty would be gone, since now you can cut out the middle man (the posts) and connect it directly to the DB. I would assume you did a little test within your own account and set up subdomains and then connect to them from the php script within the dbs?

Had to do some looking but I found it in the PHP info page in the cpanel so to answer your question zend is installed so you don't have to worry about installing it at all and believe rob is correct shell access is only restricted to admins and maybe those who have computinghhost accounts (not to sure on that one). So once you get your hosting you can install your scripts that need zend to run it.

first off unless your designing graphics or multimedia in the industry, those specs are not really neccessary, first off I don't know anyone who has a @tB hard drive out in the market, I know of 750GB and maybe a 1 TB hard drive but not 2 TB Hard drives, 4 gigs are ram again is unnecessary as well since 1 gig is needed to run it and so 2 gigs of RAM should be able to run a vista computer with some smoothness. I would say you are correct that you would need the core series of processors to handle the graphics and everything else but overclocking it would be a risk to not only burning your computer you could in fact slow it down even more. Although you trimmed it down just a bit 2 graphics cards is a bit unecessary as well unless your into making extreme graphics and multimedia stuff on your computer. 4 GB of RAM still a bit unnecessary again as also expensive If I remeber correctly from looking a dell computer 4 gigs of ram can go from 1000-1500 dollars. Which is a bit much for a just a regular home user just checking their email or playing solitaire. You should make mention that with these computer specs would be required for any type of multimedia at a business or movie industry level. When I customized the new Mac with the 16 gigs of ram I built a movie industry computer to about $20,000 and that was to cover 16 gigs of ram 3 TB of Hard drive space and pretty much every top of the line component you would need. Even a extreme gamer doesn't really need all that unless money is no option and they want to play a graphics heavy game. I know I mention in a post or two that a 512mb ram computer my parents have con run vista home premium, I don't how it could since this model is about 4-5 years old and the componants about 7-8 (referring to hard drive, RAM, processor, graphics card). I know I will be going a bit extreme when I go ahead and build my vista computer from scratch but I will see what I really would need to what I want to put into this computer.

I have to agree that it was an awesome game, still haven't finished it due to my schedule but hopefully I will finish it this summer. I considered this my first cell shaded game since that is hte same technology used for some of the DBZ games that have come out. This game sure wa challanging if you don't go power levelign in the game, but once you get up there in the levels you just have to play smart tactics because you could still get a game over if you don't pay attention. I especially like the rose nebula are because now you can get the full 360 up and down and that your able to see below you thus showing the depth that these backgrounds where made.Some of the min games were ok like the bounty hunter and the factory mode and be able to design your own weapons. But what I think was a bit over done was creating weapons, yeah its good you can custimize your weapons to look a certain way and and have different skills, However, the method to design these weapons takes to long that you would have to cheat in order to get every weapon (700+), in which that is to many weapons for a short game (50-60 hours). For the most part the story was easy to figure out esoecially mysterious characters that were in this game. I think I figured out one of the characters by the second time I saw him in this game. But over all some good plot twists and good FMV sequences that were used in this game.I would give this game a solid 9.5/10 although an excellent game I think the mini games were a bit to much this time around.

hmm... With the google ad's I would say it could be logical that you could get denied, but I don't know the innre workings for adsense so person who does use adsense would have a better answer for you.

For a small update (or rather 4 days worth of updates. Day #4 Day #5 Day #6 Day #7 although Saphire is in 4th place (she was 3rd) she will take it back by days in since windy blew most of hersteam on the first 2 days, so lets go Team Saphire!! , I wonder when the other 2 turtles will get going though, It would be funny iif they left today and just blew everyone out of the wate rat like days 10 or 11 . So I wonder what will be happening in the next 7 days for these brave turtles.