chiiyo

Okay here's my contribution. Artistic, as I mentioned. I might think of animating them in the future, but here's the static versions. The background image is a photo I took, so no copyright problems there. Fonts used were Zapfino, Perpetual Titling and Didot, all come installed in Mac OS X, so no copyright problems there too... Please comment in the comment thread! First time making banners like these...

Why don't you buy a computer from overseas? I believe that Windows has a Japanese IME which allows you to type Japanese even in an English-language OS. Only problem is probably that you won't be able to use a Japanese keyboard, or maybe you might want to buy a japanese keyboard in japan and just buy a computer from overseas. Or you can just buy a japanese computer and install the English version of Windows on it.Or you could just get a Mac and save yourself all the trouble. *wink*

By the way if anyone else was looking for the convertor and stuff, the first link that Brian gave, if you use it, it will have a nag message in your converted video, right smack in the middle of the video, for the entire length of the video. O_o. Which is not-so-good. Going to try out the second link now. Once gain, thank you, Brian.

Hey~ I'm just wondering, does anyone use Nucleus CMS around here? I've seen some people mention it before. I'm considering using it to create my website, and I've been surfing around the Nucleus websites and fiddling with the program in general.Because so much of Nucleus is in the plugins, just wondering what plugins do Nucleus users recommend? The plugins page at the Nucleus message board is like at 49 pages and I'm not even half-way through it, but just wondering whether anyone would know a plugin that does this: basically you can create an archive page for your weblog that shows the TITLE of the blog post and an EXCERPT (that you can specify yourself, not automatic kind) and orders the entries by alphabetical order of the title instead of chronologically? Can't seem to find it anywhere, can't even find a plugin that adds an "excerpt" function like in movabletype, though I think the extra field plugin will do the job...Actually I'm not too sure whether I should bother fiddling with a blogCMS at all... I just need commenting for a lot of non-chronological entries that I can keep track of. Maybe there's an easier way to do this. Does Mambo or Xoops have commenting systems? Notice from microscopic^earthling: Moved to Software > CMS

Hmm, for me, I usually use Photoshop CS for editing my photos. I put up a tutorial about editing photos in the tutorial section, and what I wrote in the tutorial is actually what I usually do to my photos.For me, I like to think it's more of photography skills than actual editing. True, editing can get you a good picture when you've gotten a not-so-good one, but I think what I'm trying to aim for are pictures that turn out great when I take them, without having to blur stuff or change exposure and colour saturation and stuff.Haha when I get to that level I can dump colour film and start shooting medium formats and slides. But that's if I ever get there. Currently I still need to change the colour settings for the photos, and do some dust and scratch control.Oh yeah a good camera and lens helps. This one was taken at 50mm at like f1.7 which explains the lovely lack of depth-of-field and blurred background.

I'm sort-of a purist when it comes to photography: I think it's okay to fix the photo by using curves and contrast, but I don't approve of like mixing skies from another picture and editing it too much. But that's just my opinion. I like taking photographs of people. My friends, actually. I also take random things along the streets and stuff like that. Haha. This is one of my favourite portraiture photos that I took recently... She's a good friend of mine, and she was putting on makeup for a photoshoot at a studio that I was helping to cover.

Try logging in and then logging out. Same thing happened to me, I had an mySQL DB created for movabletype, and I was working fine with both my cpanel open and my movabletype admin window open, and then suddenly they told me movabletype can't find the database, and cpanel showed that I had no mySQL database created.Even went to create a new database, but when I went "back", cpanel said I still don't have a mySQL database. Then I logged out, restarted the computer (because of system updates) and everything went back to normal. Got my database back and everything. So maybe you should try logging in and out and restarting the computer?

If you have applied for hosting and was approved, but failed at the application stage, you MIGHT want to check whether the subdomain or domain you were registering already exists... What happened to me is that I was stuck at the application stage, thought it didn't get through, and kept trying to apply after that, and the server kept telling me I couldn't apply. What actually happened was the application WENT THROUGH the first time, and when I checked the subdomain I registered it said it existed, and I could log into cpanel and all.You might want to try it out and see whether your application got through the first time or something, before troubling the admin to help you reset your hosting token or something.

Everyone's so 3D and flash and animated. O_o. I was thinking of doing an artsy one. O_o. Would it be very odd?

Hmm. Usually I find that photos stay pretty much the same size when you zip them, probably because formats like jpeg and gif are already made to compress information, so not much MORE normal compression can be gotten out of them. Using a more powerful zipping utility where you can specify amount of compression usually helps, but you have to uncompress it the same way of course. Have you tried Yousendit yet? Basically you upload your file, up to 1 GB, I think, onto yousendit's servers, and then yousendit will provide a link that they email to your friend, and then he has 7 days to download the file from yousendit's servers, after which yousendit will delete the file. It's good for one-time transfers. If you're looking for a place upload your photos for display or storage, I usually use Photobucket. Yes, Photobucket does have limits on each picture (250kb and below) and the bandwidth as well as total amount of pace you can use, but because the stuff that I store online is already downsized and compressed for online viewing, each file is only around 60kb and thus I get to store a lot of photos there. It's not good for protection if you upload too-good quality pictures anyway.

Oh my goodness THANK YOU!I really needed that convertor, searched for so long for it! *weep*Thank you! *up your points*

O_o. Thank you! O_o.The thing about watermarking is more of, if people want to steal your photo, they will, regardless of watermarking and the like. There are ways to get around it, and people will find it. The most failsafe way, I feel, is still making sure that people can't like print your photos and claim it's theirs. It's also good to make sure you have a copy of your photos, like on a CD or something (if you are really paranoid you can send the CD to yourself by registered mail, someone mentioned that in a post about copyright), just in case anything crops up, and you need to prove you took the photo. I still have my negatives so no argument there. What do you mean by the border won't show up if it's not a perfect 4x6? Use this method: Go to Photoshop CS, open up your photo, go to Image>Canvas Size, under "New size" change to "relative", and then type in (for a 2 pixel border all around) 4 in the Width and 4 in the Height, and then Black in the "canvas extension color". Then you'd get a 2-pixel black border around your picture no matter what size it was in the first place. About the colour, white or black should do great. I find instances in real life interesting: Professional galleries tend to go for white background, and photography competitions tend to mount on black cardboard. I still believe white is better as a border/background, though there have been photographers who only take shots in black and white and leave a black border... Last time when we mounted our own photos on black cardboard we sliced another border next to the photo and stripped the black paper so we still had a thin white border around the picture and then a thicker black border. It looks great. Maybe you should try having a white border sometimes.

I haven't tried out the one in the cpanel yet but I used to use extremetracking.com , which has quite extensive stats. Maybe you'd want to check it out?

What do you mean by iPod colour? There is no iPod colour. There is the coloured iPod minis, and the iPod Photo, which displays colour...iPod mini (the coloured ones) 4GB US$199 , 6GB US$249 (like MTF said)iPod Photo (the one with the colour screens) 30GB US$349, 60GB US$449You can actually find it all out in http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I love how the price of the 60GB dropped by so much. Now it's actually possible for me to purchase! *joy*

Hmm. I display photos too, so I'll give a few tips:Yes, 600x400 is a good size, if you're displaying photographs taken in the traditional 35mm aspect ratio. This is because even the 640x480 people will be able to see your entire picture without scrolling, though if you're aiming to target those people make sure your webpage design allows for 600x400 picture without adding more pixels on each side of the photo (like if you have a 100 pixel width banner next to your photos the people using 640x480 won't be able to see your entire photo at once).Usually I even add a white border around my photos. It gives it a rather professional feel. Around 10 pixels around is quite nice. The background of my webpage is black is I have a photo surrounded by a white border and then by black. That's how they display photos in professional galleries anyway.I find that by showing my photos at such low resolution is already some type of protection against people stealing my images. A picture at 600x400 (including the white border!) does not print well on 4R medium (I know, I work at a photo developing shop), and so long as nobody prints out my work and claim it's theirs, good enough for me. You might also want to save the picture using Photoshop CS's save for web, I usually save my pictures at JPEG High quality which brings the size of the photo down to around 50-60KB, and still look pretty decent.If you have Photoshop CS, look under File>Automate>Web Photo Gallery. I've never actually tried it before, but it looks like you can specify your photos and Photoshop will design a template for a gallery, HTML files and all.

I'm a big fan of being absolutely compatible, I still design my sites so you can view them at 640x480 screen resolution (and get laughed at because of so), and since I've been on the board for some time I find that my coding ideals are somewhat outdated. I still have the impression not all browsers can read CSS, so I still design my pages with html tables and even though I have an external CSS stylesheet, I still use tags like < font >, that basically repeat my CSS, but ensure that browsers without CSS can see my website.Problem is, am I doing something really stupid? Is CSS like compatible everywhere, more compatible than basic HTML 4.01? Because when I read people's comments on XHTML and how you need to separate the content from the layout using CSS, I don't know whether I should still stick to using HTML tags as a backup to my CSS. For me, using DIV tags feel very incompatible, as opposed to using TABLE tags...Also, I'm thinking of learning php. Is php also like compatible with everything out there? Would my page screw up really badly if the particular browser doesn't understand php?I think I sound pretty noobish... O-o.

I always start my sites in a paper notepad, as in physical paper and pencil. I have like ten or twenty designs every time I redesign, and they're usually discarded after I draw them. It's like brainstorming, you just churn out anything you're thought of, and don't limit yourself the moment you think it.After deciding what design I'll use, I'll type it out on Notepad, in tables, and half the time something is wrong with it, so I spend the next four hours tweaking it so that it'll work. Most of the time the actual design looks vastly different from the paper one... =_=.I don't know anyone else who sketches their design on paper anymore...

Is it really that hard? I find that reading the instructions and tutorials carefully for the software and most things should fall into place. I've worked with Greymatter before and now I'm trying to learn Wordpress. I've not used b2 before though. I don't even touch code! O-o. What kind of problems do you have? For Wordpress all I see you need to do is go to the Users>Authors section and create a new account, then give your friend the username and password and let them login to your wordpress admin page. Then they can post to your blog!

I agree with an earlier poster: that you should always design for the worst possible browser. As a designer of your website, if you want your website to be accessible, you should always design for the people with the browser that has the least features, display the most mistakes and what not. If it works in that sucky browser (which I feel, has to be Internet Explorer for MAC. It sucks even more than IE for windows, believe it or not), it should work for all the rest of the browsers.But really, design for standards, not for browsers. Go to W3 and get your site verified and checked, and THEN check it with the worst browser around. That way you can be pretty sure it'll work for all browsers in general. Designing for the best browser around makes little sense unless your site is only for those with the best browser. Like your site is a Firefox extension site, so you design for Firefox browsers only. EVEN SO, don't forget people move around. Someone using Firefox at home may not have the privilege of using it at his workplace or school, and if he needed to access your site, deisgned only for Firefox only, he'd be in trouble.That was an example only, no offence to Firefox users.

Hmm, by syndicate do you mean you would be trying to get as many software developers onboard, or you're trying to get as many website designers onboard? Because I think your idea is really good, but you need to have more than one web designer doing the job, especially if it gets popular. Having a group of web designers who are willing to help the software developers design their websites for free sounds a lot better than just one web designer, and the software designers will have more choice. Not to mention when the workload gets high at least it won't be just one person doing all the work. Having more web designers also ensure that the syndicate would be operational even if it grows to be very big.

Some of the things remind me of what Tiger has in store. Tiger is the next big update to the Mac OS X, and it has really cool visual effects like the example you brought up. Can't wait for Tiger to come out... It's supposed to be out some time in May or June this year?Of course, I'd have to pay for Tiger, unlike Linux which is free.Looking at all the posts around here makes me want to grab my brother's good for nothing PC and install Linux on it. It'll be cool to learn another Operating System. Maybe when I have more time on my hands...

L'ARC~EN~CIEL!!!!Okay, so they're a J-rock band. They're the only band I like. Their music is sometimes considered pop-ish for J-rock genres, but I love their music, their lyrics, and each and every one of them!*feels very out-of-place*

Is that what my buddhist sect is? O_o. I can't answer much questions about buddhism, but I can answer any queries on Taoism...

Thanks chaos, your english is fine, it is "has", so you were right.I know real player can watch it, but I don't want to install real player on my mac, I'd rather convert the file to a format like .avi. Is there any software that does that?

Hmm for me I only use a notepad-like software to type my code, and Photoshop to do editing for my photos that I put online. And of course a browser to view it, and various online validators and emulators to make sure it's compatible and stuff.And my trusty paper notebook for sketching design ideas.So software:On Windows: Editpad and Photoshop 7On Mac: Smultron and Photoshop CSSimple isn't it?