A free widescreen wallpaper for your desktop

I’m constantly trying to improve my design skills, as I’m not a graphic designer. Not really at least. I’m sure there’s lots out there who claim to be graphic designers, but shouldn’t bother.

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Why I haven’t been using CSS Sprites

I recently came across css-tricks.com. It’s a really nice site. I like his design choices, especially.

Browsing around, I stumbled upon one of his articles on css sprites. I’ve heard of sprites, but I didn’t really dig too much into them. My impression of sprites was–exactly as Chris says–that they’re just some little images.

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CakePHP vs. Code Igniter, stuff for newbies to consider when choosing a framework

If you’re new to CakePHP, Code Igniter, or MVC frameworks in general, then no doubt you’ve done some research already. In this post I’ll discuss a little about choosing the right framework, and I’ll avoid getting into a battle over which one’s a better framework. Truth is that both frameworks are great and offer a similar but differentiated approach to MVC, and the choice really depends on your application and your working preferences. (This post is mostly intended for newbies to the world of MVC frameworks.)

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It’s time for email clients to get smarter

Smart Folders aren’t very bright. Sorting by date or name doesn’t help either. Using another program (or collection of programs) to better organize email threads and collections is wasteful, time consuming, and requires too much manual effort for the workflow.

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Make your HTML tables readable and noticeable

A friend of mine recently started working on building a php calendar class. Sure, it’s been done before. About a trillion times. But he needed one and felt like exploring it anyway.

I’m posting this as a reference to learn a bit more about correctly writing and styling html tables. A calendar is really just a collection of tabular data, so it’s a good idea to use an HTML table.

Read through this article (Terrific Tables with CSS) by Jonathon Snook over at sitepoint

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Add some pretty form element help text with the jQuery Tooltip Plugin

Here’s a quick tutorial going over how to get a simple tooltip working using the jQuery library and the Tooltip plugin. We’ll set up the help text to be displayed when a user mouses-over a question mark next to a form element.

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Build a simple CSS-based image navigation

Often designers won’t budge on allowing you to use text for primary navigation menus. In the past images were embedded directly into the HTML and awful javascript functions were used for displaying multiple states. Nowadays, though, you can use images and text to please designers and search engines by doing a bit of simple math and writing some easy CSS.

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Realistic photos with dynamic shadows, like the pictures in Harry Potter

Take a couple hundred pictures of one thing, altering only the lighting and shading for each one, then combine them into one picture using tiny variably-colored hexagons. Now move around a light source behind it, and you’ve got yourself a photograph with moving shadows. Pretty cool! Take a look at the video below: Read more…

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