Posts Tagged ‘thumbnails’
October 16th, 2009 | 
Author: *Opera: The Pros*
Opera’s browser is light-weight and well-built. The download and program size is much smaller than IE, and it offers multiple ways to improve the speed. It’s newest version, 10.00, is the fastest yet. The Opera browser now offers a Turbo mode that compresses pictures as webpages load, which is perfect for dial-up and poor wifi connection users. Even high speed services can benefit from faster page loading at times. This browser is, and has been, considered one of the most secure browsers available. Opera has the unique advantage of being little known. Virus and hacking threats and techniques that are made to attack personal computers are targeted towards the most used browser: Internet Explorer. Since Opera is lesser known, it is safe from the majority of attacks.
Some of the new unique features you cannot find on Internet Explorer include visual tabs (changing the tabs into thumbnails of webpages, also, a preview of the site available when hovered over), and a moveable tab bar (can be moved the the left, right, or bottom of the page). Speed dial, a growing popular feature for browsers is a long time feature that has yet to be available on Internet Explorer. Speed dial is a page that opens with a new tab or can be set to open in place of a home page. It offers thumbnails (now in customizable numbers and other option) of favorite websites for one-click access. There are a large variety of features and benefits that would be difficult to discuss every one, but Opera by far highly exceeds in being customizable and convenient.
As far as speed and security, Opera, like any browser has these issues as a top priority and continually improves these areas. Opera has a the benefit of being little known and therefore has less security threats to overcome. When it comes to improving speed, Opera takes the cake. Not only have they had a long standing feature to handle image loading for faster speeds (and security), Opera now offers the “Turbo Mode” which is excellent for dial-up and other slow connections. Its a compression tool that chows down on page loading time. You can even set it up to automatically detect slow connections and turn on when needed! This is far beyond where any browser has tread.
*Opera: The Cons*
Quite simply, IE is integrated with the operating system. It’s already installed on the computer, so your computer will download the latest version, patches, and any other related tool for you, providing you use automatic updates. Opera is a separate company, so downloading is necessary. For slow connections, downloading this program could be difficult and you may have problems getting it downloaded.
Also, Opera is simply different. People who do not need many bells and whistles and don’t use the Internet very often may not see the need for another browser or all of it’s features. Handy helpful shortcuts may simply be a confusing hassle to someone who is not accustomed to new features, like mouse gestures (allows you to move forward, back, open new tabs, etc., by clicking and moving the mouse).
In all, Opera is perfect for people who need a faster browser and use the Internet and computers frequently. They will have no problems using or downloading Opera and may prefer it to Internet Explorer for some of the features listed here, and others. Internet Explorer continues to do well to be a solid, user-friendly browser for amateur users and those who don’t want to change to another.
Internet access is available as little as for $6.95 a month in the US and Canada. Sign up online or call 1-800-456-3118.
Article Source: Opera Browser: Pros and Cons
There are many ways to get free pictures from different Internet sites, and you can get stock photos too if you know where to look. There are a lot of popular sites that have images and photos that you can purchase, but more people are interested in sites that share photos resembling a give and take method for membership.
The basic idea of websites that offer image hosting for free are in high demand, and although there are many that are designed for different types of users, they all basically act in a similar way. A user becomes a registered user or registered member, they can upload their own images to the website on the Internet, and those pictures are stored onto a server that can be viewed by other members of the website. It is that simple.
Uploading is usually very easy and fast. A user would select the images from his or her computer that they want to upload and they then would transfer them to the websites server by clicking a submit or upload button. The best websites enable users to be able to upload their free pictures several at one time, transfer them from URL to prevent bandwidth theft, and can also submit the photos to relative archives that contain similar images.
There are many different types of formats that are used for images and the Internet, such as jpeg, bmp, tif, gif, png, swf, and others. Most of the free photo hosting services will let users upload their images in a variety of these formats, although there are some that only accept jpeg images and maybe a couple of others. Some will even include encrypted archives which use the popular ZIP or RAR extensions, so be sure you are familiar with the acceptable formats for any site you are considering using. You will be able to show images to others after they are uploaded by linking with BBcode, the HTML code, or by using thumbnails that are linked to the full size images themselves.
Users who do not want to dispose of any personal Web space find that the high quality free picture hosting services are ideal for them because they offer a wide range of different advantages. They can create many different photo blogs on the site, present image galleries and slide shows to friends and family members, they can add notes and comments to their uploaded images, and some of them are even able to use the sites to crop and edit their photos and re size them to a user friendly size.
Other benefits that vary from one website to another include utilization of the public upload system, unlimited file uploads, unlimited space, a certain amount of views per image that are allowed every month, large maximum file sizes, and more. Although these and many other benefits to vary with different free picture websites, they are handy perks to have.
For more information on free gay pictures, please visit our website.
Article Source: Your Guide to Free Pictures and Stock Photos on the Internet
If you’re selling products on the web, you need to incorporate pictures. Whether you’re selling something as artistic as handmade religious jewelry or something as technical as phone headsets, a bunch of details about the product and a price are not going to catch a visitor’s interest. So it follows that when you’re building an e-commerce website, you will be including a place for pictures.
Here’s the thing; it’s a lot of hassle for everyone if you have to hand-code in every new item. If the phone headset site finds a new distributor and gets a hundred new types of headsets in, or the religious jewelry site comes up with a new rosary necklace every week or so, they’ll need to be able to add the new products. That’s why you’ve created a fancy database-driven CMS, so they can add in the information and it automatically populates to the website.
But what happens when the new phone headset distributor sends a bunch of 1,500 pixel images when your system is designed to display 100 pixel thumbnails and 500 pixel normal images? What happens when the religious jewelry pictures are all high-resolution images that will take far too long to load? When the site layout is based on the idea of the images being a certain size, and then new images are introduced that aren’t that size, problems occur.
Now, you might be saying, “Oh come on, this is easy, just include a width=whatever height=whatever in your image tag and call it a day.” If so, hit yourself. I’ll wait.
See, the reason you see those attributes added to the images so often is, the great majority of the time, because it helps with getting the images indexed in the search engines. It’s not to actually set the image size. If you try to set the image size with them, the quality is dramatically reduced. And, if you’re sizing down, you wind up dealing with full-size loading time for a part-sized image.
Your next option is to get the client to make sure any images it uploads are properly sized. Not too likely. Aside from the very real possibility that they’ll forget what sizes to use, make a mistake, just not bother, or try to do it with Paint or something equally ludicrous, that’s just giving them more work, and one of your jobs is to minimize the amount of work and complexity they have to deal with for running their website.
So how do you get these phone headsets to fit in the proper format, and these religious jewelry pieces to load in an acceptable amount of time? Well, it just so happens that there’s some php code that can resize images automatically on the server. It’s not perfect for enlarging, but it does a pretty clean reduction, and it’s not too hard to code up a loop that will run through existing images to size them, and then add the resizer to the backend of the admin – right by where the image uploads works. Personally, I prefer setting some variables to determine the size and folder of the image, and then having it size the image in the chosen ways (a thumbnail, standard view size, and full size, for example), and save each to their own folders, keeping a single image column in the database.
So, when working on admin systems for e-commerce sites, from phone headsets to religious jewelry, expect there to be pictures. Prepare for them for the first batch of uploads and for future updates by including dynamic image resizing. It will make things easier on you and the client, and result in a cleaner, nicer-looking, and more easily updated website.
Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to phone headsets.
Article Source: Website Design Options – Automatic Image Resizing
The Portfolio Page is a very integral part of your website. This is where you can showcase all your products and work samples for your visitors to see and thus establish your reputation in the industry. By seeing your work, visitors will get an idea about your skills and abilities and would consider you of and when they have a similar requirement. Therefore, it is important to design a good Portfolio Page where you can showcase your works creatively and make an impression on anyone who sees it.
Here are some handy tips to design a Portfolio Page for your website…
Arrange according to Quality
Though you may believe that all your works or samples are good enough, there may be some that are better than the others. And the trick of the Portfolio Page is to impress visitors instantly. The organization of your portfolio page is very important in order to make a good impression on the website visitors. Prioritize your works in order of their quality and present the best ones first followed by the rest of them in decreasing order of ‘goodness’. The idea here is to impress the visitors at the word ‘go’! If they like the first sample, they will continue browsing and see the rest of the portfolio.
Moreover, arrange the content in such a way that users can view the samples one by one or see all of them at the same time as thumbnails. If there is too much content, you can split them up in pages.
Don’t Overload the Page
It is not unnatural for you to want to load the Portfolio Page with every tiny piece of work that you have ever created in life. However, instead of establishing your reputation, this will only serve to increase the size and weight of your website. Avoid the urge to upload all your works on the portfolio page and instead focus on quality rather than quantity. That is not to say that you should adhere to a limited number of entries and keep back some of your good works. But avoid showcasing unnecessary elements. For examples, too many entries of the same nature and type would have no value addition but only take up space.
Have an Easy Navigation
The navigation is very important to the Portfolio Page. This is because you would want your visitors to browse through the page easily and view the work samples. Don’t try to create a complex navigation pathway in a bid to appear innovative. Innovation may work well if really don’t well. However, if it fails, it can have severe impact on your website. That is why, it is best to play safe and create an easy navigation that allows users to browse through easily and focus on the samples posted there. Good navigation lets visitors focus on the content and avoids any confusion.
Don’t Mess Up
The Portfolio Page serves to showcase your products and work samples. Therefore, it is important to present them well and professionally. Include visual elements that can highlight the important contents and bring out the best features of the same.
Kabir Bedi works as a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a eminent web designing company that deals with a variety of web services and business support services. He leads a team of professional Indian web developers and advises them to create powerful web solutions for their clients.
Article Source: Portfolio Page – How To Design Them Well?
The design of a website is very important for your traffic, maybe as important as the content of your web page. Over time, the design of your blog or online market (as example) may seem old to the user, affecting your website’s traffic.
To avoid this problem you got to keep your design modern and cool over time. A complete re-construction of a website it’s expensive and takes time. The solution would be the redesigning of your page. I’ll reveal to you some tricks to make this redesign cheap and effective.
The grafic design of your website is mainly created with images. You can improve that designing if you improve the quality of those images. This can be done quick with the right image manipulation tools.
OK, image manipulation tools, but what kind of tools?…
I recommend online tools, as they are free and the result is the same as using expensive software like Photoshop. There are some websites that provide this kind of tools for you and they are easy to use.
Now, let’s see what elements of the page are the most important for your website’s design.
1. The main menu … You can easily change your menu by using some free menu generators. I know some generators that are able to deliver to you a unique and fully personalized menu in seconds. You need to create a new menu that is the same size as your old one and that’s how you avoid to change your entire template.
2. Thumbnails – It’s simple to make your thumbnails look fresh and unique by using a online thumbanail creator. You can make yout thumbnails look new and fancy by adding some shadow effects or a cool mirror effects to them. More than this, it’s recommended to customize them by a transparent watermark with your logo.
3. Large Images – make them cool by adding shadow effects and why not, a small reflection effect.
4. Buttons – shadows and reflections works good with buttons as well.
5. Widgets. Add some widgets to your page: calendar, clock, maybe a voting system as well.
If you follow those 5 steps you’ll get a new look for your website and that’s gona make or traffic to increase. And it takes only a hour to aplly those changes. Success!!!
Online image manipulation tools —– Drop Shadow tool – The tools you need for your redesign!
Article Source: Tips and Tricks for Website Redesign
In my previous article, I discussed the basics of image crawls – selections of thumbnails that move across the site to display photos, graphics, jewelry, or whatever other products or items you want to show. I talked about their uses, how they are ideal for giving people a look at images and products for sites where visual appear is important, such as photography and jewelry sites, and their main weaknesses. In this article, I’ll be going into more of the details regarding some potential pitfalls or challenges when coding image crawls, and how to get around them. This is not meant as a strict tutorial on creating the code, but rather, some advice for how to properly implement it and avoid problems.
First, you might run into your crawl being choppy. In most cases, this is because you’re moving it too far and not often enough. Something moving 100 pixels every second is looking to look like an image jumping across the screen; a crawl is more likely to move 1 pixel every hundredth of a second.
Now, if you have a database full of jewelry pieces or photographs, of which several come up in your image crawl, the last thing you want to do is try to move each one individually with a loop. This process is incredibly taxing on computer resources, and as such, incredibly slow. If our crawl is moving 1 pixel every ten miliseconds, that means that a hundred times a second, the computer has to run through the piece of Javascript code that moves the image. If that code includes a loop to move 10, 20, 50, 100 images one pixel to the left, it becomes incredibly taxing. Add in the extraneous checks required to make sure each image hasn’t reached the point where it is supposed to loop around, and you have a massive strain. As a result, the crawl will move significantly slower, may have a slightly jittery look, and is more subject to glitches, especially after several revolutions.
The solution? Put all your photos, jewelry pieces, whatever, into a single div or table, and just move it. Simple enough, but it brings us to two new challenges. First: you’re dynamically loading thumbnails from a database. They may have varying widths (or heights, for vertical crawls), and you may not know how many are going to be on the page. So, the challenge becomes figuring out how to decide when to wrap the image crawl. The next problem is, you can’t wrap it cleanly; either it winds up skipping, or you get a long blank spot waiting for the div to trail off before it loops back to the start.
I find the simplest solution to the second is to create two trains, one after the other. You can have two duplicate trains if you’d like, or to save on loading time, simply load half your images into one train, and half into the next. As far as calculating where to loop, I suggest cutting out the middlemen and making calculations based on the height and width of the divs. If you haven’t had opportunity to figure out how to dynamically calculate that yet, use document.getElementById(“DivName”).offsetHeight or document.getElementById(“DivName”).offsetWidth. Note that floating and absolutely positioned elements will not count towards offsetHeight and offsetWidth, so make sure your thumbnails are relatively positioned (tables work well enough for this purpose). The general calculation is, when the div’s “left” value is greater than the length of the containing div (when moving right) or less than 0 – the length of the div itself (when moving left), change it to the other. Similar rules apply for vertical crawls. So for example:
if (CrawlLeft = CrawlWidth && Moving == “Right”)
{
CrawlLeft = (0-CrawlWidth)
}
As a side note, you want to make sure your crawl is in an “overflow:hidden” container div. Otherwise, especially for a crawl moving right or down, as the crawl moves, a scrollbar will appear and start getting longer. Very disruptive.
So, that should be enough to get a basic crawl going without any major glitches. In the final article in this trilogy, I’ll get into some extras you can place in the crawl, such as speed and direction modification.
Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to glamour photography.
Article Source: The Details of Image Crawls 2
The user interface of FileCataloger is very simple and easy to use. It includes menu, toolbar, path bar, group view, list view, description view and status bar.
Group view is showing the catalog groups of the opening catalog database. List view is showing the sub-items of the selected catalog group in group view. In the list view, user can sort catalog item by clicking header of list view. The description view of FileCataloger can show the comment, custom propertys, thumbnails of the current selected catalog item.
Operating Catalog Database
FileCataloger uses a single catalog database file to save all catalog data, so as to easily arrange, copy, move and backup catalog data. The actions for operation catalog database is simply.
Importing Catalog Item
FileCataloger providesseveral friend wizard to help user to import cdrom, dvd, local disk, movable disk, folder and solo files into catalog database. And there are some options that can be configured to customize the importing operation.
While importing file from media, user can enable file parser to take comment and custom property from the files imported. Now FileCataloger support zip file, rar file, mp3 file, chm file, eml file. In the future, FileCataloger can support more file type parser.
FileCataloger can import zip or rar file as catalog group, just enable complex parser for zip or rar file.
Operating Catalog Item
FileCataloger support several catalog item operations. User can modify name and extention name, add comment, view property and delete it. Every catalog item can be added multi custom propertys and multi thumbnails. Every custom property have one name and one value, to note catalog item’s property. These functions let catalog item having a lot of infomation to use.
Organizing catalog item
User Group is unit for organizing catalog item. Firstly create some user groups, The user groups can be hierarchical. After that user can move independent catalog items into proper user group. Now, user can browse the hierarchical tree of disks, files and folders that looks exactly the same as in Windows Explorer.
The moving operation is support Drag/Drop.
Bookmarking catalog item
Bookmark group is also a useful tool for organizing catalog data. Every bookmark group can contains a lot of bookmark items. Every bookmark item links to a catalog item just liks Shortcut in window. Double clicking a bookmark item will let FileCataloger navigating to the location of the catalog item. User can have multi bookmark group and also have multi bookmark item in different bookmark group to links to a same catalog item.
User can operate bookmark item like normal catalog item in bookmark group.
The bookmarking operation is support Drag/Drop.
Operation file content
Some file often be viewed by user, such as readme file, index file. FileCataloger can take its content from media to catalog database, then view them or save as other files. Certainly The file content can be cleared by user.
Searching Catalog Item
Filecataloger have a powerful easy-to-use quickly searching function. User can search file caption(name and extention name), comment, content, custom property, sizes, creation time, last write time, last access time.
User can set search target types. example: cd, move disk, file and so on. And User can combine tow search result with Remove the previous result option be cleared. Searching text is also support mildcard * and ?. Finally user can set search for all catalog item or current catalog group or previous search result.
User can operate search results like normal catalog items in search group. If user double click a catalog item in search result group, FileCataloger will navigate to the location of the catalog item.
Because searching is in database, so user assure any changes has been saved Before searching.
If FileCatalog’s function can’t satisfy user, then user can write VBsscript to customize application. With VBscript, user can operate catalog database and catalog item. FileCataloger provide some objects and some function.
Home Page: http://www.filecataloger.com
Download Page: http://www.filecataloger.com/download.htm
Help Page: http://www.filecataloger.com/help.htm
Article Source: Started with FileCataloger