The mailto syntax is pretty simple, but sometimes you might run into problems with some mail clients (AKA Outlook Web Access). Most of them are very forgiving and you can drop a comma for example right into the body of the mailto and have no problems, but it’s better not to do that. It’s much safer if you use hexadecimal numeric values for your special characters. For example a comma is %2c and a space is %20.
For over a month now I have been slaving away on an idea I have had for quite some time. It’s probably the largest personal site I’ve ever built and it’s my first real foray in the world of Drupal. Let me tell you, Drupal isn’t an easy undertaking, but it’s very powerful. If you don’t know much about Drupal you might want to check out Dries Buytaert’s blog and see who’s using it… in short, a lot of big names.
This post isn’t about Drupal, this is about The Zombie Journal, my newest site. Consider it still rough around the edges. I have a lot of ideas which I have not yet implemented, but for now I am hoping to see The Zombie Journal grow into a social network for Zombie fans of all sorts. If you sign up for an account you can post your own zombies stories of your fictional encounters with these diabolical creatures we call “the undead”. You can also share zombie resources, rank and vote on content and participate in the forums. If you are even mildly interested in zombies I urge you to sign up today, and follow The Zombie Journal on twitter.
Over the summer I discovered a new passion and hobby; sailing. This filled many of my weekends and some of my evenings for the last two and a half months of summer. I think I can say I have truly been bitten by the sailing bug, and once that happens there’s turning back.
So what’s a new geeky sailor like me to do with all this new found experience and information? Well, share it all on a blog of course, so about two weeks ago I got to work on setting up my new blog. The domain name was the first thing I needed to secure and wow did I get a good one. I don’t know if you have ever tried securing a good domain, but searching for one quickly becomes frustrating. What’s worse is the fact that there’s lots of great domain names out there just being squatted. Put it this way, something as obscure as imhMedia was taken for the .com and I had to register the .net for my personal portfolio site. You can imagine how surprised I was when I looked up windandsail.com and found it was available. It’s a blog about what it’s like to be a new sailor and everything I learn along the way. So without further ado I welcome you to my new blog Wind and Sail.
So be prepared for a pretty biased review of Zombieland. I am a huge fan of the Zombie genre as anyone who knows me will tell you. I also own the soon to be “Zombie awesomeness” domain name thezombiejournal.com. That said I still recognize the fact that a lot of Zombie movies are pretty crappy, in fact, a lot of them are just downright awful. I had a feeling from the start that Zombieland would be different. I mean first it’s got Zombies (always good for a zombie movie), and second it’s got Woody Harrelson, what could possibly go wrong? I still had a tiny fear that it might still suck though, and I wanted this movie to be good, I wanted it to be the next Shawn of the Dead or even better, and I’m happy to say that it completely blew my expectations away.
Phil Hassey, the creator of the incredibly popular and addictive multi-player game Galcon, for the iPhone and iPod Touch has surprised us with a new game today, Galcon Labs. The game is still really Galcon at it’s core, but there are four new game types, new music, and loads of polish on this baby. The original Galcon is arguably one of the best Multi-player games available on the iPhone.
Here’s a CSS tip that I wish more people would follow. When setting up a font on your site, say Verdana, there is no reason to declare it on every H tag, P tag and class you are using. Throw it up in the body and be done with it. The same goes for font sizes, colours and anything else that will be uniform across the site. Once you have done this you can override it for specific tags and classes when you need too.
body {
font-family:Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;
margin:0;
line-height:130%;
color:#333333;
}
This will make your life easier and everyone else who has to work with your files will thank you. I think we should always be looking for ways to make our CSS smaller, cleaner and easier to read.
So obviously our beloved Image Ready is never coming back, so how is one supposed to open animated GIFs in all this mess. A couple of years back I wrote a work around for opening animated GIF’s in Photoshop in a windows environment. I later followed up with a more detailed description on how to do it.
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I happened across an interesting website today with loads of useful information and photos. Unfortunately this site was using one of the most absurd web practices, a copyright protection script. What is a copyright protection script, it’s a JavaScript that completely breaks a users experience and fails to protect anything all at the same time. I’m sure everyone has stumbled across one at least once in their journeys across the web, especially if you like to open links in new tabs.
Smart Objects aren’t perfect, and until Photoshop CS4 a mask could not be linked unless you used layer groups. They don’t always resized perfectly when using vector logos either, but one thing they are perfect for is embedding photos into your Photoshop documents. I still can’t believe how many times I end up working on PSD files full of photos without any Smart Objects. It takes seconds to create one, and saves a lot of time down the road.
One thing that is consistently presented to me by other web designers and users is space below images and usually in Firefox, but it can also happen in email newsletters. You will usually notice it when you need images to vertically butt up against each other. This results in a white line or whatever the background colour is set too appearing between two vertically stacked images. Fear not, the fix is extremely easy and you have two good options.
Welcome to the blog of Ian Hoar. I talk about current web trends, technology, toys, games, gadgets, design, usability and everything in between. It’s all about geeking out and an occasional rant. More about me
