
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! So Glad Director's Not Dead David Stiller, one of our Flash/Director enthusiasts, received a link to this article at DigitalProducer.com which gives Director users a bit of hope for this program that has remained stagnant in recent years. David had this to say: "All said and done, I like the article -- in spite of the annoying red popup undescores. It sounds like Spring 2007 is going to be a watershed in the new 'Adobe face era' of our favorite apps. While I appreciate where Tom Higgins is coming from, I thought his answer to the 'Director has suffered' question was pat and arguably not true. (His reply: "Director and Shockwave are the leading multimedia development tool and web-player ..."; this made me wince! Flash is, hands down, the leading web-player.) Still, I got my start with Director and am glad to hear it's in the ring for another round." New Version of The MM-Exporter is Out We don't have any affiliation with the folks who make the MM-Exporter, but it definitely deserves a plug. MM-Exporter is a free program - Windows only - that allows you to view your passwords and serial numbers, backup site definitions and save all of your configuration data. Did we mention it's free? We're not sure what the update was for, but it gave us an opportunity to mention a product we dig. If You Let Them Build It, They Will Come Finally beating out porn for the fastest-growing web brands this year are user-generated content websites. Included in that mix are websites like YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Flickr and Wikipedia. The web has been an outlet for people to get a message out to the world quickly ever since it began, but until recently, the general public had to rely on plain web pages to share their thoughts, pictures and movies with the world. With more and more relationships being forged on the internet, being able to share chunks of your life with your net friends in a simple fashion is a trend that will only get more sophisticated as time goes on. Not surprisingly, MySpace experienced the largest growth of any of the user-generated content sites with a 183% increase in growth. We'd give you a link, but CMX partner Tom Green got this information from today's On Line Marketing Minute from Media Post, which we mere mortals do not have access to apparently... Zeldman On The State of The W3C Jeffrey Zeldman had some choice words about the W3C and their recent abandonment issues. Check out his blog to get Jeffrey's take on what he believes the W3C should be doing for us as web developers, rather than what they are doing to the canvas of the internet. For a more "inside" look of the W3C, you can see Björn Höhrmann's open letter that explains why he recently left the W3C organization. Would You Like a Website? Maybe a Flashy Sign Thingy? There was a time when people would walk wearing "Eat At Joe's" billboards. If that really worked, you'd think we'd see more of that. Apparently no one told the people at Freedom Interactive Design, because their new campaign, which you can find at WouldYouLikeaWebsite.com, involves walking around the street carrying what appear to be animated, hi-tech signs. Although the signs were no doubt created on a computer after filming, the effects are executed very well. Tom Green says if you buy his next book, you too will be able to make videos like these...
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "I liked it a lot. I've taken a couple of Macromedia Flash courses and this tutorial helped to improve my confidence --especially in being able to analyse my mistakes and to finally get the banner ad to work properly " CMX Subscriber Dairobi P., commenting on Kim Cavanaugh's article "Overcoming Your Fear of Flash, Part III " Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!
Great Quotes: "What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it." — Alexander Graham Bell Don't Lose Those Photos I have a buddy that loves taking digital photographs and he has an amazing Olympus digital camera with tons of different zoom lenses. He used to store all of his pictures on his hard drive, and categorized them just so. Unfortunately, he lost all of the pictures in a horrific hard drive crash. Don't let this happen to you. Check out TheGadgetsPage.com and find out how to hang on to those photos, even if your hard drive loses conciousness. One of the Coolest Accessories For an iPod We've Seen Memorex plans on releasing the iFlip this September. If you own a Video iPod, you can connect it to the iFlip and view your iPod media through the iFlip's eight inch screen. Not only that, but it comes with speakers, and an S-Video out in case you want to hook up your iPod to an even bigger screen. The iFlip runs for about five hours on one charge and will cost you about two hundred bucks. See it at Gizmodo.com. Battery... Draining... Can't... Compute... Why the sour puss? You say the battery on your laptop isn't strong enough to watch that whole two-hour Footloose video on your transatlantic flight? While this article at LiveDigitally.com can't guarantee that you'll be able to watch the opening AND ending credits to your movie, or keep you computing all night long without charging, it does have some great tips on extending your laptop's battery life. If It's Rick Springfield Tablature, We're Behind Them. It turns out that quite a few web developers, or people working in the technical field, play guitar. A lot of us go to the internet to download tablatures that help us to figure out some rhythm or lead guitar licks, but if the MPA (Music Publishers' Association) has their way, we'll be consigned to buying traditional "chord books", and that's if a chord book even exists for the song you're trying to learn. Check out the "greeting" at GuitarTabs.cc and you'll see that the MPA is serious about this. There's some definite thieving taking place on the internet, but... guitar tabs? Sheesh. Read the story at ArsTechnica.com. Mini Cooper: Advertising Through Insults The Mini Cooper has an interesting web-based promotion going on whereby you can give the website - aveaword.com - some particulars about a buddy of yours, and he'll get an email that takes him to a Flash site that is personalized just for him, complete with a guy who knows his hobbies and his wife's name. It's a neat idea, and all done in Flash. Glue London and Idiot Lamp came up with this great promo. This kind of stuff keeps the web innovative and fun. For some more fun, try building a Mini Cooper Transformer at MiniUSA.com. Just go to "Build Your Own" and choose "Robot."
CMX Snippets Collection - Part I CSS Positioning layouts are hot, and many people are trying to make the transition from the mostly reliable, but non-semantic, table-based layouts we've all used for years. CSS 2.1 provides great features for laying out pages, and the specs for CSS 3 indicate that some day the future of design on the web will be ever brighter indeed. We here at CMX try to make the learning curve as painless as possible with our many CSS tutorials and articles. Now we'd like to offer you a diagnostic tool that spares you some typing and memorizing. We are proud to introduce the CMX CSS Snippets Collection. Snippets, as you may well be aware, are bits of reusable code that paste as blocks or around selections with the click of an insert button. This article includes an extension for installing part one of the collection into the Dreamweaver Snippets panel, and a tutorial that explains the problems and solutions that the hacks correct. Check Out This Collection of Snippets from CMX Partner Sheri German
Fun and Freebies Celebrate Spock and Kirk's Sexual Tension Over at EchoSphere.net, you can download Star Trek wallpapers for your computer that are a bit off the beaten path. Each of them have a picture and a caption. Some of the captions have a lesson in them, like "DIPLOMACY: Words don't always solve problems. Sometimes you just have to punch an alien in the face." Old Time Radio Shows Are Back Well, they may not be back on the radio, but you can listen to complete versions of many of your old-time radio hour favorites at OTR.net. You can listen to Abbott and Costello, The Shadow, Burns and Allen, The Lone Ranger, Stan Freberg, Dragnet and plenty of others. Great stuff. Blanks on a Blank Snakes on a Plane may be coming to a theater near you on August 18th, but why wait, when right now you can see Camels on a Wheelchair, or Raccoons on a Space Shuttle? Head over to OriginalAlamo.com where they had a competition amongst amateur filmmakers to find out who could make the most entertaining "Blanks on a Blank" film. The filmmakers didn't even know what "blank" was on what "blank" until after they signed up. Some of these are pretty creative.
All About CSS Dropshadows - Part I Do you like drop shadows on your page elements, but haven't a clue how to get them on your pages? Maybe you do know a bit about creating drop shadows, but a refresher on the modern methods would be welcome? Do you want to learn the very latest cutting edge tricks? If you are any of these, don't go away because we now begin a series on drop shadows for HTML elements. At the start we'll keep it simple, and as we progress in the series the methods will become more advanced and effective. At the end you will be treated to a brand new method so advanced that it must wait for IE7 to arrive before you can use it properly. Join us, won't you? This free article by CMX Partners Holly Bergevin and John Gallant can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Three - Building the Footer and Slicing the Drawing Adrian Senior The Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility Series: From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part One - Building the Header From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Two - Building the Content Area From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Three - Buidling the Footer and Slicing the Drawing Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 2 Paul Davis Add an administration section to the PHP Poll article and learn how to make your poll management easy! The Create a Quick Poll in PHP Series: Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 1 Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 2 Tag Clouds with PHP and MySQL Gordon Mackay Tag clouds are all the rage these days when it comes to browsing content that's "tagged" with category keywords. They quickly provide users with a visual indication of which categories contain the most information. Blogs and social linking networks have been quick to utilize this navigation pattern, but whether tag clouds are just the latest craze or a genuinely useful way for users to navigate content is very much a disputed topic. In this tutorial we will be using some simple PHP and two simple tables from a MySQL database to illustrate a quick and easy method of outputting tag clouds. Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors Derrick Ypenburg Error handling is one of the biggest oversights in Flash development. There's nothing worse for a user to have something go wrong, or wait for something, and not have a clue what's going on and what to do. The Informing the End User Series: Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Playback Coming Soon Top Ten Mistakes in ColdFusion Tom Muck Many ColdFusion developers use common coding practices that are not optimal and don't follow "best practices". The following article shows 10 different mistakes and coding problems that you may find in your applications that can be easily corrected. Introduction to Design-Time Style Sheets Zoe Gillenwater Design-time Style Sheets (DTSS) is a feature that was introduced back in Dreamweaver MX (version 6) and continues to exist in Dreamweaver 8 today, as well as Contribute. A Design-time Style Sheet allows you to apply or hide certain styles within Dreamweaver, without applying these styles to your live page in the browser. That means that if Dreamweaver is displaying certain styles incorrectly, you can write a separate style sheet with styles to correct the problem and have this style sheet only affect the Design View in Dreamweaver. DTSS can also be used for a whole lot more than correcting style rendering problems in Design View, such as: Showing styles on includes Showing content that is hidden with CSS Highlighting content you need to take action on Showing styles from dynamic style sheets Displaying styles from external style sheets This tutorial will explain these uses in more detail, then show you how to create a DTSS and apply it to a page. Creating Reflections in Flash 8 [FREE] Tom Green Things in Flash aren't always as difficult to achieve when you look at them. Objects containing a reflection on the stage is a good example. Content Control with .htaccess [FREE] Rob Williams There are many different ways to approach access control on web sites; although the most common idea is to protect content based on user names and passwords, this is certainly not the only criteria that can be used. In this article we'll explore some of the other options that you can use to control who is allowed to access different types of content on your site. CMX JumpStarts: Greenville Heidi Bautista Our summertime JumpStart takes us to Greenville, North Carolina. Chances are that if you were born in the United States your state has a town named Greenville. And with a name like that, it's got to have great gardening opportunities, right? Our Greenville JumpStart features a beautiful tapestry of transparent backgrounds that afford the designer all sorts of artistic opportunities. Plus, Greenville, like all our JumpStarts, uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 markup and follows WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines. Taken altogether, Greenville provides you with a solid foundation for any design. Greenville is a two column, fixed width layout with header and footer. It features styled unordered lists for the navigation, a styled form, and styled skip links. Several style sheets are included: commented and uncommented style sheets for print and screen media and three Win IE - only sheets that take care of browser anomalies in WinIE5, WinIE5.5 and WinIE6. The JumpStart features Zoe Gillenwater's Teaser Thumbnail List to display the images and text in lefthand column. Last but not least, the JumpStart includes the PNG file used to create the layout. The download for this JumpStart is fairly large at 18MB, due in large part to an included tutorial that weighs in at 12.5MB. If you are purchasing CMX JumpStart Greenville and would like to download the package without that tutorial, or download it in smaller chunks, please send an email to info@communitymx.com and we will make arrangements for you to do so. If you are a CMX subscriber, you will find links at the end of the article, but prior to the list of supported browsers, to download the JumpStart various different ways. Introducing CMX Jumpstart Greenville [FREE] Sheri German The name Greenville evokes the radiant ambiance of gardens, nurseries, and landscapes. And that is just how Heidi Bautista paints it in our latest Community MX JumpStart: Greenville, NC. Let's take a closer look at this bloomingly lovely design to see what new treasure we've added to our JumpStart collection.
Automating An Image Gallery with PHP and Your Local Server: Part 1 Many developers have local testing servers running on their development machines to allow for quick offline tests of materials before they are sent to the live server. If you happen to be running a local server on your development machine though there's no reason that it's functionality should be limited to mere page testing. In this article we'll take a look at how you can utilize your local server as a scripting engine to increase your efficiency and perform common tasks more quickly then ever before. Check out the Article by CMX partner Rob Williams
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Bill Horvath How Fast Are You? This isn't really a software tip, trick or dirty cheat, but it's handy anyway. If you really want to know whether your ISP's promises of a kazillion bajillion megabytes per megasecond is a reality, head over to SpeedTest.net. It's similar to some of the high-end bandwidth testers, but the graphics are much niftier. Besides, it told me my speed was incredible, so who am I to go anywhere else for a speed test? Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

So Glad Director's Not Dead

David Stiller, one of our Flash/Director enthusiasts, received a link to this article at DigitalProducer.com which gives Director users a bit of hope for this program that has remained stagnant in recent years. David had this to say:
"All said and done, I like the article -- in spite of the annoying red popup undescores. It sounds like Spring 2007 is going to be a watershed in the new 'Adobe face era' of our favorite apps. While I appreciate where Tom Higgins is coming from, I thought his answer to the 'Director has suffered' question was pat and arguably not true. (His reply: "Director and Shockwave are the leading multimedia development tool and web-player ..."; this made me wince! Flash is, hands down, the leading web-player.) Still, I got my start with Director and am glad to hear it's in the ring for another round."

New Version of The MM-Exporter is Out

We don't have any affiliation with the folks who make the MM-Exporter, but it definitely deserves a plug. MM-Exporter is a free program - Windows only - that allows you to view your passwords and serial numbers, backup site definitions and save all of your configuration data. Did we mention it's free? We're not sure what the update was for, but it gave us an opportunity to mention a product we dig.

If You Let Them Build It, They Will Come

Finally beating out porn for the fastest-growing web brands this year are user-generated content websites. Included in that mix are websites like YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Flickr and Wikipedia. The web has been an outlet for people to get a message out to the world quickly ever since it began, but until recently, the general public had to rely on plain web pages to share their thoughts, pictures and movies with the world. With more and more relationships being forged on the internet, being able to share chunks of your life with your net friends in a simple fashion is a trend that will only get more sophisticated as time goes on. Not surprisingly, MySpace experienced the largest growth of any of the user-generated content sites with a 183% increase in growth. We'd give you a link, but CMX partner Tom Green got this information from today's On Line Marketing Minute from Media Post, which we mere mortals do not have access to apparently...

Zeldman On The State of The W3C

Jeffrey Zeldman had some choice words about the W3C and their recent abandonment issues. Check out his blog to get Jeffrey's take on what he believes the W3C should be doing for us as web developers, rather than what they are doing to the canvas of the internet. For a more "inside" look of the W3C, you can see Björn Höhrmann's open letter that explains why he recently left the W3C organization.

Would You Like a Website? Maybe a Flashy Sign Thingy?

There was a time when people would walk wearing "Eat At Joe's" billboards. If that really worked, you'd think we'd see more of that. Apparently no one told the people at Freedom Interactive Design, because their new campaign, which you can find at WouldYouLikeaWebsite.com, involves walking around the street carrying what appear to be animated, hi-tech signs. Although the signs were no doubt created on a computer after filming, the effects are executed very well. Tom Green says if you buy his next book, you too will be able to make videos like these...

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"I liked it a lot. I've taken a couple of Macromedia Flash courses and this tutorial helped to improve my confidence --especially in being able to analyse my mistakes and to finally get the banner ad to work properly "

CMX Subscriber Dairobi P., commenting on Kim Cavanaugh's article "Overcoming Your Fear of Flash, Part III "

Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!

Great Quotes:

"What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it." — Alexander Graham Bell

Don't Lose Those Photos

I have a buddy that loves taking digital photographs and he has an amazing Olympus digital camera with tons of different zoom lenses. He used to store all of his pictures on his hard drive, and categorized them just so. Unfortunately, he lost all of the pictures in a horrific hard drive crash. Don't let this happen to you. Check out TheGadgetsPage.com and find out how to hang on to those photos, even if your hard drive loses conciousness.

One of the Coolest Accessories For an iPod We've Seen

Memorex plans on releasing the iFlip this September. If you own a Video iPod, you can connect it to the iFlip and view your iPod media through the iFlip's eight inch screen. Not only that, but it comes with speakers, and an S-Video out in case you want to hook up your iPod to an even bigger screen. The iFlip runs for about five hours on one charge and will cost you about two hundred bucks. See it at Gizmodo.com.

Battery... Draining... Can't... Compute...

Why the sour puss? You say the battery on your laptop isn't strong enough to watch that whole two-hour Footloose video on your transatlantic flight? While this article at LiveDigitally.com can't guarantee that you'll be able to watch the opening AND ending credits to your movie, or keep you computing all night long without charging, it does have some great tips on extending your laptop's battery life.

If It's Rick Springfield Tablature, We're Behind Them.

It turns out that quite a few web developers, or people working in the technical field, play guitar. A lot of us go to the internet to download tablatures that help us to figure out some rhythm or lead guitar licks, but if the MPA (Music Publishers' Association) has their way, we'll be consigned to buying traditional "chord books", and that's if a chord book even exists for the song you're trying to learn. Check out the "greeting" at GuitarTabs.cc and you'll see that the MPA is serious about this. There's some definite thieving taking place on the internet, but... guitar tabs? Sheesh. Read the story at ArsTechnica.com.

Mini Cooper: Advertising Through Insults

The Mini Cooper has an interesting web-based promotion going on whereby you can give the website - aveaword.com - some particulars about a buddy of yours, and he'll get an email that takes him to a Flash site that is personalized just for him, complete with a guy who knows his hobbies and his wife's name. It's a neat idea, and all done in Flash. Glue London and Idiot Lamp came up with this great promo. This kind of stuff keeps the web innovative and fun. For some more fun, try building a Mini Cooper Transformer at MiniUSA.com. Just go to "Build Your Own" and choose "Robot."

CMX Snippets Collection - Part I

CSS Positioning layouts are hot, and many people are trying to make the transition from the mostly reliable, but non-semantic, table-based layouts we've all used for years. CSS 2.1 provides great features for laying out pages, and the specs for CSS 3 indicate that some day the future of design on the web will be ever brighter indeed. We here at CMX try to make the learning curve as painless as possible with our many CSS tutorials and articles. Now we'd like to offer you a diagnostic tool that spares you some typing and memorizing. We are proud to introduce the CMX CSS Snippets Collection. Snippets, as you may well be aware, are bits of reusable code that paste as blocks or around selections with the click of an insert button. This article includes an extension for installing part one of the collection into the Dreamweaver Snippets panel, and a tutorial that explains the problems and solutions that the hacks correct.

Check Out This Collection of Snippets from CMX Partner Sheri German

Fun and Freebies

Celebrate Spock and Kirk's Sexual Tension

Over at EchoSphere.net, you can download Star Trek wallpapers for your computer that are a bit off the beaten path. Each of them have a picture and a caption. Some of the captions have a lesson in them, like "DIPLOMACY:
Words don't always solve problems. Sometimes you just have to punch an alien in the face."

Old Time Radio Shows Are Back

Well, they may not be back on the radio, but you can listen to complete versions of many of your old-time radio hour favorites at OTR.net. You can listen to Abbott and Costello, The Shadow, Burns and Allen, The Lone Ranger, Stan Freberg, Dragnet and plenty of others. Great stuff.

Blanks on a Blank

Snakes on a Plane may be coming to a theater near you on August 18th, but why wait, when right now you can see Camels on a Wheelchair, or Raccoons on a Space Shuttle? Head over to OriginalAlamo.com where they had a competition amongst amateur filmmakers to find out who could make the most entertaining "Blanks on a Blank" film. The filmmakers didn't even know what "blank" was on what "blank" until after they signed up. Some of these are pretty creative.

All About CSS Dropshadows - Part I

Do you like drop shadows on your page elements, but haven't a clue how to get them on your pages? Maybe you do know a bit about creating drop shadows, but a refresher on the modern methods would be welcome? Do you want to learn the very latest cutting edge tricks? If you are any of these, don't go away because we now begin a series on drop shadows for HTML elements. At the start we'll keep it simple, and as we progress in the series the methods will become more advanced and effective. At the end you will be treated to a brand new method so advanced that it must wait for IE7 to arrive before you can use it properly. Join us, won't you?

This free article by CMX Partners Holly Bergevin and John Gallant can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Three - Building the Footer and Slicing the Drawing

Adrian Senior

The Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility Series:
From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part One - Building the Header
From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Two - Building the Content Area
From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Three - Buidling the Footer and Slicing the Drawing

Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 2

Paul Davis

Add an administration section to the PHP Poll article and learn how to make your poll management easy!

The Create a Quick Poll in PHP Series:
Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 1
Create a Quick Poll in PHP - Part 2

Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors

Derrick Ypenburg

Error handling is one of the biggest oversights in Flash development. There's nothing worse for a user to have something go wrong, or wait for something, and not have a clue what's going on and what to do.

The Informing the End User Series:
Informing the End User: Part 1 - Handling Errors
Informing the End User: Part 2 - Status Messaging and Error Handling for Video Playback Coming Soon

Top Ten Mistakes in ColdFusion

Tom Muck

Many ColdFusion developers use common coding practices that are not optimal and don't follow "best practices". The following article shows 10 different mistakes and coding problems that you may find in your applications that can be easily corrected.

Introduction to Design-Time Style Sheets

Zoe Gillenwater

Design-time Style Sheets (DTSS) is a feature that was introduced back in Dreamweaver MX (version 6) and continues to exist in Dreamweaver 8 today, as well as Contribute. A Design-time Style Sheet allows you to apply or hide certain styles within Dreamweaver, without applying these styles to your live page in the browser. That means that if Dreamweaver is displaying certain styles incorrectly, you can write a separate style sheet with styles to correct the problem and have this style sheet only affect the Design View in Dreamweaver.

DTSS can also be used for a whole lot more than correcting style rendering problems in Design View, such as:

Showing styles on includes
Showing content that is hidden with CSS
Highlighting content you need to take action on
Showing styles from dynamic style sheets
Displaying styles from external style sheets

This tutorial will explain these uses in more detail, then show you how to create a DTSS and apply it to a page.

Creating Reflections in Flash 8 [FREE]

Tom Green

Things in Flash aren't always as difficult to achieve when you look at them. Objects containing a reflection on the stage is a good example.

Content Control with .htaccess [FREE]

Rob Williams

There are many different ways to approach access control on web sites; although the most common idea is to protect content based on user names and passwords, this is certainly not the only criteria that can be used. In this article we'll explore some of the other options that you can use to control who is allowed to access different types of content on your site.

CMX JumpStarts: Greenville

Heidi Bautista

Our summertime JumpStart takes us to Greenville, North Carolina. Chances are that if you were born in the United States your state has a town named Greenville. And with a name like that, it's got to have great gardening opportunities, right? Our Greenville JumpStart features a beautiful tapestry of transparent backgrounds that afford the designer all sorts of artistic opportunities. Plus, Greenville, like all our JumpStarts, uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 markup and follows WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines. Taken altogether, Greenville provides you with a solid foundation for any design.

Greenville is a two column, fixed width layout with header and footer. It features styled unordered lists for the navigation, a styled form, and styled skip links. Several style sheets are included: commented and uncommented style sheets for print and screen media and three Win IE - only sheets that take care of browser anomalies in WinIE5, WinIE5.5 and WinIE6. The JumpStart features Zoe Gillenwater's Teaser Thumbnail List to display the images and text in lefthand column. Last but not least, the JumpStart includes the PNG file used to create the layout.

The download for this JumpStart is fairly large at 18MB, due in large part to an included tutorial that weighs in at 12.5MB. If you are purchasing CMX JumpStart Greenville and would like to download the package without that tutorial, or download it in smaller chunks, please send an email to info@communitymx.com and we will make arrangements for you to do so. If you are a CMX subscriber, you will find links at the end of the article, but prior to the list of supported browsers, to download the JumpStart various different ways.

Introducing CMX Jumpstart Greenville [FREE]

Sheri German

The name Greenville evokes the radiant ambiance of gardens, nurseries, and landscapes. And that is just how Heidi Bautista paints it in our latest Community MX JumpStart: Greenville, NC. Let's take a closer look at this bloomingly lovely design to see what new treasure we've added to our JumpStart collection.

Automating An Image Gallery with PHP and Your Local Server: Part 1

Many developers have local testing servers running on their development machines to allow for quick offline tests of materials before they are sent to the live server. If you happen to be running a local server on your development machine though there's no reason that it's functionality should be limited to mere page testing. In this article we'll take a look at how you can utilize your local server as a scripting engine to increase your efficiency and perform common tasks more quickly then ever before.

Check out the Article by CMX partner Rob Williams

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Bill Horvath

How Fast Are You?

This isn't really a software tip, trick or dirty cheat, but it's handy anyway. If you really want to know whether your ISP's promises of a kazillion bajillion megabytes per megasecond is a reality, head over to SpeedTest.net. It's similar to some of the high-end bandwidth testers, but the graphics are much niftier. Besides, it told me my speed was incredible, so who am I to go anywhere else for a speed test?

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!