
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Win a Full Year Subscription To Community MX! Create a site from any of our JumpStarts and submit its URL to JScontest@communitymx.com. Anyone can enter to win. Of course, non-members can use any JumpStart they like, but if you want to do it on the cheap, you can use either Santorini or our other free JumpStart, North Pole. You can enter with either a newly created or previously created JumpStart site. A panel of CMX partners will judge the entries by the following criteria: Adaptation of the JumpStart design Suitability of design to the site content Validity of all CSS/XHTML code Accessibility The winner will receive a one year subscription to CMX and have the design featured on the front page of Community MX. We will also display the design of a runner up on our front page. You can read a Santorini/contest article with the contest rules and deadlines, a rubric that clarifies the judging criteria, a Santorini modification, and valuable tips on adapting Santorini for your own designs. Head over to our CMX JumpStarts chart to see all of the great designs that are available to you. JumpStarts range in price from $19.99 to $45.00 and whether or not you win the contest, you'll have a winning JumpStart on your next website! Since announcing this last week, we've received quite a few entries, and we're looking forward to having even more to choose from. Join The Fireworks Beta It's not often you see an open invite to be a beta tester for an Adobe product, but right now you can sign up on Adobe's website to be part of the next Fireworks Beta. It's exciting enough just to know that Adobe is putting out a new version of Fireworks, but to be able test it and offer suggestions on making it better are icing on the cake. If you're an avid user of Fireworks, you might want to get in on this. One Is The Loneliest Number... But You Can Apparently Get $600 For It It's a pretty simple business plan. Step One: Paint the numbers 1 through 1000 on separate canvases. Step Two: Charge between $200 to $600 for each one. Step 3: Laugh all the way to the bank. It's an idea that should never have worked, but so far over 500 of them have been sold, putting an estimated $150,000 (so far) into the pockets of Zala, an artist from Zurich, Switzerland. At OneThousandPaintings.com, you can buy one of those numbers, and feel good about making Zala rich. If you want one, get it fast, because the more numbers Zala sells, the higher the price goes for unsold numbers. Just Like Clockwork We've mentioned in the last couple of newsletters that whoever decides to buy YouTube would end up facing legal woes over copyright infringement. Hopefully Google is getting its checkbook ready. Already, some major media companies, including Viacom, who owns several cable channels, such as MTV and Comedy Central, are looking into YouTube's culpability with regard to the copyrighted material displayed on their website. For their part, YouTube says that they are diligent about taking down any material that is disputed by its owner. Other media outlets, like NBC, CBS and Warner Music, have struck deals that allow YouTube to act as an outlet for some of their material. Check out the article at WSJ.com. The Beatles' "Taxman" Comes To Mind In games like Second Life or World of Warcraft, virtual economies are abundant. A lot of nonexistent property and money change hands each day, creating a whole online economy. In some of these games, real money is exchanged for objects within the game, making the virtual economy that much more real. This has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers, who are trying to find ways to tax the virtual goods within these games. These would be the same lawmakers who described the internet as a "Series of tubes", and called emails "internets." Oh boy... Paul Davis - our resident tax expert - said "Taxing 1's and 0's.... gotta love it." Read the whole story at Yahoo.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks for the much needed info about this useful file. As a newbie, it took me long hours of researching to ferret out this information on my own. I hope you continue expanding on the subject." - Edene Z., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Rob Williams' article, Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1. 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: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.." - Albert Einstein Windows Virus, Courtsesy of Apple The RavMonE virus has popped up on at least 25 video iPods recently. It appears that one of the computers within the manufacturing line at Apple was infected with the virus, and passed it along to each iPod it processed. All new iPods are virus free, and it is reported that the problem occured in less than 1% of all iPods shipped since September 12th of this year. The virus is not a real zinger, though it can cause Windows to be less secure, should it become infected. Most antivirus programs will eradicate it. Check out the rest of the story at CNN.com. And So It Begins... The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is out, and can be downloaded from PCWorld.com, among other places. We're just linking to PCWorld's download because that's where we read our first review for IE7. The review seems pretty fair, and praises IE7 for its tabbed browsing, enhanced security, RSS integration, page zooming and add-on functionality. Interestingly, the review compares IE7 to Firefox along the way, and in nearly every aspect, Firefox won out as the better browser, even taking IE7's new features into account. We've heard reports that IE7 causes problems with websites where particular hacks meant for IE6 and below have been applied. But if you're a developer, you'll probably want to see how IE7 is going to render your pages, since Microsoft will be pushing IE7 as a security update. When they do, you'll want to know your sites will still work properly. The Slow, Steady Decline Continues The latest news on AOL is that they're laying off 1,400 call center employees. That brings the total number of AOL layoffs to about 4,000 since August. This latest bit of news comes weeks after the announcement that AOL was going to do some major restructuring in order to remain afloat amidst poor profits and harsh criticism regarding its customer retention policies. AOL is also selling off its European arm of internet access units, and we suspect they'll start doing the same in the US within several months. More on this at News.com. Do You Have Technically Challenged Friends And/Or Family? Radio Shack is going to be offering free online courses directly related to technology, each taking several months to complete. The classes will deal with subjects like editing digital photos, setting up a high-definition television, buying computers and even getting into the ins and outs of satellite radio. You can read more about it Yahoo News, and if you're so inclined, send a link to your favorite non-techy to enroll at RadioShack.com. The Miss Manners of Email The Sunbelt Blog has a pretty good article on email etiquette. By the time you're done reading it, you'll know why it's best to answer an email with an email, rather than calling the person who emailed you. Sure, we thought that was common sense, but some people need to be told these things... Most of the article seems to center around the timeliness of sending and responding to emails, but you may know someone who needs to read this. Not you... we know you're a polite emailing citizen. But those other people? Sheesh...
CMX Link to PDF File Extension for Dreamweaver Linking directly to specific places within a HTML file is pretty commonplace with the help of named anchors, but not all content on the web is so amenable.Link To PDF was developed to provide a method for Dreamweaver users to provide hotlink capability inside a PDF document. What this means is that with CMX Link TO PDF, you can now specify how Adobe Acrobat Reader opens the PDF document in a browser session. Methods include targeting specific pages, control of bookmarks & thumbnail tabs, setting zoom and page positioning, and fit view to horizontal or visible available space. Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic
Fun and Freebies! Get Wild Ever wanted to see Africa? We're not offering you a plane ticket, but you can catch a glimpse of Nkorho Pan, a natural watering hole in South Africa. It's brought to you live from Africam, via Wavelit.com. So far, we've seen wilderbeasts, cheetahs, something that looked like a donkey, and a car... Ooooohhh... Scary! Halloween is coming up shortly, so it's time to scare the bejeebers out your loved ones. KidsDomain.com has a collection of scary stories for kids that might have your young ones staying up staring at the closet. Pumpkin Carving For The Rest of Us Let's face it. Most of us are busy. Do we have time to carve a pumpkin? Well, how 'bout if we can carve it online? Sounds a whole lot better now, doesn't it? Go to Madville.com and carve your virtual pumpkin.
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1 Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years. After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 1, we will deconstruct our endeavor into a handful of bite-sized methods and write one large method, CMXJigsawPuzzle.buildPuzzle(), to call those as necessary. The complete code is already included with this tutorial, but the full explanation will span into Part 2. This free article by CMX Partner David Stiller can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Converting the Santorini JumpStart to Use Two Columns Instead of Three [FREE] Heidi Bautista The Santorini JumpStart - 18th in our ongoing series - provides you with a simple 3-column fluid layout. But what if you wanted just two columns? No problem. This article shows you exactly what you need to change. And it's only three things! Isn't it nice when things are simple for a change? That's the whole idea behind our JumpStarts. If Santorini doesn't meet your needs, be sure to check out our other designs. Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 3 Derrick Ypenburg In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we created an animated drop-down menu that built and populated itself with buttons based on data provided by an array of objects. In Part 3, we are going to wrap things up by making the menu truly dynamic. As it stands now, the menu data comes from a hard-coded array of objects from the main timeline. Now we will finish things off by feeding the data dynamically into this array of objects from an external XML file. The Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu Series: Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 1 Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 2 Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 3 Jack-O-Lantern Fun with Illustrator Kim Dudley On a recent shopping trip it was hard to miss the aisles filled with treats, scary masks and spooky decorations. Halloween is quickly approaching and the preparations are under way. So let's get in on the fun with a little Halloween decorating of our own. In this tutorial we will dive into some of the deepest darkest corners of Illustrator to create one of the most popular Halloween symbols, Jack-0-Lanterns. We will use Illustrator's drawing tools, Pathfinder tool, Raster Effects and Graphic Style Libraries to create a somewhat friendly Jack-O-Lantern. Approximate download size: 1.4MB A Fireworks Quickie - Text Mask Effect # 2 Jim Babbage I was reading through Kim Dudley's recent Illustrator article and—like several times in the past—I thought it would be good to see how a similar effect is handled in Fireworks. In an ealier article of mine, we saw how to use text as a mask in Fireworks, but I'd like to take that basic concept and add the polished look of both Kim's and Knut Kubenz's tutorials. Together, we'll produce samples similar to the images below: Similar to Kim's image: Similar to Knut's image: Text masking works best with a large and/or bold font, so that you can see the image within the text. Figure one resembles one of Kim's results in her Illustrator article. Figure 2 is similar to Knut's. There are many permutations you can come up with during this process, so feel free to spread your own creative wings once you have the basics. Drawing Gears in Flash David Stiller When I was very young, I liked to tinker with gadgets. Anything was fair game, including old watches ... as long as the item in question was no longer needed! What impressed me the most about gears were their complexity and symmetry, rolled into a single sharply elegant wheel. I often tried to draw them on paper, but the endeavor was almost overwhelming — all those tiny teeth had to be distributed evenly! Ah, if only I had known then about Flash. In this tutorial, we'll examine how to use the Transform panel to make this task surprisingly easy. When you're done, you'll be able to use this technique to draw a great variety of gears. You may, in fact, use a similar approach to draw any image that relies on regular distribution around a circle, such as a flower. Favourite Extensions: Part 1 - Tom Muck's Sniplets [FREE] Adrian Senior We all have our favourite extensions and I'm no exception. Some people collect them and have extensions for everything whether they use them or not, and some folks have just a few. I fall into the latter category. In this ocassional series I thought I would catalogue some of the extensions that I use on a regular basis. Extensions that speed up my productivity are a particular favourite of mine and Tom Muck's Sniplets extension is one such tool that I use a great deal. It isn't a commercial extension, it is absolutely free, costs nothing but your time to download and install it. Faux Image Maps - Part Two John Gallant, Holly Bergevin Last time in Part One, we covered a basic way to use CSS to replace image maps. This time we get into some extra tricks that really enhance the hovering of the links and make them stand out in a way that no image map can. The Faux Image Maps Series: Faux Image Maps - Part One Faux Image Maps - Part Two Shine a Little Light on Me Knut Kubenz This is a great way to spotlight a portion of a portrait or some interesting feature of any image. Using Adjustment Layers, you can have instant control of the spotlight's size, shape, tone and position without damaging any pixels. From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Five - Building the Screen Media Type Layout Adrian Senior In Part Four of this series you completed the optimising and exporting of your images from Fireworks, together with creating a good solid site structure. In Part Five you will assess how your layout needs to be constructed for the screen media type by taking into consideration the content that will be required in each section. You will evaluate the areas where images need to be set to the background of your layout elements and we will discuss each rule as we build it so it becomes absolutely clear as to why we are implementing this rule or that and the reasons why we are implementing them. 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 From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Four - Site Structure and Image Preparation From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Five - Building the Screen Media Type Layout Implementing a Real-Time Chat Application Gordon Mackay When you look around the internet you will find a multitude of community-style sites that offer their visitors the opportunity communicate via a real-time chat application. Many of those applications are cumbersome and rely on terrible page refreshes every few seconds. The fact that chatting online is a very important part of building friendship and communication within a community web site makes it no surprise that a frequently asked question on web development forums is "How do I add live chat to my web site?". It's a common question with so many possible answers. In this tutorial I will introduce you to a free PHP chat application that works in modern browsers and degrades gracefully in the not so modern browsers that some people still persist in using. This application is special for a number of reasons. To find out just how special it is please read on.
PHP Formmail Spam Prevention It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script. In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Sheri German
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Chris Flick , CMX Partner/Cartoonist. Handy Halloween Tips If you hear a scary or mysterious voice from a new house you suspect is haunted... LEAVE! If you have had several teenage friends killed in brutally horrible ways, don't open the closet door where you hear mysterious voices or sounds coming from. If you're a teenager in a slasher movie and want to live... Adopt the abstinence philosophy of life. Sure, you'll be laughed at by all the "cool kids" in the film but in the end, they'll all be dead and you'll still be alive. 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!

Win a Full Year Subscription To Community MX!

Create a site from any of our JumpStarts and submit its URL to JScontest@communitymx.com. Anyone can enter to win. Of course, non-members can use any JumpStart they like, but if you want to do it on the cheap, you can use either Santorini or our other free JumpStart, North Pole. You can enter with either a newly created or previously created JumpStart site.

A panel of CMX partners will judge the entries by the following criteria:

Adaptation of the JumpStart design
Suitability of design to the site content
Validity of all CSS/XHTML code
Accessibility

The winner will receive a one year subscription to CMX and have the design featured on the front page of Community MX. We will also display the design of a runner up on our front page.

You can read a Santorini/contest article with the contest rules and deadlines, a rubric that clarifies the judging criteria, a Santorini modification, and valuable tips on adapting Santorini for your own designs.

Head over to our CMX JumpStarts chart to see all of the great designs that are available to you. JumpStarts range in price from $19.99 to $45.00 and whether or not you win the contest, you'll have a winning JumpStart on your next website! Since announcing this last week, we've received quite a few entries, and we're looking forward to having even more to choose from.

Join The Fireworks Beta

It's not often you see an open invite to be a beta tester for an Adobe product, but right now you can sign up on Adobe's website to be part of the next Fireworks Beta. It's exciting enough just to know that Adobe is putting out a new version of Fireworks, but to be able test it and offer suggestions on making it better are icing on the cake. If you're an avid user of Fireworks, you might want to get in on this.

One Is The Loneliest Number... But You Can Apparently Get $600 For It

It's a pretty simple business plan. Step One: Paint the numbers 1 through 1000 on separate canvases. Step Two: Charge between $200 to $600 for each one. Step 3: Laugh all the way to the bank. It's an idea that should never have worked, but so far over 500 of them have been sold, putting an estimated $150,000 (so far) into the pockets of Zala, an artist from Zurich, Switzerland. At OneThousandPaintings.com, you can buy one of those numbers, and feel good about making Zala rich. If you want one, get it fast, because the more numbers Zala sells, the higher the price goes for unsold numbers.

Just Like Clockwork

We've mentioned in the last couple of newsletters that whoever decides to buy YouTube would end up facing legal woes over copyright infringement. Hopefully Google is getting its checkbook ready. Already, some major media companies, including Viacom, who owns several cable channels, such as MTV and Comedy Central, are looking into YouTube's culpability with regard to the copyrighted material displayed on their website. For their part, YouTube says that they are diligent about taking down any material that is disputed by its owner. Other media outlets, like NBC, CBS and Warner Music, have struck deals that allow YouTube to act as an outlet for some of their material. Check out the article at WSJ.com.

The Beatles' "Taxman" Comes To Mind

In games like Second Life or World of Warcraft, virtual economies are abundant. A lot of nonexistent property and money change hands each day, creating a whole online economy. In some of these games, real money is exchanged for objects within the game, making the virtual economy that much more real. This has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers, who are trying to find ways to tax the virtual goods within these games. These would be the same lawmakers who described the internet as a "Series of tubes", and called emails "internets." Oh boy... Paul Davis - our resident tax expert - said "Taxing 1's and 0's.... gotta love it." Read the whole story at Yahoo.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks for the much needed info about this useful file. As a newbie, it took me long hours of researching to ferret out this information on my own. I hope you continue expanding on the subject."

- Edene Z., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Rob Williams' article, Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1.

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:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.." - Albert Einstein

Windows Virus, Courtsesy of Apple

The RavMonE virus has popped up on at least 25 video iPods recently. It appears that one of the computers within the manufacturing line at Apple was infected with the virus, and passed it along to each iPod it processed. All new iPods are virus free, and it is reported that the problem occured in less than 1% of all iPods shipped since September 12th of this year. The virus is not a real zinger, though it can cause Windows to be less secure, should it become infected. Most antivirus programs will eradicate it. Check out the rest of the story at CNN.com.

And So It Begins...

The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is out, and can be downloaded from PCWorld.com, among other places. We're just linking to PCWorld's download because that's where we read our first review for IE7. The review seems pretty fair, and praises IE7 for its tabbed browsing, enhanced security, RSS integration, page zooming and add-on functionality. Interestingly, the review compares IE7 to Firefox along the way, and in nearly every aspect, Firefox won out as the better browser, even taking IE7's new features into account. We've heard reports that IE7 causes problems with websites where particular hacks meant for IE6 and below have been applied. But if you're a developer, you'll probably want to see how IE7 is going to render your pages, since Microsoft will be pushing IE7 as a security update. When they do, you'll want to know your sites will still work properly.

The Slow, Steady Decline Continues

The latest news on AOL is that they're laying off 1,400 call center employees. That brings the total number of AOL layoffs to about 4,000 since August. This latest bit of news comes weeks after the announcement that AOL was going to do some major restructuring in order to remain afloat amidst poor profits and harsh criticism regarding its customer retention policies. AOL is also selling off its European arm of internet access units, and we suspect they'll start doing the same in the US within several months. More on this at News.com.

Do You Have Technically Challenged Friends And/Or Family?

Radio Shack is going to be offering free online courses directly related to technology, each taking several months to complete. The classes will deal with subjects like editing digital photos, setting up a high-definition television, buying computers and even getting into the ins and outs of satellite radio. You can read more about it Yahoo News, and if you're so inclined, send a link to your favorite non-techy to enroll at RadioShack.com.

The Miss Manners of Email

The Sunbelt Blog has a pretty good article on email etiquette. By the time you're done reading it, you'll know why it's best to answer an email with an email, rather than calling the person who emailed you. Sure, we thought that was common sense, but some people need to be told these things... Most of the article seems to center around the timeliness of sending and responding to emails, but you may know someone who needs to read this. Not you... we know you're a polite emailing citizen. But those other people? Sheesh...

CMX Link to PDF File Extension for Dreamweaver

Linking directly to specific places within a HTML file is pretty commonplace with the help of named anchors, but not all content on the web is so amenable.Link To PDF was developed to provide a method for Dreamweaver users to provide hotlink capability inside a PDF document. What this means is that with CMX Link TO PDF, you can now specify how Adobe Acrobat Reader opens the PDF document in a browser session. Methods include targeting specific pages, control of bookmarks & thumbnail tabs, setting zoom and page positioning, and fit view to horizontal or visible available space.

Take a look at this Extension by CMX Partner Danilo Celic

Fun and Freebies!

Get Wild

Ever wanted to see Africa? We're not offering you a plane ticket, but you can catch a glimpse of Nkorho Pan, a natural watering hole in South Africa. It's brought to you live from Africam, via Wavelit.com. So far, we've seen wilderbeasts, cheetahs, something that looked like a donkey, and a car...

Ooooohhh... Scary!

Halloween is coming up shortly, so it's time to scare the bejeebers out your loved ones. KidsDomain.com has a collection of scary stories for kids that might have your young ones staying up staring at the closet.

Pumpkin Carving For The Rest of Us

Let's face it. Most of us are busy. Do we have time to carve a pumpkin? Well, how 'bout if we can carve it online? Sounds a whole lot better now, doesn't it? Go to Madville.com and carve your virtual pumpkin.

Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1

Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years. After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 1, we will deconstruct our endeavor into a handful of bite-sized methods and write one large method, CMXJigsawPuzzle.buildPuzzle(), to call those as necessary. The complete code is already included with this tutorial, but the full explanation will span into Part 2.

This free article by CMX Partner David Stiller can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Converting the Santorini JumpStart to Use Two Columns Instead of Three [FREE]

Heidi Bautista

The Santorini JumpStart - 18th in our ongoing series - provides you with a simple 3-column fluid layout. But what if you wanted just two columns? No problem. This article shows you exactly what you need to change. And it's only three things! Isn't it nice when things are simple for a change? That's the whole idea behind our JumpStarts. If Santorini doesn't meet your needs, be sure to check out our other designs.

Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 3

Derrick Ypenburg

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we created an animated drop-down menu that built and populated itself with buttons based on data provided by an array of objects.

In Part 3, we are going to wrap things up by making the menu truly dynamic. As it stands now, the menu data comes from a hard-coded array of objects from the main timeline. Now we will finish things off by feeding the data dynamically into this array of objects from an external XML file.

The Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu Series:
Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 1
Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 2
Building an Animated Drop-Down Menu: Part 3

Jack-O-Lantern Fun with Illustrator

Kim Dudley

On a recent shopping trip it was hard to miss the aisles filled with treats, scary masks and spooky decorations. Halloween is quickly approaching and the preparations are under way. So let's get in on the fun with a little Halloween decorating of our own.

In this tutorial we will dive into some of the deepest darkest corners of Illustrator to create one of the most popular Halloween symbols, Jack-0-Lanterns. We will use Illustrator's drawing tools, Pathfinder tool, Raster Effects and Graphic Style Libraries to create a somewhat friendly Jack-O-Lantern.

Approximate download size: 1.4MB

A Fireworks Quickie - Text Mask Effect # 2

Jim Babbage

I was reading through Kim Dudley's recent Illustrator article and—like several times in the past—I thought it would be good to see how a similar effect is handled in Fireworks. In an ealier article of mine, we saw how to use text as a mask in Fireworks, but I'd like to take that basic concept and add the polished look of both Kim's and Knut Kubenz's tutorials.

Together, we'll produce samples similar to the images below:

Similar to Kim's image:

Similar to Knut's image:

Text masking works best with a large and/or bold font, so that you can see the image within the text. Figure one resembles one of Kim's results in her Illustrator article. Figure 2 is similar to Knut's. There are many permutations you can come up with during this process, so feel free to spread your own creative wings once you have the basics.

Drawing Gears in Flash

David Stiller

When I was very young, I liked to tinker with gadgets. Anything was fair game, including old watches ... as long as the item in question was no longer needed! What impressed me the most about gears were their complexity and symmetry, rolled into a single sharply elegant wheel. I often tried to draw them on paper, but the endeavor was almost overwhelming — all those tiny teeth had to be distributed evenly! Ah, if only I had known then about Flash.

In this tutorial, we'll examine how to use the Transform panel to make this task surprisingly easy. When you're done, you'll be able to use this technique to draw a great variety of gears. You may, in fact, use a similar approach to draw any image that relies on regular distribution around a circle, such as a flower.

Favourite Extensions: Part 1 - Tom Muck's Sniplets [FREE]

Adrian Senior

We all have our favourite extensions and I'm no exception. Some people collect them and have extensions for everything whether they use them or not, and some folks have just a few. I fall into the latter category.

In this ocassional series I thought I would catalogue some of the extensions that I use on a regular basis. Extensions that speed up my productivity are a particular favourite of mine and Tom Muck's Sniplets extension is one such tool that I use a great deal. It isn't a commercial extension, it is absolutely free, costs nothing but your time to download and install it.

Faux Image Maps - Part Two

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

Last time in Part One, we covered a basic way to use CSS to replace image maps. This time we get into some extra tricks that really enhance the hovering of the links and make them stand out in a way that no image map can.

The Faux Image Maps Series:
Faux Image Maps - Part One
Faux Image Maps - Part Two

Shine a Little Light on Me

Knut Kubenz

This is a great way to spotlight a portion of a portrait or some interesting feature of any image. Using Adjustment Layers, you can have instant control of the spotlight's size, shape, tone and position without damaging any pixels.

From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Five - Building the Screen Media Type Layout

Adrian Senior

In Part Four of this series you completed the optimising and exporting of your images from Fireworks, together with creating a good solid site structure.

In Part Five you will assess how your layout needs to be constructed for the screen media type by taking into consideration the content that will be required in each section. You will evaluate the areas where images need to be set to the background of your layout elements and we will discuss each rule as we build it so it becomes absolutely clear as to why we are implementing this rule or that and the reasons why we are implementing them.

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
From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Four - Site Structure and Image Preparation
From Concept to Cross-Media Compatibility: Part Five - Building the Screen Media Type Layout

Implementing a Real-Time Chat Application

Gordon Mackay

When you look around the internet you will find a multitude of community-style sites that offer their visitors the opportunity communicate via a real-time chat application. Many of those applications are cumbersome and rely on terrible page refreshes every few seconds.

The fact that chatting online is a very important part of building friendship and communication within a community web site makes it no surprise that a frequently asked question on web development forums is "How do I add live chat to my web site?". It's a common question with so many possible answers.

In this tutorial I will introduce you to a free PHP chat application that works in modern browsers and degrades gracefully in the not so modern browsers that some people still persist in using.

This application is special for a number of reasons. To find out just how special it is please read on.

PHP Formmail Spam Prevention

It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script. In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Sheri German

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Chris Flick , CMX Partner/Cartoonist.

Handy Halloween Tips

If you hear a scary or mysterious voice from a new house you suspect is haunted... LEAVE!

If you have had several teenage friends killed in brutally horrible ways, don't open the closet door where you hear mysterious voices or sounds coming from.

If you're a teenager in a slasher movie and want to live... Adopt the abstinence philosophy of life. Sure, you'll be laughed at by all the "cool kids" in the film but in the end, they'll all be dead and you'll still be alive.

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!