I haven’t really gotten myself into online photo editing and effects software because they usually fall behind photoshop, but I tried one which is worthy of not just trying out, but of actual use. The effects are fun, and can be used to create wallpaper, images for your girlfriend/spouse, but can be of real use when designing a logo, either to use as is, or to get some ideas.

Head on over to BeFunky to try out the great effects they have! From Cartoonizing to the Warholizer you have 9 effects, and some sub-effects in each. They can all be fine tuned in a lot of ways to give you the perfect result. getting photos is alse really easy, you can upload from your hard drive, get from a URL, get one from your webcam, or even from a photo sharing site.

There is also some gentle comedy throughout the site, from the design itself to some effect descriptions “Patriotic: Ask not what your photo can do for you, but what you can do for your photo”. The light-heartedness, the features and the quality of the effects themselves makes this site a worthwhile visit which takes its rightfull place in my bookmark list. Take a look at me at the Atomium in Belgium below, awesome effect!

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Tags: effects, photo effects, photography, photos
Categories: Online Services

If you want to create a simple webpage for yourself, listing who you are, how you can be contected and what you do, you might want to add a few languages in there. You could use Google Translate, but that does not yield the best (and professional) results, so it would be best to translate the page yourself, or have someone do it for you.

Now, you could have different pages like “about_english.php” and “about_spanish.php”, but this would make updating a pain, and very inflexible, plus if you have 20 languages, it means 20 files per page. So how do we get around this? Let me introduce you guys, to PHP constants.

A constant is defined just like a variable, but as its name suggests, it is in fact constant. It can be echoed just like a variable, and is great for defining set pieces of text. Let me show you my method of using constants to easily keep multiple language versions of a webpage, without having to have multiple files for each page.

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Tags: languages, php, php constants, translation
Categories: Web Development

Yesterday marked a new release of Google Chrome, the new version is yet again in beta (Google like its beta stuff). They are implementing some new features, we’ve even gotten to a point where there’s a pretty neat one not available in other browsers by default. In their own words:

The first thing you might notice about this new beta is the speed improvement, but you’ll also find additional browsing tools, such as basic form autofill, full page zoom, support for autoscroll, and a new way to drag tabs into side-by-side view.

That side-by-side view looks pretty good, although I don’t think it will be of any serious use unless you have a big monitor. I usually work on a 1650×1200 monitor, and I still find websites side-by-side distracting. That being said, this feature can be put to good use when researching. You can have same functionality in Firefox using Tab Splitter

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Tags: beta, Chrome, Google
Categories: Google Chrome

Last week was a bit less active in web development terms, but here’s a roundup of what you can find on Scriptastique if you haven’t been taking a look recently.

We had a look at how a mysql query basically works, which will come in handy if you’re just learning about MySQL and PHP. The article focuses more on the technical side than how to create specific queries, but we’ll get there in the end too! Just after that we created some simple but effective excerpts from longer text automatically removing unwanted characters and spaces.

We also had a look at website mascots, why you should use them, how to use arithmetic operators in PHP and just today, why a coder should always be well slept (easier said than done). If you feel like taking a stroll down web development avanue visit the site, or follow us on Twitter or our RSS feed!
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Tags: mysql, php, web development
Categories: Web Development

Following up on last week’s much commented article about how you guys use your Firefox, I decided to also take a look at how you use your media player applications. This is perhaps a bit more complex than last week’s question, since we are covering multiple applications. Nevertheless, which media player do you use, and how?

I have been using a lot of different ones over the years, but I never really came to like any of them because I either missed features, found them too complicated to use, and I never ever managed to maintain a we ll organized collection, especially with ratings.

I have used Foobar, Media Monkey Winamp, iTunes, and just as in last weeks post, I returned to the most simple one, Windows Media Player 11.Yes, Foobar is simpler, but it is a pain to get to look nice and WMP 11 is built in from the start. I actually like Media Player 11 a lot, I thnk it looks great and handles great, although there could be better features, and frankly, it’s video capabilities are really bad, but I like it for music. So, how do you use your media player?

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Tags: media, media-player, music
Categories: ask the readers, software

This might be very obvious to some, but about 70% of the clients I work with do not know the difference and spend money on something they could be getting for free! If you have a blog or would like a blog it is essential that you know the difference between Wordpress, wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The difference is not communicated at all, especially on wordpress.com and I really hate them for this.

First of all, let’s have a look at what Wordpress is. Wordpress is and open source project and in the creator’s words from the about page: “it also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat�s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee”. This means Wordpress is completely, totally and utterly free. You can show ads, you can modify the code, you can sell it, share it, whatever you want.

Wordpress.org is the website for this open source project. It’s actually a really great place to learn about Wordpress and its usage, even if you are an advanced programmer it can give you a lot of help! You can also download the latest versions for yourself.

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Tags: Open Source, wordpress, wordpress.com
Categories: Advice, Open Source

If you are building a large website, chances are you have a great little CSS stylesheet linked to every document which governs all the pages. But what do you do if you want just one of the pages to be completely different? You could of course go into your code and ad separate id-s and classes for specific elements, but I use a bit of an easier approach.

The basis of this is to use php code to determine the directory of the page you are viewing and also the page’s name itself. I will show you the code in a second, but let’s say you have a social network site underway and you keep you messaging system (outbox, inbox, new message, etc.) in a folder named “messaging”. In this case you can grab the name of the directory and the page and assign these as an id and a class to the body tag automatically, so it would look like this for the inbox: <body class=”messaging” id=”inbox”>.

This will make it very easy to add new rules in your stylesheet, since you can refer to whole documents in a directory using “body.messaging” and you can refer to specific pages using “body#inbox”. You can now use the same CSS file to change the look of only one page without the need to go in and add new classes and ids all the time. So how about the code to grab the directory and the page? Let’s take a look!

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Tags: css, php, superglobal, web development
Categories: Web Development