CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

Back when video games were still fun (we’re talking about the 8-bit glory days here), graphics were a much simpler matter by necessity. Bitmapped 2-dimensional character data and background scenery was individually drawn, much like today’s resurgent pixel art. Hundreds and later thousands of small graphics called sprites were the building blocks for all things visual in a game. Article Continues Below As game complexity increased, techniques developed to manage the multitude of sprites while keeping game play flowing. One variation saw sprites being plugged into a master grid, then later pulled out as needed by code that mapped positions of each individual graphic, and selectively painted them on the screen. And what does this have to do with the web? Everything old is new again, and though the rise of 3D games has made sprite maps obsolete, the concurrent rise of mobile devices with 2D gaming capabilities have brought them back into vogue. How do CSS Sprites work? On to the HTML.

40 Arresting Adobe Fireworks Tutorials Adobe Fireworks is a bitmap and vector graphics editor, aimed at web designers with features such as slices, ability to add hotspots etc, useful for creating and optimizing web graphics and create web pages with good finish. If you are interested to learn, here we bring you 40 best tutorials on Adobe Fireworks for any level, whether you beginner or advanced this list would be handy for you to learn something new here… How to convert your image to line art with Fireworks In this tutorial you are going to learn how to apply find edges effect to an image using Fireworks. Game Center Layout Style in Fireworks This tutorial was inspired on the new Apple Game Center design. Designing An Effective Gaming Clan Logo in Adobe Fireworks In this Adobe Fireworks tutorial , you will learn how to create your own gaming logo for your website using Adobe Fireworks. Text Glow effect A small tutorial to create a simple text-glow effect.. Fireworks effect to write text along a path 3d Text Fireworks Tutorial

Raízes do Brasil Capoeira in Brooklyn | Capoeira in Gowanus, Brooklyn Using the memcached telnet interface This is a short summary of everything important that helps to inspect a running memcached instance. You need to know that memcached requires you to connect to it via telnet. The following post describes the usage of this interface. How To Connect Use "ps -ef" to find out which IP and port was passed when memcached was started and use the same with telnet to connect to memcache. telnet 10.0.0.2 11211 Supported Commands The supported commands (the official ones and some unofficial) are documented in the doc/protocol.txt document. Sadly the syntax description isn't really clear and a simple help command listing the existing commands would be much better. Traffic Statistics You can query the current traffic statistics using the command stats You will get a listing which serves the number of connections, bytes in/out and much more. Example Output: Memory Statistics You can query the current memory statistics using stats slabs Which Keys Are Used? stats items command to determine how many keys do exist.

CSS Menus - Vertical CSS Menu with Popout and Dropdown Menus This semantically correct Vertical CSS Popout Menu has been finalized as of 2005-02-28. See links below for supporting files. View source to see the HTML/XHTML and CSS that controls this vertical popout menu. Note from Claire at Tanfa: This CSS vertical popout menu uses the "whatever:hover" behavior file. It is available for download from the "whatever:hover page on Perterned's site. It simply needs uploading to your website (I put it in the same directory as my CSS file /css/csshover.htc) and off you go. There is a newer version of this file (V1.30.050121 - released 2005-01-21), since these menus were first written, which means you no longer have to use the specific selector workaround for them to work in IE5.x (see CSS comments). The hover targeting CSS itself has to be very specific for IE to understand it properly, again this is because we can't use child selectors. Vertical CSS Menu Horizontal CSS Menu

A Beginner’s Guide to Web Development The web development field offers a variety of languages from front-end development, like HTML, CSS and Javascript, to back-end programming, like PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. So how do you start learning how to code? In this post, I want to offer a variety of great tips on beginning your journey to learning web code. At the end of the post, I want to share a simple site structure with you to get started in HTML and CSS. I’ll focus on HTML and CSS in this article. Learning Code from Web Development Books I don’t advise trying to learn coding from web development books. These neither help you memorize proper code, nor do they help you critically think out your first site on your own. That being said, books are still a great way to get the very basics down and provide a great point of reference throughout your learning process. presents a basic history of the web and how websites are made and interact.focuses more on web theory and less on shuffling you from exercise to exercise. Mix It Up

Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia Get To Know Linux: The /etc/init.d Directory If you use Linux you most likely have heard of the init.d directory. But what exactly does this directory do? It ultimately does one thing but it does that one thing for your entire system, so init.d is very important. If you look at the /etc directory you will find directories that are in the form rc#.d (Where # is a number reflects a specific initialization level - from 0 to 6). Now if you are using a distribution like Fedora you might find this directory in /etc/rc.d/init.d. In order to control any of the scripts in init.d manually you have to have root (or sudo) access. /etc/init.d/command OPTION Where command is the actual command to run and OPTION can be one of the following: startstopreloadrestartforce-reload Most often you will use either start, stop, or restart. /etc/init.d/networking stop Or if you make a change to your network and need to restart it, you could do so with the following command: /etc/init.d/networking restart networkingsambaapache2ftpdsshddovecotmysql Final Thoughts

Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style: A List Apart Anyone who has created drop-down menus will be familiar with the large quantities of scripting such menus typically require. But, using structured HTML and simple CSS, it is possible to create visually appealing drop-downs that are easy to edit and update, and that work across a multitude of browsers, including Internet Explorer. Better still, for code-wary designers, no JavaScript is required! (Actually, a tiny bit of JavaScript is needed, but it’s not what you think.) Here’s a sneak preview of the menu in action. Creating the menu#section1 The first and most important part of creating our menu is the menu structure itself. That’s it: some simple HTML that is both accessible and easy to edit. Visually appealing? If you have previewed the menu above, you’ll see a pretty boring list of items. The first step is to remove the indents and bullets from the unordered list and define the width of our menu items. Next, we need to position our list items. Next step is the sub-menus. Now the fun bit.

How To Code A Simple Website From Scratch Part 1: Preparing the Design I thought it would be helpful to some of our beginning XHTML/CSS coders (and some seasoned ones who need to brush up) to show how I code a website from beginning to end. We’ll do this in a 3 part series; Part 1: Preparing the Design, Part 2: The HTML and Part 3: The CSS. I’ll show you a quick way to code every one of your websites, including validation and slicing of the design itself. Start With The Design We’ll use a simple, basic web layout for our coding purposes: As you can see (you can click it to enlarge to full size) this is a typical 2 column web layout with a basic header, logo, navigation and footer. Figure Out Your Containers Before we can start slicing, we need to figure out the containers (and sizes) for the website. HeaderNavigationLeft ColumnRight ColumnFooter The main divisions of the site will typically look like: Time for Slicing & Sizing First you need to find out the entire container size of our design. All “How To Code A Simple Website From Scratch” steps:

More Things Japanese | Culture, Food, Pictures, and More Logo design tutorial When a company starts, the image is often one of the things that can impulse the acknowledgment of the business existence around their area of influence. A company’s image primary consists of the logo, the stationery, presentation cards, mail templates and even digital signatures. Once the company starts to gain reconnaissance, other elements are developed, such as the website, social networks and others. On this tutorial we will be focusing our attention on one of the main elements of any company’s image, the logo. Using Adobe Photoshop we are going to show you how to design a logo that works both in communication and aesthetic levels. 1. It’s not the same to plan a logo idea for a fast food company than a heavy machinery factory, you need to determine your company’s identity in order to create an image that plays along with the whole idea of your business. 2. 3. See that the layer is locked. And now it’s not locked. Now we have a subtle background that looks better than the default. 4.