Ya know, for a supposed “Web Geek”, I can be pretty slow on the uptake sometimes. I have heard about “RSS Feeds” for years , but the way it’s been described, it just sounded like something only Techno-ÜberNerds would be interested in.

“You need a news aggregator, application, ping this, dilithium crystal flux capacitor… blah, blah, blah…”
*Yawn*…

Anyway, for us English-speaking folks that doesn’t have every episode of Star Trek memorized…
Recently, I have learned there are a whole lot of uses for everyone with RSS Feeds. Mainly, it can save you a lot of time and only visit a site when there’s something new and interesting. It’s great, especially if you are a very busy person, and/or or have blogging friends scattered everywhere.

So here is how to bookmark “Live Content”. You can not only do it with *my* RSS feeds, but any other sites that offers feeds as well.

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STEP ONE: Go to the RSS Page…
Subscribe to EricBrooks.Com via RSS Feeds
Click on any one of the feeds that may interest you…

You have the option to put them on your Google Page (or Google Reader), or MyYahoo, but what we want is to bookmark it in our browsers… Firefox appears to be the most popular browser these days, according to recent stats, so I will mainly focus on that in here..

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STEP TWO: Subscribe with “Live Bookmarks” (Firefox)…

• With Chrome, add it to your Google Reader.
• With Safari, click on the “RSS” button in the address bar, and then click on “Actions:” > “Add Bookmark” on the lower right side, and view in your toolbar.
• With Internet Explorer, click on the RSS Icon in the right side of your toolbar and subscribe, and then view it in your “Feeds” tab in “Favorites”… but does anyone even use IE anymore???

Keep it on the default “Live Bookmarks” and press the “Subscribe Now” button…

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STEP THREE: Find the feed in your bookmarks… In your Firefox Bookmarks (And you can save it anywhere in your bookmarks, actually. It’s best to keep all your favorite reads in one spot.), you’ll find a special icon for feeds, and in that, a full list of items…

You can see by the icons what is fresh content or what you have visited already…

Like I said, you can not only do that with this site, but other sites you like that offer RSS Feeds. It’s the way the web is going now, with content and information flying shorter and faster.
Don’t forget to subscribe to my feeds, ok? 😉

There’s a great tutorial on Unlimit-3D.Com on how to make those glassy iTunes buttons that seem all the rage these days.

It’s quite innovative in that it uses the rulers, pen tool and bezier curves that no one seems to use in Photoshop.

Here’s my first-time attempt on the right ~~~~>
I should have made the left side more curvy… maybe next time as I learn how to master the pen tool.
Continue reading “Making iTunes (and other fancy) buttons”

Interesting Discovery:
I use photoshop for most of my graphics. Then I open up the .PSD files in Fireworks to make .gifs (they just look better to me.)

Since fireworks is vector-based (rather than rasterized), I converted the .psd file I rendered in poser into a .png (Portable network graphics).

Then I imported the .png file into flash for the front page of EricBrooks.Com

Now it expands & contracts with no loss in quality. I couldn’t do that if I had imported a .jpg. Plus the flash file is only 39kb. Using a .jpg that file size (800x600px) would have put it well over 100k.

It’s vector graphics from now on for me….
(Just a little something to keep you busy while I delete a bunch of files here…)

I just added permalinks to the comments.

There’s a bunch of tutorials out there, but I forgot to bookmark them, so, like an idiot, I had to do it from scratch.

Here’s what I did:
In your Comment Listing Template…

First you need to make an Anchor for each comment entry. Find where it says:

<$MTCommentBody$>

And change it to:
<a name=”<$MTCommentID pad=”1″$>”></a>

<$MTCommentBody$>

Next, make the permalink. For the sake of argument, I put it at the end of the comment, after the date (<$MTCommentDate$>). You can put it anywhere you want. The code for the permalink is:

<a href=”<$MTCGIPath$>mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>#<$MTCommentID pad=”1″$>”>Link</a>

For example, when Jennifer announced her new domain: Link

So there…

“how do you get the fade effects on your buttons?”

Even though I know kd knows this answer… *wink*…

How to make your buttons go…

It’s all CSS, my dear!
1. I made a selector called .”btn”
2. In my css:
.btn { background: #FFCC00 url(img/btn.gif); background-repeat: repeat; border-color: #FFCC00; color: #000000; font-weight: bold; font-size: 9pt; font-style: normal; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

3. btn.gif
is the gradient background in the buttons.

4. <input type=”submit” class=”btn”>

You can more or less use any image as a backround anywhere on your page with css….

Any questions?