Webdevelopment & Graphic design Blog
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Blog Posts
As some of you might know I've recently made a tutorial search engine (www.tutorial-effect.net), in my previous post I explained that I wanted a light-weight site for Tutorial Effect. Now that its been online for a month I see how it works amazingly well for a tutorial search engine.
I basically used the same techniques for Celoxdesign with some different details here and there. I also know it's not the most original way of designing, but lately I've been more of a light-weight designer with designs only using a dozen kbs for the whole design, which reflects in the site's speed remarkably.
Below is a list of changes:
I've also been working on a pagination system for the tutorials, which should come to daylight soon enough. I'll also be improving the other pagination (news, tutorials categories etc.) once the tutorials pagination is done.
And as a final note I'd like to request one or maybe two more moderators for the forum, if your interested please contact me, thanks.
Hey all,
It's been quite a while since I've posted anything on the site, the reason for this was that I was working on a new site. This site is a tutorial search engine only! A tutorial search engine is a place where you can post your own tutorials with a little description and a link so you can generate more traffic to your own site.
There are many tutorial search engines out there already but I was always annoyed when I went to a tutorial search engine and had to load like 30 icons and a bunch of other graphics that were slowing down the site dramatically. So.. I made a very light-weight design that would load fast for everyone, there's only like 12kb on images of the design you have to load!
Visit my tutorial search engine and start submitting your tutorials!
As you may have noticed there's a search function now on Celoxdesign. It's weird cause I hate it when there's no search function on a site and had none for my own site.. bit hypocritical. You can search in all tutorial categories, which is a bit odd for the CSS and xHTML category, these categories only contain 1 tutorial, but you have to think ahead right?. In the beginning I'd also want a search function for the news but I think that wasn't necessary since most people come here for the tutorials and will most likely search for a tutorial.
Enjoy the search box! If you have any improvement suggestions leave them in the comments and I'll see what I can do.
Today the site has been down for a few hours. I mailed Godaddy about this and now waiting for there response, which is usually pretty quick. I'm not expecting a full description of the problem (READ: had another problem before on where they replied pretty vaguely, not explaining the problem in depth), if it was a problem that is. It could just as well be a maintenance downtime which I certainly hope so. This downtime was the first downtime in almost a year which is doable. Hope it didn't bug to many people though.
Also, I'd like to ask shout-box posters use not to many smilies in there messages, just 1 or 2 will do nicely, thanks all!
In this very short CSS tutorial I'll explain on how to hide images with CSS without altering the image code itself. I think you already know where you could use this for eh? Do whatever you want with this piece of code.
Been away a couple of weeks on the tutorial writing business but every now and then I got some time to write up a good free photoshop tutorial. Though 1 of the new tutorials is from the talented artist Daniel from whom I have permission to re-publish his tutorials. The tutorial of Daniel covers on how to paint a fantasy scene with a bridge fading into the horizon fog. The other 2 tutorials are written by me.
The first is very basic but I thought it would be useful to have it here on Celoxdesign too. This tutorial learns beginners on how to create transparent images using the PNG format. Very easy but VERY useful!
Last but not least is a very well explained tutorial on how to create a indent shadow orb.. the Celox way
. This orb has some very neat stuff, check it out!
Today I got working on the smiley support for the main page (shoutbox, news comments and news posts), it isn't difficult to do but having time to do it is a lot more tricky
. All the famous smiley tags are available like (note: they are separated by space to prevent smilies from parsing): : ), : D, : P, : lol:, Some people memorized these smiley shortcuts (like myself) so along the way when typing a message you can type the smiley shortcuts yourself. For the people that didn't memorized them you could just click a smiley and it will add the shortcut to the message field.
I've used the same smilies as on the forum, so if you see any smiley on the forum and would like to see it in the shout-box and news comments give me a shout in the comments under this news post.
Normally I always save my photoshop designs in the highest quality available in the Save for web function, but I was wondering if I could cut down the load-time without losing quality on the layout. I think I nailed it, I used the JPEG HIGH quality setting where I normally would use the MAXIMUM quality. The images look the same, I gave them a very close look on the different setting and I literally cannot see any difference between the 2 settings.
So how's the load-time you might think. Well just for fun I'll show you the size of all the images of this layout alone before and after.
Maximum quality: 133kb
High quality: 56kb
As you can see this is almost 3 times less! Which will make the page load-time a lot faster obviously.
New design and other improvements
Posted in Blog by Celox on 17-05-2007 | Nobody commented
As some of you might know I've recently made a tutorial search engine (www.tutorial-effect.net), in my previous post I explained that I wanted a light-weight site for Tutorial Effect. Now that its been online for a month I see how it works amazingly well for a tutorial search engine.
I basically used the same techniques for Celoxdesign with some different details here and there. I also know it's not the most original way of designing, but lately I've been more of a light-weight designer with designs only using a dozen kbs for the whole design, which reflects in the site's speed remarkably.
Below is a list of changes:
- Light-weight design
- Made some switches in the side menus so its more organized
- Site-wide valid CSS and xHTML coding (which you can validate in the footer, if you find invalid code please notify me)
- Javascript Show/Hide for the Shoutbox submission form, much neater look for the overall look of the site.
- Javascript Show/Hide for the Free downloads
- Improved Shoutbox forms, with a text-area for the message instead of a normal input field. More user-friendly
I've also been working on a pagination system for the tutorials, which should come to daylight soon enough. I'll also be improving the other pagination (news, tutorials categories etc.) once the tutorials pagination is done.
And as a final note I'd like to request one or maybe two more moderators for the forum, if your interested please contact me, thanks.
New tutorial search engine
Posted in Blog by Celox on 06-04-2007 | Nobody commented
Hey all,
It's been quite a while since I've posted anything on the site, the reason for this was that I was working on a new site. This site is a tutorial search engine only! A tutorial search engine is a place where you can post your own tutorials with a little description and a link so you can generate more traffic to your own site.
There are many tutorial search engines out there already but I was always annoyed when I went to a tutorial search engine and had to load like 30 icons and a bunch of other graphics that were slowing down the site dramatically. So.. I made a very light-weight design that would load fast for everyone, there's only like 12kb on images of the design you have to load!
Visit my tutorial search engine and start submitting your tutorials!
Tutorial search function
Posted in Blog by Celox on 13-03-2007 | Nobody commented
As you may have noticed there's a search function now on Celoxdesign. It's weird cause I hate it when there's no search function on a site and had none for my own site.. bit hypocritical
. You can search in all tutorial categories, which is a bit odd for the CSS and xHTML category, these categories only contain 1 tutorial, but you have to think ahead right?. In the beginning I'd also want a search function for the news but I think that wasn't necessary since most people come here for the tutorials and will most likely search for a tutorial.Enjoy the search box! If you have any improvement suggestions leave them in the comments and I'll see what I can do.
Site downtime
Posted in Blog by Celox on 11-03-2007 | Nobody commented
Today the site has been down for a few hours. I mailed Godaddy about this and now waiting for there response, which is usually pretty quick. I'm not expecting a full description of the problem (READ: had another problem before on where they replied pretty vaguely, not explaining the problem in depth), if it was a problem that is. It could just as well be a maintenance downtime which I certainly hope so. This downtime was the first downtime in almost a year which is doable. Hope it didn't bug to many people though.
Also, I'd like to ask shout-box posters use not to many smilies in there messages, just 1 or 2 will do nicely, thanks all!
Hiding images with CSS
Posted in Blog by Celox on 09-03-2007 | Nobody commented
In this very short CSS tutorial I'll explain on how to hide images with CSS without altering the image code itself. I think you already know where you could use this for eh?
Do whatever you want with this piece of code.
Free photoshop tutorials update
Posted in Blog by Celox on 09-03-2007 | Nobody commented
Been away a couple of weeks on the tutorial writing business but every now and then I got some time to write up a good free photoshop tutorial. Though 1 of the new tutorials is from the talented artist Daniel from whom I have permission to re-publish his tutorials. The tutorial of Daniel covers on how to paint a fantasy scene with a bridge fading into the horizon fog. The other 2 tutorials are written by me.
The first is very basic but I thought it would be useful to have it here on Celoxdesign too. This tutorial learns beginners on how to create transparent images using the PNG format. Very easy but VERY useful!
Last but not least is a very well explained tutorial on how to create a indent shadow orb.. the Celox way
. This orb has some very neat stuff, check it out!
Smiley support main page
Posted in Blog by Celox on 28-02-2007 | 1 person commented
Today I got working on the smiley support for the main page (shoutbox, news comments and news posts), it isn't difficult to do but having time to do it is a lot more tricky
. All the famous smiley tags are available like (note: they are separated by space to prevent smilies from parsing): : ), : D, : P, : lol:, Some people memorized these smiley shortcuts (like myself) so along the way when typing a message you can type the smiley shortcuts yourself. For the people that didn't memorized them you could just click a smiley and it will add the shortcut to the message field.I've used the same smilies as on the forum, so if you see any smiley on the forum and would like to see it in the shout-box and news comments give me a shout in the comments under this news post.
JPEG image quality, faster load-time
Posted in Blog by Celox on 27-02-2007 | 4 people commented
Normally I always save my photoshop designs in the highest quality available in the Save for web function, but I was wondering if I could cut down the load-time without losing quality on the layout. I think I nailed it, I used the JPEG HIGH quality setting where I normally would use the MAXIMUM quality. The images look the same, I gave them a very close look on the different setting and I literally cannot see any difference between the 2 settings.
So how's the load-time you might think
. Well just for fun I'll show you the size of all the images of this layout alone before and after.Maximum quality: 133kb
High quality: 56kb
As you can see this is almost 3 times less! Which will make the page load-time a lot faster obviously.
