I’m always looking for new tricks to add to my magical bag-o-css, but as far as I know, there are about 3 good methods to making shadowlike page backgrounds. I’m not going to go in depth on this since I know these have probably been explained in depth over at ALA or somewhere else, so here’s the short, short version:

Method One:

You can define a vertically tiling, horizontally centered background image that has the content area and its casted shadow worked in.

Examples:

• Jasongraphix.com - This seems to be the only part of my site that everybody wants to gank.
• CameronMoll.com - Another classic example.
• MikeIndustries.com - Mike’s vertically tiled background includes the content area, the sidebar, and the gradient that fades to a solid color since he isn’t dealing with a textured background.

Pros: There are a ton. The main one being the ability to add other site background elements to it that you want to continue down the page…like a sidebar.

Cons: Background textures (if you have them) are dependent on that repeating image if you have a drop shadow being cast on them. It’s also difficult to have a bottom on the page for this reason.

Method Two:

If you have a body background that you want to tile vertically and horizontally, and still want that nice drop shadow from your content “layer”, things get a bit more tricky. You can either use a jpeg that has a little bit of the background texture in it being sure to get it to line up by centering the tiled background image, or use what I call the checkered gif. This is just a gif image that is checkered with opaque and transparent squares to make appear translucent.

Examples:

• Spoono.com - This is the first place I saw this technique. Notice the left-side drop shadow.
• EchoDeep.com - I designed the dark border around the content area on this site using that checkered gif technique.
• This silly little “sandbox” experiment - I did this a about a year ago when I was tinkering with background concepts…but it has a checkered gif that also fades out to match the background. (May not be compliant with…well…any browser as it was just an experiment.)

Pros: You get a shadow in IE…

Cons: It’s a very limited technique and using Checkered gifs is really just a hack for not having png translucency support in IE yet. ARGH!

Method Three:

Make ACTUAL SHADOWS using alpha-transparent PNGs for the browsers that support it. What a novel thought. If only Microsoft would get on with releasing IE7 so I can relabel this entire post “obsolete”.

Examples:

• Maratz.com - Check it out in Firefox, then go back and see it in IE6.

Pros: It’s the right tool for the job and it’ll revolutionize web design once it’s fully supported.

Cons: It doesn’t work in IE6 for Windows…although the developers of IE7 say it’s already implemented…as well as tabbed browsing.

Right now, Ames and I are living in an apartment where basic BellSouth phone service is included in the rent. In June though, I’ll be starting a remote job, which is sure to include quite a bit of long distance calling. Then, at the end of July, Ames and I will be packing up and moving to South Carolina. I could take all incoming calls on our landline and place all long-distance from my cell phone, but I don’t have enough minutes in my cell plan for that. As a result, I’m thinking it might be a good time to jump on the broadband phone bandwagon. This would allow me to go ahead and get my Carolina phone number now to give out to friends before the move. It would also allow me to have phone service as soon as the internet is hooked up at the new place…which we all know is priority number one for moving.

I know a couple people who have switched over to IP phone service, one uses Vonage, and the other has BroadVoice. Both are happy with their service, but the problem is that there are a whole lot more reputable IP telephony companies out there. They all seem to be around the same price, include a boatload of features, and promise the moon. Here are the biggest contenders:

• BroadVoice - $19.95 and my friend gives them a thumbs up for value and for being a “neat little company”.
• Vonage - $24.99 makes them a pricey option…and to me, they seem like the AOL of VoIP right now. That just doesn’t appeal to me so much.
• AT&T CallVantage - $29.99!?! OK, now that I’m over the price, I’ve seen a lot of positive comments about their customer service and QOS.
• Packet8 - $19.95 sounds about right, and although they seem to have mixed reviews, I’ve read a lot of positive news about them.
• SunRocket - $199…yea, right. Like I’m going to prepay for a year of VoIP service? That’s only about $17/mo, and in my book, they stack up to the $19.95 companies, but I don’t think I’ll pay them by the month at $24.95.
• Lingo - $19.95, but check out the negative reviews. I think that a lot of the content at voipreview.org is grassroots marketing (AKA - mostly BS), but it seems that most of the Lingo reviews are authentic. I’ve seen good reviews elsewhere though, so they stay on the list - perhaps because I like repeating their name: Lingo, leeengo, Lin Gho!

Ok, I think it’s time for bed, but if you have any experience with these or other residential VoIP providers, please let me know:

1. How long you’ve been with them?
2. How long have you been doing the VoIP thing overall?
3. What is the best and worst thing about the companies service?
4. If regular phone service ranks 98% for clarity and cellphone service ranks 72%, How clear is your VoIP serivce?
5. Are you strangely delighted by saying the word “Lingo”?

I was thinking about the musical baton meme, how it spread, and just how quickly it spread. If this were a virus, it would have been a very efficient one as it made its way through the entire web-development community (at least from my perspective) in less than 2 days. That says a lot about how adept we’ve become at propogating news and information via blogs and RSS. I’m sure Birdman could probably come up with a much better way to present this as he’s been raving about a book he’s been reading entitled “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, but I wanted to make a quick list-style display of this viral epidemic.

For my list, I started with Richard Rutter, the first person in the chain of blogs that I read that picked up a baton and started chucking them out. Each of the 5 people he infected passed on the baton to 5 other people as well. For the sake of brevity, I followed one branch a couple branches of this tree (Jon Hicks). I continued to expand one branch from each of Jon’s contacts, then expanded one branch from Jason’s contacts and so on and so forth.

• Richard Rutter (clagnut.com)
  • Jon Hicks (hicksdesign.co.uk)
    • Neil Lee (beatnikpad.com)
    • Wifey (mysleepyhead.co.uk)
    • John Oxton (joshuaink.com)
      • Andy Clarke (stuffandnonsense.co.uk)
      • Kevin Leitch (kevinleitch.co.uk)
        • Adam Howell (benjaminadam.com)
        • Matthew Pennell (thewatchmakerproject.com)
          • Chuck Mallott (telerana.f2o.org)
          • Rob Mientjes (zooibaai.nl)
            • Jina Bolton (jinabolton.com)
            • Jonathan Leighton (turnipspatch.com)
            • Indranil (troidus.com)
            • Mathias Bynens (mathibus.com)
            • Anatoly (fecklessmind.com)
              • Jan (filosof.biz)
              • Adam Michela (axentric.com)
              • Marko Dugonjic (maratz.com)
                • Cody Lindley (codylindley.com)
                • Bojan Janjanin (yesterdayishere.com)
                  • Alen Grakalic (pixelpusher.biz)
                  • Jason Beaird (jasongraphix.com)
                  • Steve Smith (www.orderedlist.com)
                  • Clint Fisher (clintfisherart.com)
                  • Ilija Studen (area51.cryostudio.net)
                • Mike Rundle (phark.typepad.com)
                • Mark Wubben (novemberborn.net)
                • Matija Turcin (e-knjige.net)
              • Michael Heilemann (binarybonsai.com)
              • Jan Brasna (janbrasna.com)
          • Dan Oliver (justdan.co.uk)
          • Michael Green (triplux.com)
          • Kate Bolin (katemonkey.co.uk)
        • Pierce Gleeson (distorte.com)
        • Cody Lindley (codylindley.com)
        • Andy Hume (thedredge.org)
      • Phil Roche (redbrick.dcu.ie)
      • Erik Sagen (kartooner.com)
      • Derek Featherstone (boxofchocolates.ca)
    • Dan Cederholm (simplebits.com)
    • Jason Santa Maria (jasonsantamaria.com)
    • Rob Weychert (robweychert.com)
      • Glenda the Good Witch (glendathegood.com)
      • Ian Corey (jesandian.com)
      • Mike Davidson (mikeindustries.com)
        • Andrei Herasimchuk (designbyfire.com)
        • Jeff Croft (jeffcroft.com)
          • Wilson Miner (wilsonminer.com)
          • Maryrenee Smith (maryrenee.com)
          • Adam Polselli (adampolselli.com)
          • Sara Flemming (soubriquet.net)
          • Jared Christensen (jaredigial.com)
            • Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman.com)
            • Jeremy Koempel (smalltransport.com)
            • Cameron Moll (authenticboredom.com)
            • Addison Hall (addisonhall.com)
            • George W. Bush (?)
        • John Gruber (daringfireball.com)
        • Matt May (bestkungfu.com)
        • Stephen Lodefink (finkbuilt.com)
      • Andy Budd (andybudd.com)
      • Sebastian Schmieg (kingcosmonaut.com)
    • Shaun Inman (shauninman.com)
    • Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman.com)
    • Dan Mall (danielmall.com)
    • Kevin Cornell (bearskinrug.co.uk)
  • Simon Collison (collylogic.com)
  • Kyle Bradshaw (somedirection.com)
  • Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
  • Sergio Villareal (overcaffeinated.net)

If you don’t get the Legend, try refreshing a couple times. I have a different style of bullet for those who haven’t played the game. More details in the comments.

Update: So, I was invited to play the game yesterday by yesterdayishere.com (Bojan Janjanin).

So everybody in the web-design blog community is jumping on this Musical Baton meme…but where did it all start? Heck if I know. I first heard about it on Monday when Richard Rutter, Jon Hicks, and Jason Santa Maria all started playing the game. I followed the “who tagged who” links all the way back to a Live Journal user who claimed not to have been tagged, but was playing anyway. I thought I’d stop looking for origins at that point and do the same. It’d be interesting to see some stats on how many gigs of music the average web-designer has, since so many of us are participating. Anyway, here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer: 12.1 Gb
…the music server at work has 66.4 Gb
(mostly rips of everyones cd collections)

The last CD I bought was: “Believe” by Big Dismal

Song playing right now: “Yakitori” by Yoko Kanno
(don’t ask…I didn’t enque it.)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

1. “Right Here” by Mark Wills
2. “Float On” by Modest Mouse
3. “Tutti Vogliono Viaggiare in Prima” by Ligabue
4. “Better Together” by Jack Johnson
5. “3x5” by John Mayer

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

1. Ray Williams - (Did It. - May 18^th)
2. Brian Reese
3. Nathan Bird - (Did It. - May 26^th)
4. Ryan Salerno - (Did It. - May 24^th)
5. Russell Tyndall

Many thanks for the email heads up, Shawn. When I designed this site (and particularly the graphics that make up the site) I did so striving to come up with something original. I had one instance a while back where someone was using my graphics and css which was obviously unpolished and unprofessional but this…this is impressive.

Click the images above for the life-size versions. I take screenshots of things like this for two reason. 7d7846cf73c303c5534111928f6b0dc0

Apparently this is a site for a band/guy named Wade Bowen. Well Wade, I don’t know how much you paid these guys…but it was too much. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to do any freelance work, but seeing as how you’re going to need a new design, and considering the shady nature of your current firm, perhaps I could direct you to some designers/firms that won’t rip off the latest CSSVault design.

And to you, All Access Today, I hope you’ve noticed the traffic I’ve been directing your way. I’ve included your name and the name of your client in this post for a reason - Google Rank. You probably don’t want that kind of publicity, so if you would like me to remove this post you should: Change the look of, or take down http://www.wadebowen.com/ and contact me to explain your actions - particularly the reason you thought you could copyright this work.

Update: I just had a friendly IM conversation with a member of the Galleywinter forums where things are a apparently a little heated about this issue. He wanted to hear my side of the story and clear the air a bit. I’m glad he contacted me. The truth is that I have nothing against Wade Bowen, but I am still a little upset with his webdesign company. I have contacted All Access Today to request that the background be removed. They informed me that their “junior developer” got the image from a public forum for free background images. I responded with the following request:

I have posted details on my site of what I thought was a blatant ripoff of my work. If such a public forum for free background images exists, my issue is with that forum, not with your company and I would like to amend this post. If you or your junior developer cannot produce a direct link to the forum and string where my graphic is being disbursed, then I have no reason to believe this is the truth.

As of 3:30pm EST they have completely replaced the image, for which I am grateful, but All Access has yet to respond to my request for the source of their free background image.

In the process of househunting, Ames and I have spent a lot of time on Realtor.com checking and rechecking for listings that match our criteria and budget. This process has been fun, but frustrating as well because the technology doesn’t quite meet my expectations. In particular, the map views on realtor.com are quite the annoyance. In the past, if I wanted to see where a listing was, I’d copy and paste the address into Google Maps and navigate using their much more user-friendly interface. Not anymore.

Enter Greasemonkey, an extension for Mozilla browsers that lets you define “user scripts” to specified webpages. Thanks to Greasemonkey and Birdman (programmer extraordinnaire), there is know a handy link to the Google Map of each house I look at. Since this is a functionality we thought a lot of other people could really use, we posted it up on the GreaseMonkeyUserScripts Wiki. There are literally hundreds of user scripts that have been written for Grease Monkey in the last few months, and the creators of the extension are planning to create a proper script directory at http://userscipt.org which will be much more searchable. In the mean time, be sure to check out book burro, Geocaching.com scripts, and of course our Greased Realtor script.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written about what I had for lunch, but a Free Joey Bag of Donuts from Moe’s Southwest Grill seems worthy enough. I thought they were giving out free food as an anniversary stunt, but apparently it’s all about establishing Cinco de Mayo as Cinco de Moe’s, a day of “doing absolutely nothing”. I think it’s particularly humorous that this propaganda page has an “Employment Info” link at the top, and that Cinco de Moe’s obviously means that people working at Moe’s will be working harder with the influx of customers there for a free meal.

All that said, Moe’s is still one of my all-time favorite lunch destinations in Gainesville. Since there is 1 (soon to be 3) Moe’s locations in Columbia, South Carolina, it stands to maintain that position even after Ames and I relocate in mid-July. I actually just got around to posting a few pictures from last weeks trip. Hopefully I’ll have some rafting pictures to post, but we still need to get the water camera developed…but it seems we only took digital pictures while we were camping at Chau Ram Park. I guess that makes sense since we were just driving around looking at houses the rest of the week. I’ll be sure to write about our experience and lessons learned from house hunting as soon as that’s all finished. I’ll also be writing soon about future employment. I would say that I found a great job, but it’s more accurate to say that a great job found me. Details coming soon…

I feel compelled to reiterate once again that I am really not a programmer, but it is so gratifying when I'm able to solve a problem with a bit of code. So, here's the code...any ideas on what this does or what my problem was? If you're good with PHP and see any problems, please let me know!

$calurlyear = date(Y);
$calurlmonth = date(m);
$calurl = ($calurlyear . '/' . $calurlmonth . '/calendar.php');
$i=0;
do {
    $i++;
    $calurlmonth = str_pad($calurlmonth-1, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    if ($calurlmonth < 1){
        $calurlmonth = 12;
        $calurlyear = $calurlyear-1;
        }
    $calurl = ($calurlyear . '/' . $calurlmonth . '/calendar.php');
    if (file_exists($calurl)){
       include $calurl;
       $i = 10;
       }
}
while ($i < 10);