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Today, exactly at midnight, my blog (www.optimiced.com), as well as Ani’s blog (www.molif.com), are getting rid of their ‘clothes’.

Today is ‘CSS Naked Day‘ — the day which promotes Web Standards!

This ‘CSS Naked Day’ is 24 to 48 hours long, and will show, that a blog or website with well written HTML+CSS can look pretty well even without its clothes (without its CSS styles).

So, if you see my blog without CSS today or tomorrow (without its design), don’t be puzzled by this fact — we ’stripped of’ our CSS styles for a good cause — and, as you can judge by the photo above (which we made together a few hours ago), not only of our CSS clothes, but also of our real clothes! (Read also a story at the Blogherald) ;-)

Long live Web Standards! :-D

Yesterday I made an upgrade from WP 2.3.3 to WP 2.5 (with full backup of MySQL database and files before that, of course). Looks like everything works fine:)

First, about the good things in WP 2.5:

1. Editing tags is now built-in feature, which is great;
2. A better visual editor (Rich Text Editor) — I don’t use it, but they claim it’s better;
3. Fixed an old bug, which didn’t allow you to specify a directory for uploading files, which is one or more levels higher than the current WP directory (I just had to dig in deep, just to find that you have to fill correctly both fields in Settings → Misc ["Store uploads in this folder..." & "Full URL path to files (optional)..."], or this won’t work);
4. A better Image Uploader;
5. Possibility to automatically update plugins, with just one click (nice!).

There a lot of others, but these I noticed at first glance.

And now some rant from my part:

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I always liked graphic design. As Web designer, up until now I did not need any 3D skills in my work, and in the rare occasions, when I was imitating 3D or 2.5D (as this pencil, for example, created with Fireworks), I did it for fun:)

If you watched Ice Age or Shrek, you certainly know how advanced is now the 3D animation. Of course, I watched these movies, too, and I know that nowadays, almost every real object can be drawn in such a way, so it looks really real:)

Notwithstanding this fact, I was amazed to see this:

[©Steve Moody, virtualcoder.co.uk]

Looks incredible!

Yes, I know it’s not a photo, I know these balls were created using a 3D program, and for all that, my mind cannot accept this fact, somehow… I was even trying to convince myself not to check for available EXIF data in this image, it looked so much as a photograph to me:-)

Step 1:

Open Silverback.

Step 2:

Resize slowly your browser window (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7 are all ОК) and…

Step 3:

…watch the effect. Cool!

There’s a discussion on how the quasi-3D effect was achieved using CSS + half-transparent PNG graphics — to me it reminds me the old video games; and looking at Steve, I instantly think of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong!

CSS rullz! ;-)

Smart tools as xScope 2 make me feel sorry sometimes, that I don’t own an Apple Mac! ;-)

If you work on a Mac and do (web)design, I recommend you to drop a look at Doug Bowman’s blog, where he wrote a detailed explanation about xScope (in short, this is something like Screen Calipers, multiplied by 10… or even 100!).

Argh! This is called Win-discrimination! :-D

If you still didn’t send your Fireworks tutorial — now’s the moment, as the contest is extended ’till end of March!

I avow, that I didn’t yet send anything, because I started writing my tutorial in the evening of February 28th, and after approx. 2 hours of writing and taking screenshots I got at a dead end and… went to bed:)

Now I have the chance to make a revanche and finally create my first tutorial about my favourite graphics program ;-)

Do you use Macromedia Adobe Fireworks?

Do you love graphic design?

Did you ever tried to write a tutorial?

If the answers to at least the first two questions is ‘yes’, then the following info might be intersting to you:

Fireworks Zone is holding a contest for best Fireworks tutorial.

Here you can find detailed info about the contest.

The contest is sponsored by GenoPal (color selection software).

Here follow the contest’s regulations, in short:

• Everybody can participate.
• The contest has already started, but you still have more than a week to jump in (the contest started on January 28th and will end on February 28th 2008.)
• Prizes (first, second, third): Genopal Pro v1.0 worth USD 49.95 (first and second prize win an additional bonus!;-)
• The tutorials of the three winners will be published on the Fireworks Zone website.
• Language is English. Possible formats: HTML document/Fireworks .PNG/MS Word document.
• if you wish to participate, send your tutorial to: webmaster(a.t.)fireworkszone.com (change the (a.t.) part with the @ sign, of course;-)
• More info? Here! :-)

Good luck, if you’ll participate! (I might participate, too, if I find a couple of free hours this week…) :-)

PS FZ is a good resource for Fireworks users. It is created and supported by Thierry Lorey (who wrote, for example, the tutorial How to create 3D crystals with Fireworks — on this tutorial even I tried my humble Fw skills;-) — if you have any questions regarding the contest, don’t hesitate to write to Thierry! :-)

Dan Cederholm recently returned from New Zealand, where he spoke at the Webstock conference.

From his short posting, written with a lot of humour, I jumped to his photos from the conference. And this particular photo:

[(CC)2008 by Dan Cederholm]

…made me laugh a lot:)

I want one of these T-shirts, too! :-D

Sometimes you might accidentally delete the Show Desktop icon on the quick launch toolbar.

It’s fairly easy to restore it.

My preferred method is to just copy the icon from computer to computer, but there’s another way, too. Also, mind that the Show Desktop icon is not an ordinary program shortcut — but if the icon is deleted, you can re-create it easily, by following these steps (info copied from Microsoft kb #190355):

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Not that I didn’t write on the subject before, but it’s kinda nice to read about the same thing elsewhere, isn’t it? :-)

Top money saving tip #1: Get rid of your car + ride a bike instead.

Seriously, a car is a money suck, it ruins the environment and it makes you lazy. Having a bike is fun. It makes your quality of life go way up… you get exercise, you smile more and it’s kinda fast.

(via thesmalljoys.blogspot.com)