For the artist or 3D modeler who is in need of pose references, Posemaniacs.com provides a database of 3D figures posed in various positions. The best thing about Posemaniacs is that every single posed figure is rotatable in 360 degrees for any view to suit your needs.

Another good resource is The-Blueprints.com. There are a multitude of reference images, ranging from vehicles to weapons available for download. In order to access the images in their original resolution, it does require registration of a free account . (You can still view the images without an account, but they will only be 500×500 pixels at the largest)

A great free database for textures is CGTextures.com. Textures are provided at CGtextures are mostly hi-resolution files that meet your every need.

For great photo and texture resources, stock.xchng has a large database. To download the high-resolution photos and resources, you will need to register for a free account.

Brusheezy also has a great database of photoshop brushes, patterns and textures that are free for download.

Last but not least, there are a great list of resources to be found at deviantART.com

These are by no means the only places to find free resources online, but just a small part of the great databases of resources that are out there.

To fulfill the needs of those font loving gamers out there, designer Varun Vachhar has created the Console Font.

Each and every letter of the font set is designed stylistically based on a host of gaming consoles! From classic to current consoles, the Atari to the X-Box, and even an N-Gage is thrown in, the individual letters look almost like stand-alone icons by themselves.

It’s certainly eye-catching enough, and I do love the idea of the consoles and their controllers representing the letters and numbers.

But one thing I don’t like about the font is that some of the letters don’t appear to be based on any console that I’ve ever seen, but maybe that’s just me. Another quip from me would probably be the readability of the font. I actually took me a while to figure out the letters K and F.

Oftentimes in the creation of stylistic fonts, there is a tendency to abandon legibility for the sake of design; at least this isn’t one of the most illegible fonts I’ve ever come across.

It could definitely still use some tweaking (see the letter G and number 5) but I think it’s an interesting take on typography. As it was based on the Objectified poster, I can definitely see where the idea and design came from, but it makes you wonder if there have been more ideas like this floating around out there that haven’t been discovered yet.

Although Console Font has been creative and fun, but I personally don’t see the stylistic font lending itself to too many uses. What say you?

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to choosing fonts for an assignment. There are thousands of fonts out there, with multiple categories such as serif, sans-serif, monospace, etc. It is a mind-boggling selection that is simple at first look; after all, we just choose one that looks best to us and use it.

Cfont Pro and AMP Font Viewer

This task can be accomplished by several free tools: Cfont Pro and AMP Font Viewer both of which are free, does them well for an unbeatable price. Both applications allows you to manage and display fonts installed on your computer and gives you many options to ‘test out’ a font to see it in actual usage rather than short previews. You can even print a string of text but with different fonts to see how they look.

Properly selecting fonts for websites also require some thought, as the font you choose to use needs to be installed on the user’s computer to be able to display properly. Otherwise, it will default to another font. It’s nice to set up your site to look great with a free font you downloaded online, but all that effort is useless if the user doesn’t have it. Therefore, consider finding out the commonly installed font types on computers and then only consider and compare those fonts when doing font selection.

Ever been to a website and notice there is a small icon embedded next to the site’s URL? For example, here in Kongtechnology.com’s address bar, you will notice a King Kong been trapped inside a square box. Pretty neat huh? This is called favicon, a short term referring to “Favourite Icon”.

What Does a Favicon Do?

Although some people find favicon useless, and opined its existence as ‘to beautify’ a website. This is not entirely true.

For a cyber world that crawls with millions of websites, it is important to stand out from the crowd and get people to remember you. You might not notice, but our brain is more likely to remember an image rather than a lengthy URL. If you do not own a logo for your blog, brand your site with a catchy favicon is a great way to attract people’s attention. Ditch the orange Blogger or black-white WordPress favicon, and let new visitors have a second look at your URL. Get recognized!

Today I will be covering ways to insert a favicon to your blog header in Blogger, WordPress and Self-Hosted site. Before I go further with each platform, you need to have your favicon image ready first.

Types of Favicon: Ready-made or Self-made

It could be a picture of your own image, an avatar, the initials of your name, a logo or even your hamster… just make sure it goes well with your blog theme. Be creative but not too complex, since the standard size for a favicon is 16 x 16 pixels (in width and height). Trust me, it’s VERY small.

While I think you won’t be having much problem finding existing picture for your favicon, I would like to assist those who are going for Self-made favicon images:

For Initials/Logo favicon:

Photoshop is a great software for any type of image-editing. You could set your canvas size to 16×16 px before you work on it. However, to me, it is much easier to create the image first, then resize it. To do so:

1. Right Click > Image size.

2. Un-checked the ‘Constraint Proportions’. Type in the pixels as follow:

3. Here is how your new image would look like. Didn’t I tell you it was small?

For Avatar Favicon:

Some people are less comfortable to display their real images in public. However, if they still wish to have the ‘personal-touch’ in their site, avatar would be a brilliant choice. Portrait Illustration Maker is a fantastic site to generate self-customized avatar.

**Randomizer’ is another option if you wish to get a ready-made avatar instantly**

Each category has tons of choices. By not being picky, you will definitely find some that will resemble you the most. So get a portrait of yourself and start digging through the features. Cool thing is, you also get to adjust and colorize your choices. Try it!

Here’s a version of myself. (Yeah, just being silly)

Now you have your image done, it’s time to resize it to the appropriate 16 x 16px. If you do not have photoshop, no worries as there are other online resizing sites for you to play with:

1. Picasion

2. Online Image Resize

3. Favicon Generator

Time For the Real DeaL…

Insert Favicon to Your Site

Now you have the right favicon, with the right size. Next, you need to convert the existing file format (.jpg or .png) to .ico. Go to FavIcon Generator and get the image and code generated as follow:

1. Locate your file and upload it, with or without sharpening it.

2. Once the favicon is successfully generated, you will be presented with some codes such as following:

For free hosting sites like Blogger or WordPress, you will be embedding the code “B” to your header, here’s how:

For Blogger users:

1. Log In to your Blogger account.
2. Go to Layout> Edit HTML
3. Locate the code below (via Ctrl+F):
   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

   Copy the code “B” right after it.

4. Save your template. View your blog, or (Ctrl+F5) to refresh your browser.

For WordPress Users:

1. Log In to your WP account.
2. Go To Design > Theme Editor. At your “Theme Files” sidebar, locate “Header.php”
3. Find and paste code “B” before </head>. Update Your File.

You may need to refresh it a couple of times to get the favicon up and running on your site.

For Self-Hosted site:

You have 2 options: to have the favicon (.ico) hosted on your own site, or host it at another server. The difference between the two; is… if you host it on another server:

• Your site would have a backlink to the third party image-hosting site;
• If anything happens to that image-hosting site, there goes your favicon!

So, if you wish to host the favicon at your own site, that is when you use the ‘direct link’ as shown in code “A”.

1. Log In to your web hosting site.

2. Upload your favicon (.ico) to your webhost at “public_html” folder.

(In future, if you ever wish to change your favicon, just replace the existing .ico file with a new one)

3. Log In to your WP account, Go to Design >Theme Editor > ‘Header. Php’

4. Paste Code “A” (as below) before </head> :

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

5. Update file.

Extra hints:

If you have multiple subdomains created for your website, for example: http://women.yourdomain.com,

and you wish the favicon to appear in every subdomain pages, you may need to upload the favicon to all of the subdomain folders (here, the folder name is ‘women’) within the ‘public_html’ directory.

If your main site url is ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/blog’ instead of ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’, you will need to upload the .ico file to the ‘blog’ sub-folder of this particular domain.

Hope this tutorial helps you in creating your very own favicon. Have you discovered a much easier way to do it? Kindly share with us your experience.

Now, my local computer is running Windows Vista with IIS7. Running classic ASP applications on this setup is not as smooth sailing as it used to be when we were using Windows XP or Windows 2000… I just hate the new security that were introduced in newer version of Windows.

There are a few changes in IIS7 which Classic ASP developers should be aware of… but one of them which has been bugging me for a while is the dreaded:

Microsoft JET Database Engine error ’80004005′
Unspecified error

message thrown when my ASP script tried to read and write to the Access database. Stupid ACL security on Windows Vista.

How do you fix this problem?

The answer is obviously with the ACL… The following commands will grant the Network Service temp directory to allow creator write and read privileges.

icacls %windir%\serviceprofiles\networkservice\AppData\Local\Temp /grant Users:(CI)(S,WD,AD,X)

icacls %windir%\serviceprofiles\networkservice\AppData\Local\Temp /grant “CREATOR OWNER”:(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)

How do you run the above commands? Go to a DOS prompt with Administrator privileges, and run them. If the above still failed to work, run the following line too.

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config /section:applicationPools /[name='DefaultAppPool'].processModel.loadUserProfile:false

No, I didn’t invent these lines, it was the awesome work of these people. Read to understand more on loadUserProfile, IIS7 and temporary directory failures. Hope this makes your ASP coding a little bit easier.

You can of course use the Javascript:

<a href=”javascript:window.open(url);”>Your link here</a>

But this is ugly and dirty, both in terms of the accessibility and pop-ed up window itself. Look at the code snippet above, the a href tag is not linking to a link but instead it is running some javascript. This means the whole meaning of the link is gone!

Okay, you got the point. So, how do we make it accessible and good, with clean code?

Very easy, we use GreyBox. Basically, GreyBox makes our life easier by supplying the codes needed to build beautiful and clean pop-up windows. GreyBox uses the “rel” attribute. rel is used to describe the relationship between the current page and the href destination of the anchor. The whole line becomes something like this:

<a href=”http://google.com/” title=”Google” rel=”gb_page_fs[]“>Launch google.com in fullscreen window</a>

It’s very easy to setup and use GreyBox even if you are a first time user… just follow the instructions on their website. It’s FREE to download and use!

Why GreyBox?

• It does not conflict with pop-up blockers
• It’s only 22 KB!
• It’s super easy to setup
• It’s super easy to use
• You can easily alter the style as it is controlled through CSS

Now, GreyBox really creates pop-up windows that don’t suck!

Now, the conventional anchor links always zip you to the marked lines immediately. I have always found this to be somewhat jumpy. So, when I recently stumbled upon this excellent smooth anchor links script at david walsh blog, which demonstrated the ability to smoothly take a user to a specific portion of a page, aka the anchor, I was totally amazed!

This is definitely one of the cooler scripts I have seen in a long time, and I can’t think of a reason to not share it with you! I hope you like the smooth scrolling effect and will use it in your web pages or blogs! Happy smooth-scrolling!

However what’s more common is perhaps you are installing WordPress in a sub-folder of an existing website, and after blogging for a while, you are thinking “Hey, how can I list my blog posts on my homepage?”

It’s really easy actually because WordPress has made life so much easier for us. In order to use any functions in WordPress (such as display latest blog posts, display latest comments, etc), you simply need to include the file “wp-blog-header.php”. For example, to display my latest 10 blog posts in my Flash Games page, I simply put the following few lines of code:

<?php
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
require(‘../wp-blog-header.php’);
query_posts(‘showposts=10′);
?>

<ul>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a><br />
<?php comments_popup_link(__(‘Comments (0)’), __(‘Comments (1)’), __(‘Comments (%)’), ‘grey’); ?>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>

<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

Apart from display the latest 10 posts, it also displays the number of comments each post has.

OK, the codes above may look a little gibberish, but the important thing is by including the file “wp-blog-header.php”, you will have access to all the WordPress functions in an instant!

Wonderful isn’t it? With this you can easily integrate WordPress into your existing website and make the website easier to update by making use of WordPress CMS capability.

The first icons website is Iconfinder.net.

The search feature is very intuitive as it incorporates AJAX. The moment you enter any keyword it will auto-complete and suggest some related keywords. In complete Web2.0 spirit, all icons are tagged. Once you have found the icon you are looking for in the search result, click on it to see more details such as the designer, the license and a download link.

Do use the download link (and not right-click-save) to download the icon as this will retain the properties of the icon, such as the transparency property.

I am not sure how many icons are there, but some of my search results return thousands of results. So, I guess their database hosts at least tens of thousands of icons. Anyway, technically speaking, these icons are not all free completely. Most of them fall under one of these licenses, Creative Commons, GPL and LGPL.

Another icons website worth taking a look especially if you can’t find the perfect icon you are looking for in Iconfinder.net, is Iconlet.com. This icons website is less sophisticated, but it gets the job done.

Just like the first website, Iconlet.com also allows you to easily search for icons, view who’s the designer and license information, and of course save the icon for your own use.

So, there you are two more useful websites to add to your bookmark/favorites. Use them whenever you are designing a website or a blog. Make your website and blog stand out with beautiful and professional icons.

But if you are looking for a quick solution… then read on. I was doing a quick simple page for a friend of mine when I found myself using the <ul> tag. Check out the following screen shots.

<ul style=”margin-left:-15px; color:#3056AE”>
<li>List item 1
<li>List item 2
</ul>

The list looks perfect in Firefox, right or not? I put in “margin-left:-15px” to shift the items to the left slightly. The indentation is just nice. I love you Firefox!

However, it’s a totally different sight for Internet Explorer, the world’s most used web browser. It looks horrible. List items are shifted too much to the left, even run off the screen! I am not sure if this is a bug, or just a weird behavior.

There might be a solution… perhaps a better one in CSS, but I am not going to do too much of research in this. I prefer a quick and dirty workaround. This is what I did to fix it. At least seems to have been fixed.

1. Download PHP Browser Detection script. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my script is coded in PHP. Save the downloaded script file as “browser_detection.php”.

2. Put the following code at the top of the existing file.

<?php
include “browser_detection.php”;

if( browser_detection( ‘browser’ ) == ‘ie’ )
$margin = “20px”;
else
$margin = “-15px”;
?>

The above code basically uses the function browser_detection to check what’s the browser type we are using, and sets the margin accordingly.

3. Change the existing code to the following.

<ul style=”margin-left:<?php echo $margin; ?>; color:#3056AE”>
<li>List item 1
<li>List item 2
</ul>

That’s it. Now view the list items in both Internet Explorer and Firefox! They look great in both! Congratulations!

Should you have a nicer solution in CSS itself, please do let me know.