Posted on: July 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil

I’m going to break this fairly short blog into 2 parts since I have 2 helpful tips that are fairly fast to implement.  I was going to make two blog posts on these, but they are closely related concepts, so here is a single post.

First, a helpful CSS Imagemap code creator:

For this site, if you ever have noticed, you might see that the top icons in the header (including the FamousPhil.com text) all link to certain pages on FamousPhil.  Usually, a HTML or CSS imagemap is used to make these links.  The site designer figures out where to place the selectable link area on the header by calculating pixels on the image.  Being the lazy designer that I am, I went to find a better solution to where I wouldn’t have to figure out exactly what pixel lengths I need to accomplish the clickable areas I wanted.  There is a really handy site that I found that allows you to upload or specify an image location on the web and easily specify areas for clickable links.  It then makes the html code.  This site is: http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap. I have used this site many times for creating CSS Imagemap code.  I just have one word of caution when using this site, that is, the code generated is really condensed and not really friendly to work with.  I recommend using a program like PHPDesigner 2008 in HTML mode and using HTML Tidy, make the code into the CSS2 standard to make the code look better and much easier to read.

Second, I would like to cover making a div in HTML with two images and have text span both images.

This problem plauged me for a good two hours the other night.  Basically, I am designing a site that has a body with an image gradient (fades out as the image goes down the page), and then at the bottom of that fading image, I have to continue a textured background repeating.

To accomplish this in CSS, you need to nest div tags in HTML and specify CSS.  Here is an example that I am using directly on this site:

"<!--HTML CODE-->
	<div class="middle">
		<div class="middle2">	

		</div>
	</div>

"

"/*CSS CODE*/

div.middle{
	background: transparent url("img/backgroundrepeat.png") repeat;
	min-height:250px
}

div.middle2 {
	background:url("img/bodytopgradient.png") no-repeat;
	min-height:124px
}

”
In this example, middle is the bottom layer that will repeat down the entire page. middle2 in this example is the top layer and has a single image that contains the top gradient. I add a min-height to make the top layer show up entirely before the background repeating pattern becomes the top image.  Text will expand the page downwards, but due to the lack of text, I made a minimum height on the repeating image also to verify that it works as expected.

Hopefully these tips will help you on your next design.  Thanks for reading my blog as always!

Tags: css, div, image, imagemap, map, span
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: July 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil

• I'm Updating FamousPhil.com! #
• Mowing the Lawn #
• I'm eating lunch and working on web development. #
• Listing more items on Ebay #
• Relaxing before bedtime, might integrate twitter into my famousphil homepage. #
• How to cook a good, juicy steak — Blog http://cli.gs/30GJE #
• Updating FamousPhil.com to be more SEO friendly. #
• Combining myspace, famousphil, youtube, and facebook together with twitter and wordpress. #
• Packing up old stuff for storage. #
• How to cook a good, juicy steak http://famousphil.com/blog/236 #
• Remembering the Kim Possible chapter of my life http://famousphil.com/blog/249 #

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Tags: feed, tweet, twitter
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: July 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I’ve decided that its just about time that I take the time to remember my involvement in getting Kim Possible a 4th season from Disney and all of those who worked tirelessly with me in that chapter of my life.  The details are quite sketchy now as time progresses and I don’t really want to lose touch with my past.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Animation Communication Central, disney, Kim possible, Ron Stoppable, ronstoppable.net, Save Disney Shows
Posted in Personal, Student Life
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Posted on: July 18th, 2009 by Famous Phil

I guess I’m out of it today, thus, I’m going to make an “out of it” post about one of my favorites: food.   For the longest time, I’ve cooked steak on a foreman grill or the open charcoal grill without any prep work for the steak.  I must admit, although its edible, its not really that good by any means.  Over the past few months, I’ve perfected my steak cooking methods.

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Tags: steak
Posted in food
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Posted on: July 10th, 2009 by Famous Phil

As you probably know by now, I have a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.  With any kind of server, a backup and disaster recovery plan is a vital part of any kind of professional hosting.  Hosting email can be quite tricky as it is, but taking network backups was a new road that I’ve never covered in Windows.

First, I have a fairly simple environment set up for my backup.  I have a Linux backup server running samba sitting in Seattle (mthsweb2).  This server has the Windows IP white listed so that only my Windows server can connect to it to map a network share.  For those of you who don’t know what samba is, samba is a daemon in Linux that will allow Windows to naively connect to a Linux server for file sharing.  Samba is a very simple solution for mapping a network drive to Linux in Windows without needing any specialized software such as sftpdrive (not called something else).

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Tags: backup, batch, Linux, mapped network drive, network, ntbackup, samba, script, server 2003, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: July 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First, I think I should put in a plug for exchange hosting. I got exchange 2007 up after deciding to get a bigger server and host a few more people.  Exchange 2007 is a bit more bloated but has nicer spam fighting features and has a much nicer interface in browsers like firefox.  I’m still looking for a few people to help me pay for the server.  I put all the details on codecall in this thread: http://forum.codecall.net/hosting-registrars/18780-exchange-2007-email-hosting-offer-personal-server-looking-4-more-people.html.  If you’re interested, feel free to drop me an email

Now onto the rest of my blog (and the main reason why I’m even blogging)

I really think its time I take the time to update other parts of my site.  My blog gets a lot of my attention because it is fun to write when I get a chance to write about stuff I care about!

Lets start with why am I taking this sudden initiative to update the rest of my site.   A few days ago, I was talking to John who has a low page rank (PR) on his blogging site at johnciacia.com.  John wants to increase his PR.  I currently have a much higher rank than he does but I’d like a higher rank too.  Higher PR means more popularity and higher search rankings for common key words.

Why would I want a higher PR?  Higher PR means my popularity will go up on search engines and I will get more traffic to my site.  I really want to get 10,000 people reading my blog within a few years.  I feel this is a very obtainable goal because I tend to write 2 to 3 very technical articles per month that aren’t easily obtainable elsewhere on the web.  I constantly find the Microsoft knowledgebase is insufficient at helping me fix my own problems, so when I come up with a solution elsewhere, I tend to post it either here or on Adminreference.com.  I have looked back on AR quite often to find my own solutions to recurring problems due to corruption, etc.

Now time to move onto my photo gallery

I finally got around to putting a few photos up from the same old photos forever.  I have yet to filter out the spam comments, but they will go eventually.  Within the next week or two, I plan on posting a few of my nature photo galleries that I’ve kept on my computer now for quite some time.  These include a fox that comes to our house quite often and a rare shot of baby skunks.

Anyways, I would like to point your attention to my latest gallery: http://famousphil.com/gallery/?level=album&id=4 (You can get to this from the main page by clicking the photos navigation link).  This is of a practice barn burning for the Humphrey Volunteer Fire Department (no website available).  Our Fire Department is very small and right down the road from us.  We had a barn on our property that was falling down and we felt it was time to burn it before someone got hurt in it from beams falling, etc.  Anyways, I got a few really cool shots and thought I’d share them   Look forward to more nature photos in a few days.

Tags: barn, burn, burning, department, email, Exchange 2007, fire, Google, humphrey, page rank, pr, search, seo
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: July 1st, 2009 by Famous Phil

It seems that anymore, wherever I look, I always seem to find myself in a discussion about global warming, either in my head while watching the news or with other people.  To save myself a lot of future useless breath discussing my feelings, I think that I am just going to refer everyone to here Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: cars, energy, global warming, gore, inconvenient truth, polar bear, pollution, power
Posted in Student Life, Technology
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