Pushing Buttons

I'm often stuck working with ASP and wishing I were working with PHP. PHP has a great deal of methods available that make life a lot easier. And in ASP you find yourself writing custom functions to do something that would be trivial in a better language.

Checking to see if a value exists within an array is one example. ASP does not offer any quick or easy solution. In fact, ASP is pretty much a nightmare when it comes to working with arrays. It's usually easier to use scripting dictionaries.

A quick list of eight extremely useful and fun Photoshop tutorials. Including how to correct banding, creating inset typography, applying the tilt-shift technique and how to create a clean modern website design.

Check them out!

In JavaScript there is a sort function for arrays. Though, the result will take into account the case of each character. Therefore you can have something like the following happen.

var a = ["john", "April", "tim", "Zoe"];

a = a.sort();

// a is now ["April", "Zoe", "john", "tim"]
Using MooTools you add a method to the Array object which will allow you to sort while being insensitive to case.

IE6 is a constant burden for web developers. It really is impressive to see how many ways it continues to aggravate. To put it lightly, it is the devil.

One common issue is the lack of support for transparency in images. Most web developers would prefer to use PNG images while dealing with transparency. Just about every browser, including later versions of IE, support transparency in this image format. With the exception of IE6. IE6 will display the PNG with gray where the transparency should be.

There are a number of ways to get around this. Such as the popular belated PNG script which applies a filter to the image to resolve the issue. One problem with this script is that visitors will still see gray until the script runs and re-renders the images, causing a flicker effect. There is also the PNG Alpha Fix script which takes a similar approach, but uses an htc file.

Sometimes it's easier to use GIF images to get things looking right in IE6. Yet, IE6 has its issues with this format as well. When rendering the image it will decide if pixels are completely opaque or completely transparent. If you want certain pixels to have 50% transparency you will run into this problem. It causes the images to look blocky, as if traced.

There are several methods you can use to create rounded edges in Photoshop. This is a step-by-step guide on how to quickly and easily create rounded edges in Photoshop.


First start off by creating a new document. I created a 400 by 400 pixel document, and set the initial layer to white.