I’ve been working on a web site for a photographer friend of mine.

She would like to show her photos in a nice slideshow with fading effects and thumbnails.

To minimize the maintenance effort, I need a simple web app that would do most of the work for her so she won’t need to touch the code at all. Ideally, she’d just dump a bunch of pictures to a folder, and voila! the slideshow is populated with the new pictures.

The Smooth gallery 2.0 by JonDesign looks promising.

I’ll give it a try and report back.

A cool UI component for in-page browsing. here’s the link to the page where you can learn and grab the code from: http://billwscott.com/carousel/

A really cool tutorial on creating gradient text fill using css from one of my favorite blogs: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-gradient-text-effect/

This allows us to use custom fonts that are not available on the user's machine which then allows the design to be more expressive and dynamic.

This solution uses PHP and Javascript. It's dynamic so we can simply change the html code and have the text rendered automatically without having to recreate images.

All you need and how to apply it: "Dynamic Text Replacement " by Stewart Rosenberger from A List Apart.

Toubleshooting guide provided by Stewart Ulm who created this solution. 

Here's a sample of DTR in action 

The Chicago GSB 2006 Asia Business Conference site is live!

This is a simple brochureware site with flash slide show component that loads external images. That means whoever at Chicago GSB theoritically can update the images used in the slide show by adding/removing images from the folder where the images are stored as long as she keeps the naming convention consistent.

The formatting definition for this site are all stored in a separate css file for managability reason also. By doing that, the html files are very simple and easy to edit by content editor at Chicago GSB since they need to be able to update the site frequently as new information becomes available. 

A really cool trick that would make your XHTML code light and "pretty": Simple Rounded Corner CSS Boxes by Ryan Thrash.

If you're not in the mood to read narration of how this trick came into existance, scroll down until you see the sample box and the code that's responsible for it.

If you’re looking for Javascript that can expand and contract a div menu/element, Dustin Diaz shared his script on his site: DHTML expand and collapse div menu 

Pretty simple really. In a nutshell, you just need to find the correct element (use id) then make it invisible by changing the value of style.display to none.

Here are couple links to articles that explain how to set opacity with CSS:

• Ove Klykken: CSS Transparency for Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla and Safari
• Mandarin Design: Exploring Opacity Step-by-Step by Michelle Goodrich

If you just need to grab the CSS code that does the trick with brief explanation, Ove’s article will give you what you need. However, if you want to really understand this topic, the extensive coverage on Mandarin Design will explain various aspects of using opacity wih CSS.