Okay - this is mainly for the express purpose of showing a buddy of mine through a few tricks and wrinkles that are in the "Bag o' Tricks" we get in our user CP area.

Fabman? Any time you're ready. I may have to run out and deal with a few things, but the cool part of using a test thread to advantage is that it sticks around for a while.

First trick is to try out CTRL+N
What THAT does is to pop open a seperate browser window.
Navigating back and forth is easiest done by moving the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen so the start button appears - it also shows you what windows are active and you can select back and forth between them with a single click.

A second useful way to use this is to minimise and size the windows; you can set up two windows side by side to compare them, or just make one smaller so that when you go to the start line and "CALL" it up it will be a convenient size for copying stuff by the old "Drag and Select" method.
The upper right corner of each window of course have the Minimize, Semi-Minimize, and Close button tiles. Beware the "X-BOX"... I hate it when I close something and then find out thirty seconds later that I wasn't done with it!

We can have as many windows running but minimized at a time as we want, but too many becomes a problem to tell the difference between. Anywhere from three to five is about par, two or three is normal. Each window is a seperate program - one can be NOTEPAD, another one IE EXPLORER (window 1), IE EXPLORER (window 2), a fourth can be a graphics program, etc...

A BIG BIG one is plain old "EXPLORE" - the same explore you get when you right (RIGHT! Not left as usual...) click the start button that we use to look through files and directories, because all of the pics, and other stuff we work with are going to be somewhere (hopefully in a dedicated file or directory) in our own machines before they get uploaded.

It's like having a set of drawers in a toolbox. You go from one to the other depending on what you need. Opening and minimizing these windows just gets them ready to use, like setting up your toolboxes where they are going to be used.
Got it?

Try messing around with that for a bit, also bring up "NOTEPAD". Notepad is the next toy we are going to play with

 

Got it Dutch. I've been using that system already. If I happen to drop off the web, it's because we've got an ice storm starting, and since I'm on satellite Internet the ice may cause me to lose signal.............

 

They used to tell us (when I was a DirecTV installer) that the simple way to clear that problem is with a garden hose, or a whisk broom if you feel like climbing

Okay - on to curiouser and curiouser things...

NOTEPAD is an old hackers tool - for good reason. ANYTHING that is written using notepad HAS NO HIDDEN MARKUP OR FONT attributes. It is 'Plain Jane' - what you see is all that is there, period.

Now, this is real helpful when working with picture files because you can see exactly what you copy from a webpage and paste into a notepad document. It also makes the perfect file to copy a collected group of things like graphic links or text, hypertext links, and so on FROM - because you can lay out everything that you want in a list, and try one at a time, or get one after another to add to a series (Say - a bunch of pictures for example, that you want to post one after another... )

Notepad is "PLAIN TEXT ONLY", and that's important because we don't want to accidentally upload or post any spurious junk that we didn't know was there. Micropunk WORD, and WORD IMPERFECT are both notorious for adding unseen elements to anything that is copied and pasted from them. Notepad is a stripped down version text writer/composer that only does one thing, and does it well.

Files saved from notepad always have a .txt file extension. They are easy to spot and work with.

What we are going to do with it is built on the previous idea of having seperate windows available...

If you opened a new browser window with CTRL+N, use the second window to go to your USER CP first, and then on the left side menu click on "PICTURES and ALBUMS". Make a new album in that window and upload some pictures of ford trucks at random from your PC, if you don't already have a few. We're going to use that to practice manipulating images in different ways.

Once that is done - I direct your attention to your user cp again, and the left menu item "Edit Signature". Use the same window that you used to make the new album, that way you can keep tabs on what's going on in this thread.

Notice the following words:

You may upload a new custom image using the controls below.

Option 1 - Enter the URL to the Image on Another Website

Option 2 - Upload Image From Your Computer

Note: The maximum size of your custom image is 450 by 150 pixels or 200.0 KB (whichever is smaller).

Option ONE is a bad idea. It relies on another website (I think) to maintain that picture, and most sites won't let you do that.
Option TWO stores an image on FTE, and you don't have to worry about some other site going DOWN!

But the main thing that concerns us is that "NOTE:"

Pictures can only be a given maximum size, or less. There is a difference between DISPLAYED SIZE and FILE SIZE !!!
A picture that is 1024 by 768 pixels per side may be of higher or lower resolution.
Pictures that are high-res have a much bigger file size total than a less detailed one, and the same in revere (?...) Or whatever.

SO: To maximise the image it should be 450 pixels long, 200 pixels tall, and 200.0 KiloBytes or less

I recommend that the maximum image size seldom be used except for special things, because smaller images stand out from the crowd

Knowing the maximums, most people go for the max, never realising that it makes them all look-alikes. Also: Using the max size is kind of annoying to some people

We are about to enter the never-never-land of BBcode markup - and for this be aware that to really show what is going on I have to get around what the forum will do when it see's BBcode tags. To accomplish this I want you to be alert to a switcheroo that I'm going to use to avoid unintended pictures showing instead of how to write the stuff that makes them show. I will do this by using a bold type ( and ) instead of the BBcode [ and ] that would normally be used. Wherever you see "(" or ")" it actually means "[" or "]".
Se comprende?

In other words substitute [ for (, and ] for ) when you see them.

It's the only simple way to make this all understandable.


*I just found a partial answer to how to explain BBcode in detail, it's called a "noparse" tag. What it does is cause BBcode to be shown but ignored by the browser - so now I can display the code in my signature for example:

<b>[center]</b>2009 FTE Online CHAMPIONSHIP<b>[/center]</b>

And even highlight parts of it to explain what's going on with it! But it only works well with single lines of text.

 

Well I'm back, kinda sorta............Family problems, ice storms, snow, and Internet hassles. Same old crap.

I do have 2 graphics programs that allow me to manipulate photos. Never used them much, most of my work is done with CAD and Pdf.

I read your other thread "success" and saved the info on BB code (very good!) and will play around with it tonight.

The first thing I'd like to do is put a link to the contest in my sig. I downloaded a "banner" making program and want to play around with it also.

Right now tho I'm going to the shop and work on the panel project. I need some work time alone..............................

 

I can understand that. I had no idea you were a "CAD MECHANIC", that's some pretty advanced software. I was backgrounded in Drafting when I was a young fella, and it still shows in the sketches I do.

One of the slicker tricks for signatures is the center tags you see highlighted above. They can be a little bit of a hassle at times when combined with other alignment tags.

Putting a set of "left" tags around something that is nested in a paragraph that is already in center tags can cause the text or whatever to get chucked off to the side in unexpected ways...

When you look at your graphics programs see if it has a seperate file-sizing tool (as opposed to size displayed onscreen). That's going to be a particularly vital asset, since MOST of the images I've dealt with all last year were gigantemormous files that had to be dropped to 97.7 K or less for uploading to the dedicated contest albums I store them in for the polls.

That is also going to come into play for your sigpic - and one other note:
For the finals round I changed my sigpic and it didn't show up right away, so I panicked and and gave Adrian a holler. He fixed it, and told me that the hacker attack on IBI had screwed up the image server. I think it's all back to good now though...