8×10Gallery.com

Then you need these tools. The IE Developer Toolbar and Firebug for Firefox are must have tools if you are trying to code, adjust or rework your website. With the changes we’re making to the site I have been using the two tools and they are great! Firebug is actually a big more powerful in that you can change and edit CSS and HTML right in the browser and see the effects of those changes without changing the actual source code. You can test out color combinations, resize objects, change padding etc and see if you like the results right on the page itself. It’s incredibly handy! Check em out!

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

IE Developer Tooolbar

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Firebug Toolbar

The end of the year is nearly here and as I look back there have been a lot of accomplishments for me personally. First of all the site actually got off the ground. It was a sketch start with some server issues and getting all the components together, but now it’s running smoothly.

I’ve posted a lot of galleries over the months and had a great time taking shots in the botanical gardens and trackside with the Porsche club. When I first started putting the pieces together I wouldn’t have guessed I would be taking 20,000+ shots in a single year and making a whole slew of new galleries. And out of those 20,000 shots many are keepers but only a small percentage are excellent. But each one taught me something and helped me improve and that’s the point.

From the photography standpoint things have been great. I’ve worked with a lot of new subjects and all sorts of environments, from high speeds cars, colorful full bloom flowers, flaming pumpkins and even shots of the city skyline from the rooftop. All in all, a lot of fun and some real keepers came out of it.

So where to from here? Well, there is a lot planned for 2008. The big news is the 8×10gallery is expanding and bringing on new photographers. Randy Zellner, a long time friend of mine and an excellent photographer from Arizona, is bringing his knowledge and his photos to the site. We are teaming up to bring you a wide variety of images, which will now be on sale in our brand new Photo Store! The store is nearly complete (we are selecting photos right now) and once we complete that all new links will show up on the site to get you there. We are featuring flowers, landscapes, cars, animals, architecture, abstracts, sports and all sorts of subjects. These aren’t just stock images of fruit and vegetables from a grocery, but great landscapes and scenic views which you can use on your website, print for your walls or download for your computer wallpaper.

We are very excited about making our photos available and look forward to offering you high quality yet affordable images for your projects.

We also have site updates planned for the new year such as updating the blog with a new look as well as changing the gallery format, adding new images from both Randy and myself, plenty of behind the scenes changes, a whole schedule of track racing shots, more architecture shots, landscapes and lots of other little updates we have planned.

I’m looking forward to a pretty adventurous and productive 2008. 2007 had a lot of new opportunities and I think 2008 is just going to expand on that.

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing the site change right before your eyes. And if you want to learn more about Randy and his photography, check out his personal website at http://www.terminalfrost.net.

The first day of April did bring its showers and the weather has decided to go for a cold snap - relatively speaking anyway But I did take another quick jaunt over to the botanical gardens to see what there is to see. You have to be quick to capture some of those flowers! Some don’t even last a week! Several of the flowers I shot on Wednesday of last week are already gone, the petals dropped off and nothing is left but a stalk. I guess that’s all part of the experience.

I did get a few good ones which I added. I’m still not quite getting the white flowers to show up correctly. I thought with the cloud cover the flowers wouldn’t look so translucent. They still are. I guess I will have to keep working on it. I did get some other good flower shots; at least I think they are.

And on a side note, HTML gives me a rash! I hate that ridiculous language! (Every time I look at HTML I get a weird Wordperfect 5.0 Reveal Codes vibe from it! Isn’t this how MS Word unseated Wordperfect as the top word processor, by not having to look at formatting codes?? And if you don’t know what Wordperfect is or the Reveal Codes option, then you’re just a pup in the computer world my friend!) But anyway, I don’t use IE anymore; I switched over to Firefox well over a year ago. The point is, what I see in Expression Web is the same as what I see in Firefox. I made the wild assumption it would also be the same thing I would see in IE. Well, that’s what ya get for thinking! IE does not render my pages the same way. The main problem was the Announcements section looked different between the two browsers. In IE, the text is much larger and bold. I spent a couple of hours last night trying to figure out why. I thought if it looked correct in the Web Editor it would look correct in the Web Browser, especially since Almighty Microsoft made both of them!

After staring at the HTML tags I discovered the problem. A tag was opened, but never closed, and then open again. So in effect this made the whole section adhere to that tag. Apparently, Firefox and Expression Web were smart enough to realize it was a false tag and ignored it. IE didn’t see things that way. I guess you can’t always rely on WYSIWYG actually working. I would make another smart-assed MS crack, but I’ll refrain. But the lesson learned is, even if you don’t use the other browser, it’s probably a good idea to at least double check your work from time to time to make sure you aren’t looking like a total goof! So to all the IE users out there, sorry the page looked odd. It should all be straightened out now. See, told you all this was a work in progress.

Anyway, enjoy the flowers, because there are a lot of them!