Archive for December, 2006

How to keep people happy at work..

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

There is an interesting article at Fast Company that argues matching your businesses’ values to your team’s values will make people want to stay and work for you, far more than money. It’s funny that companies DO create mission statements, talk about visions, company values etc, and yet never actually see if these values are aligned with the values of people who work for the company. I believe focusing on your employees within a business is one of the most important things you can do - without a happy team, it’s going to be hard work.

Finally they exist…bookmark and rss buttons

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Add This provides handy buttons to allow bookmarking of a site with bookmarking websites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. Also, to add an rss feed for a website to feed readers such as bloglines, netvibes and lots more.

Nifty Javascript Tool

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

There is a a handy javascript library called Lightbox JS 2.0 that allows you to click on an image, and then the image pops up in it’s full size in the middle of the screen.

It looks so good I thought it was flash driven when I first saw it :-)

Biodegradable pots

Monday, December 11th, 2006
Pots

No more plastic pots!

Ecoforms, based in the US, supplies biodegradable pots. Apparently they can last up to 5 years and are made out of grain husks. There is also
Enviroarc, based in Australia, who use mostly bamboo pulp. Handy when you are feeling hungry too.
http://www.ecoforms.com/

http://www.enviroarc.net/index.php

Typo3 - Email validation in forms

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

If you’d like to add validation to the standard email forms that are added in typo3, this is how you do it.

Say you want to add email validation. When you are editing the body text for the page form, I use this line of code:
Email: | *Email=input,50,100 | | EREG : Please enter a valid email address : ^[a-zA-Z][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]@[a-zA-Z0-9][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]\.[a-zA-Z]

[a-zA-Z\.]*[a-zA-Z]$

Voila!

Photoshop - How to separate the subject from the background

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

Here is one method I use:

1. Click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode button

2. Make sure the colors that you are using are black and white

3. Select the brush tool

4. Using the brush, paint the whole subject - the colour should be displayed as red by default

5. Click on the Edit in Standard Mode button and the painted section will become selected

6. Go to the select menu and click on Inverse. (Select>Inverse) to select the inverse of the selection

7. Go to the Layer menu and select Layer via Copy. (Layer>Layer via Copy).

You should now have a layer with just the subject in it.