Blaze New Media

I’ve always taken the time to look around cities that I visit for a good Internet cafe.

I recently visited Montreal with my Powerbook and was happy to find that most of the Starbucks offered free wireless Internet access, something rarely utilized back in London.

At the moment I am in Cape Town, way down in the Southwestern tip of South Africa visiting my parents and family. It’s been quite the contrast in web accessibility; broadband Internet is expensive and slow (512kb ADSL for around $160 per month!). This does of course write off any real chance of a fairly substantial Internet cafe starting up.

Things are moving forward though, costs are reducing due to increased competition, and people in South Africa are starting to warm to the idea of a fast internet connection.

My parents who live here in Cape Town are looking into the idea of opening a sandwich bar/Internet cafe somewhere in the city. What do you look for when choosing an Internet cafe on your travels?

Personally, the price is a big factor for me, but other factors like privacy, atmosphere and speed definitely play a part in my decision.

It would be interesting to hear what people consider before walking into an Internet cafe, and what you would personally like to see, whether it be good food, a friendly atmosphere, or even a room packed full of G5’s.

This morning I and two other students in my program gave a presentation to 50 final year BSc Multimedia Technology & Design students.

I have to say I think that the presentation was well received, there are quite a few budding web designers and developers on the course currently, and I think that showing them the potential of CSS really opened their eyes to new possibilities.

We also distributed hand-outs to everyone that attended with answers to frequently asked questions, as well as a list of interesting websites – including many of the well known design blogs out there.

It was also interesting to hear the questions that people had to ask about standards based design. One of them was infact directed at our lecturer, asking “Why have we not been taught this method of design on our course?”

We do have a web-design module on our course, but it’s in the first year of our studies, and to be perfectly honest the content for the module is a good 4 years out of date… tags anyone?

View Presentation (pdf)

After a full weekend of tweaking and hair pulling, I finally have the new design to the point where I can put it up for all to see.

Yes, there are still a few bugs that I need to iron out, I’ve changed my blogging software over to Wordpress as it’s getting fairly decent reviews and also let’s me tinker with it’s source.

I’m pleased with the design, it uses the onion skin technique in order to achive the shadow either side of the white content section – also enabling me to add a fairly descreet gradient to the background either side.

Over the next few week’s I’ll be refining and refining, so expect to see subtle changes. I’m not sure how long this will take – hey it’s Christmas!

Have you ever wanted to add a small icon to the start or end of the hyperlinks on your page?

Sure, going through and adding an tag to all your hyperlinks would work, but that’s just tedious.

CSS offers a far easier solution. Here’s a quick, three step guide that will give you funky links in no time.

• Create the icon you want to use. Think about the size, it should be a similar height to the default text size of your site.
• Add the following line of code to your CSS.
  

  a {
  background-image: url(IMAGE_URL);
  background-position: right;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  padding-right: 10px; }

  background-image: url(IMAGE_URL);

  It will tell the browser where the icon image is located. Replace IMAGE_URL with the location of your image.
  

  background-position: right;

  In these links, the icon will appear to the right of the text. You can change this to left if you want it at the beginning.
  

  background-repeat: no-repeat;

  We only want the icon to show once. So turn off repeating.
  

  padding-right: 10px;

  This part gives all your hyperlinks some extra space at the end for the icon to sit. (You’‘ll probably want to tweak this value depending on your icon size.) You can change this to ‘’padding-left’’ for icons at the front of links.

• Hey presto, check those links again – easy huh? You can also extend this a little, try changing the icon for the :hover event, you can come up with some simple but stylish looking effects.