DeDestruct - Tutorials and Easy to Use Tips for Web Developers and Web Designers

Writing User-Agent specific CSS

Asked by Andrew a freelance designer from Chicago

How come when i have the “if IE” link to the css, it doesn’t change at all?
It’s linked correctly and the “if IE” is correct, but the css just isn’t showing.
I think cause the link to the regular css is over-riding the “if IE” one. Why won’t it work?

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How do I get the current position of the cursor in a TEXTAREA using Javascript?

Asked by Frank Peterson a design student from New York

How do I get the current position of the cursor in a TEXTAREA using Javascript? I’ve only found scripts on inserting at the current position but not on returning the number of the cursor’s position.

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Get WordPress to show the last 10 posts modified.

Asked by Jamie a Student from Florida

Is there a plugin or hack to get WordPress to show the last 10 posts I’ve modified.

I often update my old posts with new information, but I’d like to have a list of the ones I’ve just recently updated.

I dont care about recent posts, but recently UPDATED ones.

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What is the best way to isolate a person/item in Photoshop?

Asked by Brian Purkiss a Freelance Designer from San Antonio, Texas

I currently use paths, the pen tool, and then add a layer mask.
Is there a better way, or is that it?

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Is it possible to make a transparent div with opaque text and images in it?

Asked by Alex van den Hoogen a Freelance Designer from the Netherlands

I have build a website which has a variable background. However I want to use div’s that are transparent. This works, but when I want to use images in those div’s they are transparent too, which gives an very strange effect.

Thus my question is, is it possible to make a transparent div with opaque text and images in it?

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“This site (http://shop.uppercasegallery.ca/) has a shopping cart the likes of which I’ve never seen before. It’s pretty slick; it slides in and persists at the bottom of the screen, unless the user closes it. With my limited knowledge of the newer technologies of the web, I’m assuming it employs JavaScript and maybe a little bit of Ajax.”

It is indeed a nice shopping cart application, but it actually uses a 3rd party provider called Shopify made by Jaded Pixel. While I don’t want to do a product review or endorsement you can set Shopify to work on your domain and even have control of the interface. They’ve even released their templating language called Liquify as open source for Ruby on Rails applications (similar to Smarty on PHP).

You have options to leverage JavaScript frameworks to build something similar such as the shop module in script.aculo.us. Many JavaScript frameworks offer a combination of drag-n-drop/Ajax that can be used to build similar functionality. Unfortunately, code samples are impractical in this example, because it varies on what framework utilized and programming language.

Adding a View Cart Link without access to the PayPal Account.

PayPal offers a simple, quick way for people to start taking payments online, instantly. The learning curve is smooth and most people get set up and start taking payments within days.

I sub-contract some freelance work on the side and one of the recent requests was to include a ‘View Cart’ Link across the footer of the website.This wasn’t a full-fledged e-commerce website, it was made up of static HTML pages that held item descriptions, images and individually generated PayPal ‘ Add to Cart ‘ buttons.

Currently the only way to get to the cart was to click the buy link and be transferred to the hosted cart at the PayPal website. The client wanted users to get to the cart directly without having to add an additional item to the cart.

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ImageReady is no more, and Photoshop wont open animated GIFs ! WTF !!!

Image from: http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p245/firewalker06/blog%20content/warning.gif

Hot off the missing thumbnails comes another Photoshop CS3 ‘feature’, or lack thereof

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