Hi all, I'm about two or three days from having my website finished, and I wanted to know who, if anyone, would allow me to place a link to your site from mine. If you would like me to, please email me at: mowenj@mediaone.net and let me know. If possible, please attach your preferred logo. I'm asking you to email me, so as to keep it away from the forum, since it's kinda OT. Thanks! :) Cheers, Mike

hey! whaddya mean, off topic? yer a vue user, aint ya? so you got a vue user's web site. we're all vue users, aint we? so we all got vue user web sites. why, we couldn't be more on-topic if we tried! (er, well, okay, if we tried real HARD....! ;) )

I agree with Bloodsong. It's very on topic! As such, for you (and possibly others who might want to know), here's my philosophy regarding linking. You wanna link to my site? If so, I think that's very cool. I prefer people do it if they think there's something worthwhile to let others know about, not because I asked them to. So if you enjoy something, link away! :) The URL? Any INDEX.HTML page on varian.net. Sub-pages have a tendency to change without notice. If an INDEX.HTML page changes, a redirect will be supplied, so you won't end up with a broken link. For Vue users in particular, the specific page you'll most likely prefer is: Treasures d'Esprit http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/vue/ Want a graphic for the link? Okay, I'll point you to a couple, but you must download the image to your own server, not link to it on mine. If you agree to that, you can use one of these for Treasures d'Esprit: http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/vue/tde_title200.jpg (11 kb) http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/vue/tde_title125.jpg (5 kb) http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/vue/tde_title80.jpg (2 kb) There. Now that should answer more than you wanted to know. LOL! :) Varian

Cool, Varian, thanks. I wouldn't link an image from yours' or anyone else's site anyway. For that matter, it wouldn't even have occurred to me. It WOULD be a nice way to save space though, LOL... but don't worry, I have plenty of that for now. Cheers, Mike

Attached Link: http://www.shrewslair.com/

haha! told ya :) bloodsong's gallery: http://bloodsong.3dmenagerie.com/ 3d menagerie (includes the new location of my free goodies/tutorials page, and links to the other sites, too) http://www.3dmenagerie.com/ dragon factory: http://dragonfactory.3dmenagerie.com/ (speaking of which, did you get yours kate? did you like the little extra i put on your package? ;) ) (er, that was you, wasn't it?)

Hasn't arrived yet, Bloodsong, but the mail service is kinda slow this time of year during an election. Can't wait to get it and start playing with it!! Kate (yes, that was me grin)

Wow, I like this topic! I just indulged away the early afternoon by browsing Kate's and Bloodsong's sites. Kate, you've got some wonderful items! I'd forgotten about your cottage and that cool porch railing stuff. Please make a bunch more! (LOL! Easy for me to ask!) :) And yes, links please! I got a 404 trying to peek there. Bloodsong -- congrats on Dragon Factory, it sounds fantastic and was probably a lot of work to put together, which explains why you became so quiet for awhile. And yeah, this is a Vue forum, but I must admit I spent most of my browse-time drooling on your Poser goodies. (I wiped it off the monitor before I left.) The items you've set up for others to use are all so great-looking and useful, it makes me want to create a scad of images -- right now! Thanks for all the inspiration and helpful aids! :)

http://www.fallencity.net for me. I still need to make a decent logo. A text link is fine. I use text links on my site because otherwise it will overwhelm the viewer with all the graphics. I assume you'll post your site URL so we can make links to you? :-)

Hi all, Thanks for the info. Since I'm kind of at a loss, design-wise right now, I think I'm gonna start working on the links page. Crescent, of course I'll be supplying the URL-- my guess is that if people know it, they will probably be more likely to visit. ;) But just don't expect anything too fancy, because no one's ever going to confuse me with some sort of pro web designer or anything! Even though my ISP gives me 10 megs of space, they don't have any kind of web tools/homepage sort of deal going on, so I'm on my own as far as the html pages are concerned, but I've got a few html editing programs....it's just slow-going. It probably won't be ready until around the middle of this week at the soonest though, unless soemthing happens and I end up with more time. I'm going to be REAL busy until the end of this year, and maybe even a little beyond. Oh well, back to it... Thanks again-- I'll be linking to all of you. :) Cheers, Mike

of course I'll be supplying the URL-- my guess is that if people know it, they will probably be more likely to visit. ;) LOL!! Yes, I think that seems like a sound theory! ROFL!! :D

If you need any help with the html, let me know. I'm not a pro, but I know some good tricks to make life easier.

U r all such characters....hurry up mike....lol Sacred

Crescent, Thanks for the offer. I like what you've done with your website, and I might just have to take you up on answering a question or two, but I've sort of got it under control for now... It's a fairly simple design I'm working on, because my major concern is browser compatability, so for now I'm leaving out the bells and whistles. I would love to hear anyone's advice on frames and tables--particularly tables-- and ESPECIALLY if there's a sure-fire way to make a background image fill an entire page, regardless of the viewer's screen resolution, without doubling over and without causing scroll bars to appear on the horizontal? Cheers, Mike

heyas; wow, varian, you liked my stuff? cool! cuz i love your stuff! dragon factory took about 9 months or so to put together. do you have poser? it'd be a shame for you to like all the poser stuff and not be able to use it :) mike... i vote no on the bells and whistles and java and browser-specific crap. nice and simple is the way to go! a background image should not create scroll bars on the page, even if it is twice as long as the viewer's screen. so if you're doing one of those left-hand border background deals, just make the empty part a few thousand pixels long. if you want a full image to shrink/grow to fit the viewer's window size... get outta here! :) best bet: make a really tiny tile that is sorta generic across the board! (fast to load, fills up the screen, ain't distracting. for example: that paper texture i have on my gallery pages.) there are a lot of tricks you can do with frames and that sort of thing. a couple people i know do that they're at... www.dragonmyth.com btw, i hate frames, so i vote no on them, too. (i know, my sites have frames, but it only makes sense for the navigation.) tables are fun. tables are your friend. keep in mind that in netscape at least, NONE of the table will show until all the images in it are done loading. i think you can fix that if you make sure you have size tags on all your images. you can also do a background colour in a table, but last i recall, you couldn't use a background picture. lastly, i use and recommend navipress, a freeware wissywiggy html editor. aol bought it up, apparently so they could bury it. you can still (for the time being) get it here: http://www.aolpress.com/

Bloodsong, Thanks.. I'll look into all you said. I just downloaded the aol press thingie. Haven't checked it out yet, but I got it and will be doing so soon. :) By the way, Netscape just released their (presumably) final release of version 6.. not a beta. I've been using Word 2000 again for html pages, and so far all I've found that NN 6 can't handle viewing (when made by Word 2K) is scrolling text, and a few Microsoft-specific symbols. NN6 Final Release handles all those frames and tables quite well, and seems to have much better support for CSS and XML. Just to let you know if you already didn't. :) Thanks again...(and again, and again....) Cheers, Mike

a sure-fire way to make a background image fill an entire page, regardless of the viewer's screen resolution, without doubling over and without causing scroll bars to appear on the horizontal? Basically, what Bloodsong said. Currently, I'd suggest building border background images at least 1600 pixels wide. That size will keep you safe with the vast majority of monitors for some time yet. Also, consider contricting your page-width. Who wants to read columns that are 1024 pixels wide anyway? It's easier on the eyes to read text with shorter-width columns...which is why magazines print in columns, not text all the way across a page. I also agree with Bloodsong regarding tables. Tables are good. Tables are your friend. You need tables. And definitely use image size tags, whether in a table or not. They help everything load faster. And along with Bloodsong, I'd suggest skip frames, Java, dancing cursors and other gizmos. Navigation frames are not bad if your code is pristine and a visitor won't get locked into them when they try to leave your site. For starting out, skip 'em. People are going to visit your site for your content, not Flash. And again, as Bloodsong said, I too would recommend AOLPress (formerly NaviPress). It is an excellent, non-intrusive WYSIWYG HTML editor that permits you to tinker with the code directly without needing to hassle with every detail all the time. It'll help keep your tags nested properly, and it makes it so easy to toss a page together. I call it non-intrusive because unlike FPE/Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors, AOLPress doesn't stuff your code with a lot of garbage. The worst it does is toss in a few non-breaking spaces at a whim, but they're easy to remove with a search/replace on the code side. AOL hasn't updated the program in years, but it's still keeping pace with HTML 4.0 quite well. Now, Bloodsong didn't mention one item that I'll add. MSIE and Netscape are NOT the only browsers that people are using, so for best results, don't plan a site around what "works okay" for those browsers. Just stick with HTML standards, and your pages will work for all browsers. More info: http://www.webstandards.org/ Okay, so I get to repeat everything Bloodsong said and only add one thing. But, isn't this a brilliant piece of writing? ;D Bloodsong -- absolutely I love your stuff! And I'm honored you like mine, because you're one of my "heroes" out here in 3D Land. :) Yes, I've got Poser (2 and 4), and I've previously downloaded your swan/cygnet models. Just haven't used 'em yet. But I love the morphs you've done, such as for the lion and wolf. It's sheer genius. Of course, that also applies to the whole idea of Dragon Factory as well. I was really into dragons about 20 years ago. Could've used DF then...if I'd had a computer and Poser 4 and Vue d'Esprit 3 then, too, of course! :)

Do NOT use Word for HTML. It screws up the code badly! There's a lot of free WYSIWYG editors out there. Try softseek.com or download.com to find them. Frames suck for many reasons. If someone links to one of your pages inside your site, then your navagation is lost. (Been there, seen that. Won't do it myself.) Frames do not work the same between IE 4 and IE 5. I know one site where the frame cuts off some of the content of the page. Just chops off the last letter of each line no matter how you size the screen, no matter what the resolution. (I never did figure out the problem, and since I wasn't responsible for that disaster of a site, I didn't care.) Tables are GOD. You can do tons of neat tricks with them. If you need info on using HTML and tables, go to www.webmonkey.com for more information than you'll ever need. Since you are making a background image, this probably won't come into play, but be warned that the Hex code for colors in photo imaging programs like Photoshop does not quite match up with the Hex code for browsers. My current front page picture has an oval frame with a hex code of #333333. My background is #333333. Looking at it through a browser, I could clearly see where the picture ended and the background began. I finally made a small background gif of #333333 so the picture blended into the background properly. (Argh! At least it only added .5kb to the page.) Another trick is the blank.gif file. You can use columns and rows to make dividing lines between sections. (Color the row/column itself to a different color. The dividing lines between my site areas is an example of this. A really good example is devshed.com.) In Nutscape, though, if there is nothing in the column/row, it won't show it. I routinely use a 1x1 blank (transparent) gif for my site. If I want a dividing column that is 5 pixels wide, I put in the blank.gif and size it to 5 pixels. It displays the same in all browsers. Sorry, site design is fun for me. I just wish I had better design/color skills.

heyas; actually, varian, i did say 'don't do browser-specific fancy crap, just do the basic stuff.' but you're right, i didn't mention the other browsers people might use. you're my hero too! cool! we have a mutual appreciation society going here! love that idea with the double trees. and all those free plants! you're the only guy i know who makes dead plants! :) and i can't believe that somebody else has actually ever heard of navipress! this is so cool :) er, so, anyway... when are we gonna see this group-project page of yours that we're working on, mike? ;D

Crescent is SO right! The blank.gif is indispensible! I could not have made my "Fun With Tables" Dreamview page without it (http://www.varian.net/dreamview/). Oh LOL, Bloodsong, you're right. You did at least imply that there were reasons to be non-browser specific. I humbly beseech your forgiveness for my oversight. And hey, we should start a Fan Club for Us! ROFL! We've got two members already...the only direction we can go is UP! This could be BIG news! They could start reporting about Us on TV and radio! Hey Mike! Maybe you'd like the first EXCLUSIVE interview? What an awesome way to inagurate a new site! LOL! Time to go soak my head...:)

Can I be president of the Varian/Bloodsong Fan Club? giggle I swear, I couldn't get much of anything done without the two of you. Just your materials alone, Varian have been worth millions to me (and I'd kick some your way if I actually HAD millions :->) OOoh...hey, Bloodsong...My Dragon Factory arrived in yesterday's mail! Woohoo!!! And that is such a CUTE sticker on the package :)

wohoo! glad you liked your sticker. i told mary i shoulda stuck a real goodie inside (like a 20 dollar bill? ;D ), but i didn't have time to think of that. :/ glad you liked the sticker, and i hope you like the dragon factory even more!! :) no, wait; i'm the president! i should get the biggest salary. why? um... cuz i called dibs first! :) so, mike... still waiting on this so-far-still-mythological page url here... ;)

Yeah yeah yeah....I had a couple of pages made that I really liked. They looked pretty good, I thought, but I did The Bad Thing: They were all frames. I tried them out at all the different screen resoulutions I have, and on NN and IE, and all looked good for the most part, and then everyone tells me they hate frames! So now I'm re-designing, trying to replace the frames with tables and trying to figure out how to use those tables the way I want. I still haven't gotten rid of my Frame-Laced, MS Word 2000-created pages yet though... ;) I think the frame has gotten a bad rap! Cheers, Mike

Ah, Mike. Frames look nice (used well) and at first, they do have appeal for designing. But it's so easy to miss a link here or a notice there and have your visitors entering where you least expected them, or having your frames following them to other sites after visiting yours. It's your website, so do design how you want it. Once you've worked with frames for awhile, you'll understand where the rest of their bad reputation comes from. Kate, I think anyone who likes my Vue materials and Bloodsong's Poser dragons is excellently qualified to preside over the fan club! Bloodsong, you don't want to be president, or who's going to interview you, snap your picture and write heroic stories about you? Those are the president's duties, I think? And maybe we don't have to worry about paying the president until maybe after our first full-length feature film rocks Hollywood and presiding becomes a full-time job. Then we can start selling our autographs instead of just giving them away! :) The Varian/Bloodsong Fan Club...ah, I like the sound of that! It has such a nice flow to it, better than The Bloodsong/Varian Fan Club would. big grin And here's a quickie Vue update: I've been working on a couple new tutorials, and they're almost ready to be unveiled. So this is exclusive news for the Club, Kate! ;) I'll make a grand Mike-style announcement when the great moment arrives. :)

Waitaminnit...I gotta do interviews and stuff? I dunno, that sounds kinda like work or something...maybe I'd better rethink this president thing... ;)

Blinking text, scrolling marques and animated clip art .gifs are just as cool as frames. I like to use them in equal numbers. ;-}~

ROFL! I think we've all gone nuts! :)