[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

it’s hard for me to offer a good tutorial site for this – i haven’t been looking at tutorial sites for years, so i don’t know which one is necessarily better to learn from or not… :-/

i did make a quick example here myself:

https://sitruc.com/cow/php_include/

you can click on the simple example to see it and then download the zip file – that has all the code from the example and it is a very simple template model to get you started…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

[theFiddler] ” I’d just hoped maybe there was an alternative.”

there are really a ton of alternatives – the flash one can work nicely with the xml, and the template suggestion really is very basic programming, however it is programming…but really not hard at all – if you’ve been wanting to learn it, then by all means i say why not the present for learning it? it is literally:

and then that header template has all the html for your nav menu, and you put the above where you want it in an html file and rename the extension to php – that’s about all there is to it…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

well – 2 items here. one is the menus – there are a ton of free ones out there (https://www.google.com/search?q=dhtml+menu), but there are a few that do cost but only in the $30-$40 usd range (like https://www.milonic.com/) – i always write my own when i need one (or just leverage old code i have), but even to have someone like me do it would easily be a few hours of time, so if you figure an average rate in the $50-$80/hr range, suddenly $30 isn’t so bad. they aren’t hard to write at all if you know javascript and html, but it might be worth it if you don’t to get a professional one that will give you support if you run into problems…

the 2nd issue of having the menu not in the html – you can use any current scripting language (php, asp, jsp, etc.) or ssi (server side includes – older, but still around) and create templates for headers, menus and footers and then just have all the pages reference those templates instead of putting the code in all the pages themselves – alternately, some javascript/dhtml menu systems will let you put all the settings in an external js lib file that you can reference from each page – just depends on the system…

so sorry i don’t have a specific product to refer you to, but i hope this answer helps a bit – if you have any more questions then please feel free to ask! 🙂

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ooh – more information needed on this – like when you say “won’t open” – what do you mean? bad rendering? something else? also, any examples of live pages that are demonstrating the behavior would be needed to diagnose the problem…

let us know!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello….

a popular one for the mac is bbedit:

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

it’s a very solid editor…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

adobe after effects used to be able to generate flash files (but not very well) – but if any app did it, it would be ae…

hope that helps…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

i wrote a php version of this about 4 years ago for people on the forum who’ve asked for the same thing – here’s one of those threads:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/16/820960?univpostid=820948&pview=t

unless you have programming experience, it’s not really a tutorial sort of thing – there’s too much to go into to cover in a tutorial… :-/

but you can use the thing i wrote if you have php and safe mode disabled on your server…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

i’m by no means a copyright expert or lawyer, but copyright in the u.s. is granted to the original person by default (e.g. you don’t have to apply for it, really), and in theory a design like this could be copyrighted…however, in this case (the pencil effect), it might be too generic to copyright as a concept, and at most the company that did it first could send a few threatening letters to the other that ask them to alter their design, but it would seem in this case that it’s more of a copycat than a copyright…

that said, you could of course put a copyright symbol on your site’s design and then you have (for all intents and purposes) “copyrighted” your art, but with millions and millions of web sites out there, how would you ever know if somebody stole your idea? and if they weren’t in the same country as you, what are your options? in theory other countries have to honor your copyright claim, but if you’re in the u.s. and somebody in (for example) brazil steals your idea and uses it and refuses to answer your requests to stop using your idea (assuming you found them in the first place), then what would you do? take them to court in brazil? not very feasible, unfortunately… 🙁

so the best thing you can do is just do what you want on your site and put your copyright on there, but if it’s a good enough idea and your site is popular enough, then it’s a matter of time before someone uses your idea on their site and alas there’s not a lot you can do, really, outside of those standard cease-and-desist letters…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

if you want a wysiwyg editor, then dreamweaver (https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/) is the industry leader, although it’s not free… :-/

there are also other free ones out there:

https://www.google.com/search?q=wysiwyg+%22os+x%22+html

although note that none of these are probably like the tool that yahoo offers, as that is highly customized to hosting on their servers…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

we’ve covered this issue often in the forum – try searching all posts for keywords like email and newsletter and you’ll find a lot of info…

basically you are sending people an html file with references to images back on your server that their email client parses and shows. the two major issues are:

1. small file size (including downloaded graphics – should be less than 50Kb or so
2. only plain basic html – no flash, javascript, etc…email clients cannot parse stuff like that

hope that helps…

sitruc