$counties = array(‘Antrim’, ‘Armagh’, ‘Carlow’, ‘Cavan’, ‘Clare’, ‘Cork’, ‘Derry’, ‘Donegal’, ‘Down’, ‘Dublin’, ‘Fermanagh’, ‘Galway’, ‘Kerry’, ‘Kildare’, ‘Kilkenny’, ‘Laois’, ‘Leitrim’, ‘Limerick’, ‘Longford’, ‘Louth’, ‘Mayo’, ‘Meath’, ‘Monaghan’, ‘Offaly’, ‘Roscommon’, ‘Sligo’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘Tyrone’, ‘Waterford’, ‘Westmeath’, ‘Wexford’, ‘Wicklow’);

http://danielstuart.ie/photographs/

I put together this gradient that follows your mouse cursor around the screen.

http://dev.danielstuart.ie/html5/canvas/gradient-follow.html

http://dev.danielstuart.ie/html5/2/

http://dev.danielstuart.ie/html5/1/

Mind = Blown!

A look at the xHTML

Below is a look at the xHTML placed in the top bar. I have set the display to none so it does no show up initially.

<div id="miniLogo" style="display: none">
	<a href="http://danielstuart.ie">
		<img src="images/miniLogo.png" alt="Daniel Stuart"/>
	</a>
</div>

jQuery to the rescue

I have used scrollTop() to determine how far down the user has scrolled. According to my template design, I want the logo to fade in when the user has scrolled down 100 pixels or more. Also, I want the logo to fade away when the user scrolls back up to the top.

I have set up a boolean variable to check it the user has scrolled past the main logo as I only want to initiate fadeIn and fadeOut once.

I also used jQuery.noConflict(); to avoid any issues with any other scripts I am using.

var $scrolled = new Boolean(false);
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(window).scroll(function () {
	position = jQuery(window).scrollTop();
	if(position >=100 && $scrolled == false){
		$scrolled = new Boolean(true);
		jQuery('#miniLogo').fadeIn('slow', function() { });
	}else if(position <100 && $scrolled == true){
		$scrolled = new Boolean(false);
		jQuery('#miniLogo').fadeOut('slow', function() { });
	}
});

So check it out above, scroll down a bit past the main logo and watch the magic happen!

I recently put put together 10 panoramas from around New Zealand with Photoshop’s photomerge automation. This is a great tool for putting these shots together if your camera doesn’t have an in built panorama mode. I have a basic digital camera too (FUJIFILM FinePIx Z20fd) so I’m happy to get some impressive amateur panoramic photos from it.

Its pretty easy to do this too with Photoshop, nice and automatic too. It also saves a lot of time trying to do this manually. I’ll bring you through the steps I took to achieve the image above.

Take your photos

I wanted to capture the dormant volcano crater of Mount Eden as well as Auckland so I decided to take 8 portrait photographs from left to right. My camera has a grid overlay display so i could line up the horizon. Here’s the files

Start Photomerge

Open up Photoshop (I’m using CS3 ) and go to File->Automate->Photomerge

Select your Photos

In the next window, click Browse and select your single panoramic photo’s. Once you have selected your photo’s now all you have to do is click ok, sit back for a few minutes and watch the automatic script do its work.

It’s that easy

Once its complete you’ll be shown something like the image below. Now all you have to do is crop it and hey presto, you’ve put together a panoramic photo!

Check out my 10 panoramas from around New Zealand. Added Hoverbox to make the photo selection look nice and the image scroller is done with Pamoorama.

The first bit of work was a simple WordPress website for a local tradesman. They were looking for something quick and it was basically a free theme, some plugins and some content put together.

www.queenstownconcretegrinding.com

The second website on the other hand was a custom design by Kelpdesign and it was for a local construction project management company. I had to convert it to xHTML and CSS and set it up as a WordPress template. This was the first time I have created a template for WordPress and it really opened me up to what WordPress could do. I have created so many templates for Joomla in the past and developing one for another CMS was pretty interesting. This WordPress template had everything from custom fields and separate layouts that could be assigned to specific pages and categories. As well as clever bits of PHP and nice usage of WordPress’s API.

www.triplestar.net.nz