So as many of you noticed, and left me comments about, the downloads on the Infect The System website were broken.

It all started when I updated the version of Wordpress running this website. That went as smooth as it always does and things seem to be fine. And as with most updates this can cause many plug-ins to stop working, which isn’t a big deal either as you can usually update those as be fine.

However, this time when I attempted to update my download manager “DrainHole” it caused a big error and download were down! I tried numerous time to fix it, but it just wasn’t happening.

Since this blog is relatively low priority over other things in my life, I didn’t have a lot of time to track down the error to fix it. So I decided to wait for the next WordPress & DrainHole updates, and they are finally here!

Anyway, late last night (around 12am) i got everything back up and running and downloads are once again working.

Thank you to all who left comments!!!

The other day I was busy making some buttons for a client, and after designing one of them, i decided to make a whole set of them and give them away here.

These buttons would be great to replace your standard set of buttons on a website.

This button set includes the following buttons in orange: Browse, Cart, Checkout, Delete, Details, Go, Login, Logout, Order, Reset, Search, Sign Up, Submit, Upload, and a blank button to use as you please. This set also includes the full PSD Photoshop file so you can edit it all you like.

Hi all you RSS and XML Feed Fanatics!

Infect The System is now using Feedburner to send out our feeds.Why you may ask? Well, Feedburner offers so many improvements over the basic wordpress feed.

Most notably for me, it has wonderful analytics integration to make feed stats easy to see and analyze, and on your end (the reader) the feed is much easier to read both in feed readers, and in browsers. In addition to that, it is also setup to easily adapt to any feed reader flawlessly.

So that’s about it for this quick little rant, if you care to update your link to the feed here, just click on the RSS Feed Icons on the the top of the page!

Thanks!

Have you been noticing those large download buttons popping up everywhere over the last year or so? I sure have, they are really eye catching and in your face. It’s next to impossible to ignore them, and they get the point accross.

I just recently started adding some these buttons to my site to increase downloads, and I think it’s working so far! Anyway, after I designed mine I decided to to write a tutorial blog about it, and give away the resulting file that I create.

Here is the final result that we will create in this tutorial:

Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of repeatedly used tools and options in Adobe Photoshop and some of these tools and options do have pre-assigned keyboards shortcuts, and others that do not.

After being an idiot for a while and repeating some of these tasks over and over the long way, I decided to make a set of Photoshop actions that would make my life a little easier, and cut down on production time.

I have decided to share these actions with you, and hopefully they can be of some help. They are all really basic actions, but I find by having them assigned to the Function keys, it makes getting things done less of a pain.

Here are the actions, and their corresponding function shortcut key:

F2 – Flip Horizontal
F3 - Flip Vertical
F4 - Crop
F5 - Fill White
F6 - Fill Black
F7 - Fill Menu
F8 - Select Inverse

As you can see I have assigned the F7 key to bring the Fill Menu up, some of you may know and use the Shift + F5 shortcut already. But that is a bit of a stretch for the fingers, and I know it’s not my favorite position to put my hand in. So it’s just small things like that which save a few seconds here, and a few seconds there, but you do, (at least I do) notice it add up over time.

Anyway, here is the download for the .atn file. I have only tested it in Photoshop CS3, but they are such basic actions I would imagine they would work in many versions of Photoshop.

Being a web designer, with a possible light case of ADD, i noticed that in the past I had used a different organizational method for my css files on almost every website I built. Hell, in some cases there was no organization what-so-ever.

As is often the case when you repeat a task over and over, I got better at organizing my files to make them easier for me to build and edit. I am going to share some of my organizational tips with you here today, and hopefully they will save you some time in the long run. Read the rest of this entry »

How do I center a CSS Div Horizontally? This is a question I hear from my readers in both emails, and comments somewhat frequently. There are already at least 10 (probably more like 100) other websites that tell you how to do this, but the question still comes up.

So being that I am such a nice guy, I figured I would write a blog post about the subject instead of just answering emails, and comments all day.

The code to center a div horizontally is really simple. It should be noted that you MUST have a fixed width div for this to work.

#div-container {
width:800px;
margin: 0 auto;
}

The margin CSS values I used above were written in CSS Shorthand, but you could also write the code without shorthand, in which case the code would look like this:

#div-container {
width:800px;
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
}

Now just insert a DIV into your html with the ID  given a value of div-container like is shown in the example below.

<div id=”div-container”>
Place your newly centered div’s content here
</div>

So that’s the long and short of it. Pretty simple and upfront. Hopefully I won’t get any more emails about this, but as always feel free to email or comment if you have any questions or comments.

It has been a long time since I updated the design of the site, or updating the wordpress version running it.

But finally I just took care of both problem at the same time.

Design

A whole new design, which was given so nicely by Chris Wallace, which I used for a starting point. You can check out some of his other cool WordPress Themes.

I will be doing even more extensive customizations to this design, but for now, this is a HUGE step up from the previous site. One of these days I will design a new site from the ground up for this blog, but that takes time. Time that I am not paid for, so as you can imagine, it’s not usually a top priority.

WordPress Update

Infect The System is finally using the latest version of WordPress. So far it seems to be running pretty stable, and the new interface is amazing.

Infect The System Future

I have some new Tutorials coming by request of some of the readers here. I always love more suggestion for topics, and freebies, so if you have any suggestions that you think would benefit a lot of people (not only yourself, don’t be selfish) feel free to let me know.

So this is the end of this blog for now. Thanks for reading sucker!!!

After yet another long break I’m back to give away even more free stuff!

This time I have 6 FREE Web 2.0 style badges up for grabs. But wait, why bother only giving you PNG files when I could give you the original source PSD files so you have full control over these badges. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a small or medium sized online business, or a small or medium brick-and-mortar business to which you wish to add an online component, you’re going to need web hosting, and business web hosting can be just what you’re looking for.

What Web Hosting Is

Web hosting is the service that provides the place on the Internet where your website goes. To get a page on the web you need a web server, and few companies have their own web servers. That’s why there are companies dedicated to providing this service. These companies are called web hosting companies, and you contact them when you need a web server for your site.

Variations in Web Hosting

Not all web hosts are created equal. Which web hosting package and company you choose will depend on a variety of factors. Web hosts vary according to price, to level of involvement in your web development, to features, to amount of bandwidth and disk space provided. It’s important to choose the web host that’s right for your online or online-enabled business.

Business Web Hosting

If you’re just starting out with online marketing, business web hosting can be a great place to start. With a business web hosting plan, your website goes on a shared server, which means other companies are using different parts of the same server to host their own websites. Since your company isn’t taking up all the server space, you’re charged at a significantly reduced rate. This rate is a mere pittance; this is a few dollars a month as opposed to a hundred or more. That can make a real difference for a business that’s just getting off the ground.

Pros and Cons of Business Web Hosting

With business web hosting, you’ll get what you need to maintain a great website at a low cost. You may not have the same kind of control and flexibility that you would get if you had control of the whole server, but that’s usually not something you need starting out. As your business grows, more traffic comes in and your web development needs become more diversified and complex, you can think about different web hosting options. To start with, a business web hosting option is usually the way to go.