Random Sparks

I have been keeping my eye on the net book environment for quite some time. I love the idea of a smaller foot print, but want the computer to be usable. I was at Best Buy (looking

Many times on a web site you will want to have a button have three distinct visual states: normal, active, and hover. This is easily accomplished using HTML and CSS. This post will provide the details necessary

My friend showed me photos that he has posted on-line in his MobileMe Gallery. Apple did a great job designing this web site. There is a lot to learn from this user experience. One element that I

Recently I was helping to introduce someone to web design. The person’s enthusiasm for learning about creating web content was apparent. He had already created a web site for his uncle. This content was created using one

I have been working on my blog style lately. One feature that I wanted to have was a way to easily convert anchor tags into a styled button to highlight a link. For instance, I often post

Creating a rich user experience may require the need to have animation on the web page. Of course you can pull in tools like Flash and Silverlight. But sometimes, these are too heavy. If you only need

Many times I have come across buttons on the web that look nice. Most of the time the buttons are the wrong color and I am forced to create my own. Then I usually Google for “glossy

I spent some time this weekend updating the theme for the Random Sparks blog. The blogging engine that I am using is dasBlog. The benefit of the dasBlog blogging engine is it is written entirely using the

I have been working on converting the photo gallery ASP.NET application to Silverlight. Previously the application relied on jQuery and a host of web services to deliver a rich user experience. The conversion to Silverlight has been

During the implementation of the Silverlight version of the photo gallery, I wanted to create a custom look and feel for the buttons that will be used in the UI. This “fancy button” will be used through