Dan Philibin

I’ve decided to try going without Mac OS X’s Dock on both machines this weekend by using Quicksilver for nearly everything, giving me a good 75-100 pixels of screen space at the bottom. It’s been working out great for me, so here’s how replace the Dock and its functions with Quicksilver. More…

I love having e-mail on my iPhone. While I still receive the same messages on my Mac at home, it’s still nice to be able to check e-mail on the go. However, I’ve used my latest e-mail address for well over 500-700 e-mail messages since I got it (I’m sure some of you have thousands), and loading that address into my iPhone means the phone will try to download all 700 mail messages, marked as unread, into my inbox. Fortunately, I’ve found a quick solution for working around this problem. More…

While reading my Digg feed the other day, I saw the title of a story that was similar to the tutorial I had written on creating the light flare. Naturally I thought, “Great! I’m dugg!” But clicking the article’s title proved me wrong. It appears that someone has ripped off of my original “flare” tutorial and made their own version on Blogspot.com (even stealing my customized WordPress logo from my tutorial):

Creating Lens Flare with WordPress Logo

It seems that this isn’t the only tutorial imitation on this site, one tutorial from PSDTuts is also listed on his blog.

Since the site’s launch at the start of June 2007, several people have asked me to write a tutorial on how I made the “flare” effect that is used on the WordPress logo on one of my latest projects, WPCustomization.com. While the Flare filter is used on the background, most of the lighting is done with brushing and different blending modes. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to re-create this effect.

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With the growing trend of the background image/negative text indent technique for logos, most users who print out a page on your site won’t see the logo because background images aren’t normally printed. Here’s a quick CSS trick that will get that background image onto your user’s printouts. More…

In a previous tutorial, you learned how you could use PHP and CSS together to randomize background images. Here is another technique you can use.

The slogan for Apple’s 1st generation iPod Shuffle was ‘Life is Random.’ While they’ve changed the slogan for the colorful 2nd generation line of shuffles, the Shuffle page still reflects what the clip-on player is meant to do. The page sports a random color scheme, matching the photo on the right and the colors of the music player. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can use PHP with CSS to randomize your color scheme. More…

By combining CSS and PHP, you can put a little randomness into your CSS. While it’s possible to have lines of code to do this, it’s also possible to keep it short and sweet. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to combine PHP and CSS to have random background images. More…

I’ve decided to re-write for Windows users the two tutorials I have written for Mac users where you learn how to install MAMP and proceed to run WordPress blogs. When designing WordPress themes, it’s nice to be able to store them locally to test them instead of uploading files to a web server. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up WordPress locally on Windows and then manage multiple blogs with their own themes.

This tutorial has been moved to the WPCustomization.com Blog.

I’ve decided to re-write for Windows users the two tutorials I have written for Mac users where you learn how to install MAMP and proceed to run WordPress blogs. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up WAMP, a program that lets you run PHP and MySQL databses, on the Windows OS. More…

When designing WordPress themes, it’s nice to be able to store them locally to test them instead of uploading files to a web server (though Transmit makes it quite easy). In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up WordPress locally on your Mac and then manage multiple blogs with their own themes.

This tutorial has been moved to the WPCustomization.com Blog.

Running PHP scripts on your computer is probably one of the most useful tools for web developers. While there are ways to install the code on Tiger, many times using Terminal, I’ve found MAMP much easier and it can do everything I need it to. More…