Now offering custom wordpress websites as one of our services.

We are happy to offer custom wordpress websites are part of our services now. As we usually do, we experimented on one of our own websites to learn it. Please let us know what you think. www.justinblayney.com

Creating cookies with PHP for Widows and Macintosh

I discovered a little quirk today when using a php script to write a cookie for users viewing preferences. Apparently you need to write them differently for both mac and pc. It drove me crazy trying to troubleshoot this.

One way to write the cookie is as so...
setcookie('viewingPreferences', $myCookieVars, time()+60*60*24*365*10, '/', '.www.darkstarmedia.net');


But on windows it doesn't work (tested on IE, Firefox and Crome). It wants it written as so...

setcookie('viewingPreferences', $myCookieVars, time()+60*60*24*365*10, '/');
without the website...

So I came up with this little script with a little help from google...


$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if (preg_match('/linux/i', $user_agent)) {
        $platform = 'linux';
}
    elseif (preg_match('/macintosh|mac os x/i', $user_agent)) {
        $platform = 'mac';
}
    elseif (preg_match('/windows|win32/i', $user_agent)) {
        $platform = 'windows';
}


if($platform == "windows") {
setcookie('viewingPreferences', $myCookieVars, time()+60*60*24*365*10, '/');
} else {
setcookie('viewingPreferences', $myCookieVars, time()+60*60*24*365*10, '/', '.www.darkstarmedia.net');
}


I don't have a Linux computer to test on, so I am just going to assume it works properly like it does on a mac.

New domain name darkstarmedia.ca

We just bought the darkstarmedia.ca domain name. Same great website, now 2 ways to get to it. We are still working on acquiring the .com, it appears that some link farm in the middle of the Indian Ocean has it now.

Darkstar Media Launches earth-line.com

We are proud to announce the launch of earth-line.com. The earth-line website was build using our custom CMS website as it's base code and then customized with shopping cart functionality. It includes a newsletter builder, product management with dynamic SKUs, ordering, user management, and copy management on all pages.

We are pleased to have worked with earth-line to create this website. earth-line is a wholly-owned brand/subsidiary of Green & Clean Energy Co. Ltd.  who have been researching and developing LED technology for mainstream applications.

RSS Feed added to CMS

We added a RSS feed to our website News function, please follow this link to learn more about it.

Darkstar Media launches CMS template website

We are pleased to offer our do-it-yourself website. It is an affordable CMS (Content Management System) website that allows you add and edit pages with ease, change your fonts, and manage different colour schemes. It can be used as is, or we can customize it to suit your needs with features such as a shopping cart or blog. Please click the link below to take a tour. http://www.darkstarmedia.net/CMS/Index.html

CMS is almost complete

The CMS (Content Management System) website we have been building is almost complete, we are just adding the final touches to it. This can be a low cost website solution where the users can manage their own copy, meta data, images, etc. It will come with some pre-designed skins or you can create your own from scratch. It will be very easy to add features and we could expand it to any size and use it as a base for a large scale website. More details to follow...

New site: blissology.com (Eoin Finn Yoga)

We are happy to announce the launch of Blissology.com (Eoin Finn Yoga). Working in collaboration with Jar Creative we built this innovative shopping cart website which allows users to download yoga videos directly into itunes with a full content management system for all products and orders. If you haven't heard of Blissology, we encourage you to check out the website and try some of the yoga routines. We did and have become loyal followers ever since. www.blissology.com

Saveable and fillable PDF forms with image import

Have you ever seen a PDF which you can download to your PC and fill at your own leisure? How about one where you can import your own image into it? We recently had to create such a form for a client and were surprised on how little documentation existed on how to do that. We tried to call Adobe and they offered little support. If you are interested in creating such a form we are going to do you a big favor and list out the steps needed to do so.

First some requirements.

• You will need Acrobat Pro 9 to create the form fields and save the PDF as rights managed
• You will need LiveCycle Designer (Windows Only)

1: Create your Form PDF in Acrobat Pro 9 and add the text fields
2: Under Advanced Menu - Choose: Extend Features In Acrobat Reader

Now if you just want text fields, this is enough, but if you want to give the user the ability to import and display an image, please follow the next steps...

3. Open LiveCycle Designer on the Windows platform
4. Open you PDF into this and Choose: Create an Interactive form with fixed pages
5. Open the Standard Objects and Choose "Image Field" (they have "Image" as well, don't get confused) and drag it to where you want the image import.
6. Save and close the document.
7. Open the updated document in Acrobat Pro again and choose Extend Features In Acrobat Reader (for some reason this setting wont stay after using LiveCycle)
8. Save again, and now you are done.


Hopefully this article will help anyone looking to build this type of PDF and that you find our tutorial first and save yourself hours of research (and a bit of frustration on not finding any clear tutorials).

It is getting easier and easier to slip into debt...

Visa Case Turns iPhone into Credit Card. I'm sure this will be the standard in a few years and we'll be using it too.

Flash games we developed

These are some flash games we developed many years ago. they are not to be taken too seriously, just a bit of fun and distraction.

http://www.darkstarmedia.net/games.php

New Website design: justinblayney.com

We are happy to launch the latest version of justinblayney.com. We had fun using jquery UI.layout for this website. I will be interested in seeing how this type of website will be indexed by the search engines and think for now, this will be good for small brochure type website like this one is. One use of the layout which I can see being very useful will be for contact forms or shopping carts sliding in from the right.

HTML5 - Canvas Element

We have been reading about HTML5 which is scheduled to come out later this year and it has some very exciting new features. One that we are interested in is the new canvas element. it allows you to draw 2D elements on the page using code and was first developed by Apple. It isn't yet supported by all browsers but will be soon. We were playing around today with it and did recreated the star in our logo, view it here. It supports transparencies and items can be overlapped.

Skinning Blogger

I just finished adding the new Darkstar Media website design to our Blogger blog. Not the easiest task, the Safari Inspect Element feature helped quite a bit. Please let us know if you are interested in having a blog to go with your website. We can create a custom blog from scratch or use a free one such as Blogger or Wordpress and add your design to it.

Online quote form

We are happy to announce a new online quote form for Darkstar Media. This will allow prospective clients to quickly give us a brief overview of their requirements and let us be more readily prepared to answer their inquiries.

Click here for our Quote form

Retiring HTML tables

Well, after many years, I have finally decided to phase out tables in my html code (except for tabular data). I held out for many years as the browsers simply would not agree on how to display the CSS properly and it didn't make sense to create different style sheets for every browser, browser version and operating system.

Over the last 2 months I have been experimenting and been pleased to discover that Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox, Safari and Crome finally agree on how to display CSS. I even found that IE 6 isn't too far behind.t

One tool I did use to help deal with browser issues was the CSS browsers Selector, which works great and has both a PHP and javascript version. But for the latest version of our Darkstar Media website, I didn't even have to use that once, which was very refreshing.

JOIN website launch

We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest website project JOIN. A fully accessible website which features font resizing, contrast changing and coded very lightly to allow for easy read-ability for disability software.

The Ontario goverment is working to create a barrier-free and accessible Ontario by 2025, this website follows that goal and we are pleased that we are able to contribute to this. You can read more about what the Ontario Government is doing here. If you would like to upgrade your website to be more accommodating to persons with disabilities, please contact us and we help you reach that goal.

New Darkstar Website

In keeping up with the Ontario Governments goal to make Ontario accessible by 2025, we have rebuilt our website to be fully accessible for persons with disabilities. Darkstar Media has done the research and we are ready to help build websites which are fully accessible for everyone. For more information, please contact us so we can discuss how to make your website more friendly and available to more people. We would also appreciate any and all feedback, especially from those using readers such as JAWS.

Website Accessibility

We are now in the process of building a website which will help people with disabilities to look for employment. This is the first time we have seriously looked into making websites accessibility compliant and were surprised to see how easy it is. Having run the website template through various validators we are happy to say that we pass them all. Yet we are surprised that all the online validators out there all bring back slightly different results (eg, warnings and recommendations).

We cannot post this website at this time but will be happy to when the website launches. If you would like more information on this, please drop us a line.

Intern Position Available

This position requires a solid understand of Dreamweaver, MySQL, PHP, AJAX, jQuery, and CSS.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Build out PHP / CMS functions
• Writ cross browser compatible code
• Create SEO friendly code
• Work within deadlines

Skills

• Very Strong understanding and expertise skills with PHP and MySQL.
• Strong knowledge of Dreamweaver, MySQL, PHP, AJAX, jQuery, CSS
• Basic Photoshop / Illustrator / graphic design software skills needed.
• French reading / writing an asset