In this tutorial you will learn how to create new hard disk partitions using the fdisk utility. First thing to check is that you have available space available on your hard drive to partition. You also need to make sure that the number of partitions on the existing hard drive is not maxed. The max is 4 unless you are using extended partitions, but we’ll go over that in a different tutorial. In my case, the hard […]

Connecting to a MySQL database is a simple process requiring only 2 functions. 1 function to connect to the server and 1 function to connect to the desired database. The functions used to establish a MySQL connection are mysql_connect() and mysql_select_db(). First lets start by seeing a sample of the connection code and then I’ll go through and explain each function.

Web Scraping, also known as Web Harvesting and/or Web Data Extraction is the process of extracting data from a given web site or web page. In this tutorial I will go over a way for you to extract the title of a page, as well as the meta keywords, meta description, and links. With some basic knowledge in PHP and Regular Expressions you can accomplish this process with ease. First lets go over the regular expression meta […]

Whether it’s in print, tv or on the web retro graphics are becoming more and more popular in today’s media. Today we’ll be going through a few photoshop techniques used to create retro graphics. Feel free to download this tutorial at the bottom of the page and follow along with each layer as we create a retro city scene from the 70′s. We’ll be going through a step by step process to create the following city scene: […]

In this tutorial we will be going over an easy way of creating a lightweight LightBox effect that you can use any of your websites. This tutorial will use some effects to give your LightBox some style such as fading in and out. Lets start by setting up our document with some basic HTML markup.

With this tutorial, you will learn how to add basic validation to any form. This lesson will be a continuation of my other tutorial for creating an ajax php contact form. Click here if you have not yet gone over that one. Lets start by opening our code with our jQuery and form. We want to create a way that we can choose which fields to validate without much work. For this tutorial I will be adding […]

Creating a grunge style website in Photoshop takes a variety of different brushes, fonts and techniques in order to implement it correctly. In this tutorial we’ll go through the entire process of creating a grunge website from start to finish. Once you’ve completed the tutorial below you should end up with a design similar to the following: Start out by creating a new document with a white background at 774px by 900px (These dimensions are for the […]

In this tutorial we’ll learn how to create custom brush patterns and apply random effects to remove the copy/paste appearance the pattern comes with. This is a useful technique when trying to create a variety of shapes in different sizes, opacity, colors and angles without having to duplicate and modify each shape individually. I’ve applied this effect on a series of bamboo sticks to illustrate the randomness of the effect. Start out by creating a new document […]

Removing backgrounds from images can be a much easier process than most people think. The first approach a lot of people take is going directly to the magic wand or polygon lasso tool in Photoshop. While these are both very powerful tools and can achieve great results when used correctly, they can still be somewhat time consuming and aren’t always the correct approach when removing a background from an image. In this tutorial we’ll go through a […]

In this tutorial we are going to go over the steps that will allow you to convert your dynamic URL’s to nice SEO static links. Lets start by examining the URL we are going to be converting. /index.php?page=contact This is a pretty typical looking dynamic URL. Notice we are assigning the identifier of contact to the page key. The only part in this URL that will change is the identifier contact. Lets say we want to convert […]