The normal way of preloading images is by using JavaScript to do the job.  In the lieu of Firefox and it's NoScript type extensions I have stopped relying so heavily on JavaScript in my pages.  So where does that leave us when it comes to preloading images?

In steps CSS.  Most of the time when I want to preload and image it is for hover menu's or rollover type images that I know the user most likely won't hover over right away.  In this case I want the rollover's to work right away.  My next example won't please some of the real hard core standards people because it adds a little markup to the page, but in my opinion it is better than and less markup than the common JavaScript usually used to preload images.

At the bottom of the page before the closing body tag I add a preload DIV.  I assign the class of preload to the div and then let CSS handle the rest.  (you will also have to add a DIV element inside the preload DIV for every image you want to preload.  Hopefully in CSS  3 we can assign multiple images to the background of one element (DIV) but for now this works.

The CSS for this is

.preload
{
    position: absolute;
    width: 0px;
    height: 0px;
    margin-left: -9999px;
    background: url(yourimagehere.jpg) no-repeat;
}

Now the DIV elements inside the preload DIV only have to have the background set because they are going to go to the left along with the preload div. 

The reason I didn't do a display: none or visibility: hidden was because Opera and Safari are smart enough not to waste resources loading your images because it can see by the way you did the CSS that you don't want it to display.

This has worked great for me in the past and I am continuing to use it in the future.  I am sure some of you have arguments against it, and I would love to hear your arguments.  Please feel free to post a comment here. 

I am going to start a page by page guide for these type of things in the future that will allow users to search and find help while they create their own web sites.  For now you will have to search the blog to find good information.

Thanks for your time
~Mike

I am extremely frustrated this morning.  I tried to move my home web site, which is in DotNetNuke to IXWebHosting and I keep getting the following error.

Installing Database - Version 4.4.0...FAILURE 400 - Thread was being aborted

I have done some research and have found that it is most likely happening due to timeout issues, and I found the following help.

1. Open IIS, and right click on the virtual directory you set up for running the dotnetnuke install.  Choose "Properties".

2. Open the "ASP.NET" application tab, press "Edit Configuration", and then select the "Application" tab.

3.  Change the "Request execution timeout (seconds)" value to be say 900 or more.

The only issue I have with the above is that I can't get into the IIS configurations at IXWebHosting.  I have placed a trouble ticket into the hosting company and I am hoping that they will fix this for me.  I would just go to another hosting provider, but man these guys are very cheap and so far the service has been pretty reliable.

I don't get a lot of visitors here, but if anyone else has come up with this issue please feel free to comment on it, or give a solution that applies to hosting externally. 

You could also give me an opinion on who the best DNN hosting is.  I wouldn't mind. 

~Mike

One of my other goals with the CornerPixel web site is that I want to work on helping designers and developers who use CMS's to produce better standards compliant web sites even while using a CMS.

I will be setting up a couple CMS's in the near future.  One DotNetNuke (DNN) and one Umbraco site.  I will post in a couple weeks with URL's when I have those installed and skinned. 

The other thing I will be doing is providing DNN admins with good standard compliant skins in the near future.  There has been many who say that this is impossible, but I have seen several out there that have been done very well, and I intend to provide a similar service.  I think for free at first but I won't commit to that yet.

Well just wanted to update you and tell you all to keep checking in to see those CMS sites in action. 

Also please notice the cool RSS link at the top of the page. 

Thanks for listening,

~Mike

Well I went and did a little research and found I could download the TinyMCE editor and give that a try.  Unfortunately that didn't work.  I followed all the instruction and couldn't get the editor to show up.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a pretty awesome programmer and he mentioned that DasBlog had LiveWriter support and that I should try that avenue especially if it was the editor within DasBlog that was giving me fits. 

So I took my friends advice and this is a post I am doing via Windows LiveWriter.  I am also going to include a picture because I want to see how that works and where the picture ends up.

So there you have it.  My Logo, except with the wrong URL.  Lets see what happens.

~Mike