Newer notes are at the top...
If you bought a microwave fireplace, could you spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes?
There have been changes to the GIF WIZARD (at gifwizard.com), but for non-commercial use, 'shrinking' GIFs is still free. It does a great job!
Did you know that you can use the spacebar instead of page down... in Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?
And... did you know that it is 'safer' to use   instead of if you want a non-breaking space? Apparently some older browsers don't support . You can use non-breaking spaces to leave extra white space between paragraphs. Use the following for three blank lines:
<P> 
<P> 
<P> 
When reducing the size of your graphics, changing a JPG to a GIF file isn't enough. JPGs, and a lot of 256 color GIF files can be reduced to 16 color GIF files... and the colors changed to the non-dithering variety.I used a few different programs. The Gif Wizard, an online utility, is great, especially for animations. I have Ulead's SmartSaver - for optimising GIFs and JPGs, but the demo will only work for about another 2 weeks.
Why is it that no amount of planning will ever replace dumb luck?
I usually have Windows95 set to display 16 million colors (24-bit). When Windows95 is displaying 256 colors (8-bit), a lot of graphics are dithered - even if they are saved in only 16 colors!Apparently this happens when they are not the 'right' colors! I read some articles about the standard 216 colors...
I learnt enough to be able to change graphics to display properly in 256 colors. There's probably a better - and quicker - way to achieve similar results, (Warum einfach, wenn es auch kompliziert geht?) so I won't embarrass myself by describing what I did!
I will tell you that the value for each element - red, green and blue - of the 'magic' 216 colors can only be 00, 33, 66, 99, CC or FF hexidecimal.
Yes, there are 216 different combinations for these values. See them here. This file will load quickly - it is not a graphic.
I've edited quite a few GIF files. I think GIF animations would need to be edited frame by frame. JPG files are saved in a minimum of 16 million colors, so they won't display properly on a 256 color system.
30 May 1997: I've discovered the GIF WIZARD!! It will 'shrink' your animations for you!!
If you're using a browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer (3 or higher) to look at my pages, you're probably not seeing them the way I intended you to see them.The same code is interpreted differently by the browsers. For example, in Netscape Navigator 3.01, margins, and some of the positions of graphics, are different.
30 May 1997: I now know how to make my margins the same size in Navigator as in Explorer. I will also be able to indent paragraphs and adjust paragraph breaks if I want to... all with a single transparent pixel!
Paragraph breaks are bigger in Netscape. This is not very noticeable in these pages, but made some others - when paragraph breaks were used inside lists - look awful. White space has a place, but that was not it!An 'invisible' border between your graphic and your text, using BORDER, won't be invisible in Netscape Navigator. So it's better to use HSPACE and VSPACE.
I've also found that animations 'run' faster in Internet Explorer than in Netscape Navigator.
I've been playing with graphics for years, and 'surfing the Net' since the beginning of 1997. Some pages have great graphics. However, some of these graphics won't be seen by many people because they take too long to load. On the Net, the size of your graphics is important. I've done quite a bit of 'fiddling'. JPG seems to be the best format for photos. Experiment with the compression level!One background JPG file I came across was 117K (and took 'forever' to load!). By re-saving the file with the compression set to 15 - the default in PaintShop Pro - the file was reduced to 38K. A compression level of 30 produced a 28K file. Experiment! Some files can stand more compression than others.
'Non-photo' graphics are probably best saved as GIFs. Complicated graphics might require 256 colors, but simpler ones can be reduced to 16 colors. Reducing the number of colors reduces the size of the file.
We've found some cute animations. Some animation files are rather big, but animation files can be reduced in size too. An animated GIF is made up of a number of frames. Microsoft Gif Animator - a free program - can be used to delete some of the frames, making the file smaller. Again, you'll have to experiment. Some frames will be more important than others.
We found a 'pretend' animated counter, but it was 37.8K. By deleting some frames, we reduced it to 13.4K - without significantly affecting the animation!
Gif Animator can also be used to make animations loop forever, or give animations transparent backgrounds. The row of smilies on this page didn't have a transparent background when I found it.
