About a week ago, after 8 months of hard usage, the original earphones from my iPhone went silent on me. “Don’t panic!”, I said to myself, thinking that after a quick visit to Switch(a very known Apple dealer in the Antwep area) my iphone will sing only for me again. Well, what do you know? “We don’t have them”. Damn!

Once I got home looked even on eBay; nothing trustworthy. Hey!  www.apple.be! After browsing for like 10 min. - disappointment - Apple did not have them either. I know, it’s unbelievable - Apple’s iphone accessories page.

Luckily, a friend of my boss suggested to try Mobistar. And he was right! Today I went to one of their stores and the guy there said they just came in. Success!

The peeling stickers are definitely pretty popular these days on the web. I bet you’ve all seen them and some of you might even wondered how are these things done. I’m going to write a tutorial as soon as I’ll have some free time, but until then here’s a PSD source for one.

Download

• Web 2.0 peeling sticker PSD

Haven’t written anything in a while now, haven’t been on vacation if that’s what you think, even if that would have been great; I’ve just been working, so here are some things that I’ve done. All of them are contest entries on SitePoint so the logos are not mine and they are only mockups, nothing finished.

The gallery:

Right now I’m doing a lot of changes, for the better I hope, so that everybody knows that I’m alive and active. Latest thing I did was to change the size of the profile picture and the picture itself on stelianfirez.com, so my face is no longer covered by the Nescafé mug. “Season7″ comes from this phase I’m going through at the moment with the moving to a foreign country and looking for a job there. “Season7″ is also the name of a WordPress theme I’m selling right now on SitePoint (http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/11267).

Back to the changed profile, here’s the new picture:

I usually don’t post these kind of things, but right now I need as much good publicity as I can get. So, the logo made it to the FAVEUP gallery and it even got some votes. Here’s how it looks:

If you like it yourself, you can vote it at http://faveup.com/design/404. Don’t worry about the “404″ in the link, it’s just the logo’s id :) .

It seems that Aaron Bassett has found a much easier way to get the 1px dotted borders in IE. You can see it here.

Step 1
Open an image editing software, I chose Photoshop, and make 3 transparent GIF or PNG images like the ones bellow:

right_dot.gif
size: 1×2

bottom_dot.gif
size: 2×1

topleft_dot.gif
size: 2×2

Step 2
This is the CSS part. Just create 3 classes for the DIVs which will get you the needed borders. Here’s how the classes should look like:

.right-border{ margin: 0; padding: 0 1px 0 0; background: url(right_dot.gif) repeat-y 100% 0%; } .bottom-border{ margin: 0; padding: 0 0 1px 0; background: url(bottom_dot.gif) repeat-x 0% 100%; } .topleft-border{ margin: 0; padding: 1px 0 0 1px; background: url(topleft_dot.gif) repeat 0% 0%; } p{ background: #ffffff; /* It’s necessary to give the dotted bordered element a background color */ }

Step 3
Last thing were going to do is put this piece of code around the element that we want to have dotted borders:

<div class="right-border"> <div class="bottom-border"> <div class="topleft-border"> <p>Here's how you can have dotted borders</p> </div> </div> </div>

TIP
If you want to apply the borders to an image you’ll notice that the DIV will be wider than the image itself. To fix that you can add to the right-border class the float: left; property and afterwards add to the class of the element that succeeds the right-border DIV the clear: both; property.

Example

I know this is not what you’ve been dreaming for, but if you hate dashed borders and you need to have dotted ones in all browsers this is one way you can do it.

Well Belgium, here I am. Yes it’s true, for five days now I’ve been living in Liege in “Les Homes du Sart-Tilman”. The only reason I chose this place is that I’ve stayed here before, while I was an Erasmus student.

So I’m back, the only difference is that instead of studying, now I’m looking for a job. It’s obvious that I’m not gonna look for a place to work only in Liege or in Belgium cause Netherlands and Luxembourg are really close, I mean, after all Benelux is actually my target.

I know it’s not gonna be easy, being a Romanian and everything, but I hope that someone will appreciate my work and my skills. So starting from today I will send my CV to any company from Benelux which is hiring web designers. Whish me luck :) !

So I made another theme. I know I promised to release “Numbermac” first, but 24frz seemed to be a better choice at this moment.

Some things i could say about it: it’s pretty clean, it has a lot of space and if needed it can be modified pretty easy to fit an 800×600 screen resolution. Another great thing about it is the header which being so thin leaves the focus on the post.

I’ve decided to use it because I want to prove that it works good and I don’t mind it being the face for my blog. Plus I like to change the look of my site whenever I can. I also added a link in the header for people to see that they can download this theme. Enough talking, hope you like it.

Download

• 24frz theme

By the way, if you’re wondering how “Numbermac” looks like I can only tell you that it’s inspired from the Mac Aqua desktop.

Here’s the latest WordPress theme that I designed and coded. It’s called “Numberlay” and besides downloading the actual theme you can also download the source file.

Some things you should know about this theme:

License

• You may not resell this theme
• A link back to stelianfirez.com must be kept in the footer
• You can use the theme in any kind of project, personal or commercial
• You can modify it as you like

The Sidebar

If you are using WordPress 2.2 this version has WordPress Widgets included. If you are using a previous version you can install the widgets plugin from Automatic; in this case you will find along with the theme package the widgets plugin file customized.

Details

• Screenshot
• Demo
• Download Theme
• Download Source File

If you find any bugs that you can’t fix please leave a comment and I’ll solve the problem.

welovewp.com is a nice gallery of WordPress power sites i’ve found a couple of days ago while surfin the web.

It’s the same template you can also download on the main site, nothing different.

I just posted it here too for those who have never visited stelianfirez.com before. It’s made somewhere in December, last year. The zip file doesn’t contain the fonts because some of them are under license. So there are some screenshots on Flickr so you can see what you’re about to download.

ScreenShots:

• Home
• Products
• Categories
• Cart
• Billing

Source files:

• RoomShop.zip

You can start by reading this article about how to use mod_rewrite and get the most of it for search engine URLs.

I’m sure that those of you who have already visited my website have seen the screen below.

Yeah, I know, it’s been on the front page for the last 3 months, but I had a lot of things to do since February. Anyway, this time I will keep the blog updated and will come with free stuff and tips all the time.