A new venture has arrived at Pure Adapt, Inc. as we start the development of Adam’s brainchild. With Adam’s expertise in programming and using RSS he has developed a better way to keep up with everything happening with your favorite sports teams. LockerPulse will bring you an innovative and better way to get your team news.

Locker Pulse began as a side project that Adam was working on but now it has become our next major business venture at Pure Adapt. Read more about the conception of LockerPulse on Adam’s blog.

The design process has begun and I’m very excited to be involved in this unique venture into sports with the design ideas that we have. Take a sneak peek at what we have so far on the LockerPulse splash page and if you sign up now you’ll receive a special offer on launch. In the LockerPulse design we hope to bring users a better way to stay connected with their favorite sports teams through usability and simplicity with some badass aesthetics.

Starting with this unique design concept that we have really gives me an opportunity to push my design skills to the next level. Speaking of design, I want to say how much I hate IE for the umpteenth time, because it renders everything like crap. Now getting off that topic I’ll be using resources like Smashing Magazine for inspiration to get my design juices flowing and inject them into LockerPulse. The design is coming along and I can’t wait till we unveil it to the world in May.

LockerPulse is coming 5.1.2010! Sign up today to get a special offer when it goes public.

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A major earthquake hit Concepción, Chile on February 27, 2010 which impacted Earth as much as to have shifted the Earth’s axis 3 inches and shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds. Recorded at 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale it’s the 7th strongest in recorded history. Here we have another country devastated by a major earthquake less than 2 months after Haiti was struck. My Monthly Charity for February 2010 will be for the Save the Children organization as they prepare to send an assessment team to focus on the needs of children and their families.

Any disaster increases the vulnerability of children. And we know from experience that an earthquake of this enormity — with widespread destruction of homes, schools, infrastructure and piece of mind — will put thousands of children at risk, said Charles MacCormack, Save the Children’s president and CEO. – Save the Children Readies to Respond to Massive Earthquake in Chile

Our mission is to create lasting, positive change in the lives of children in need in the U.S. and around the world.

Our priorities are to ensure that children in need grow up protected and safe, educated, healthy and well-nourished, and able to thrive in economically secure households.

We provide a wide range of programs, including:

• Training community health workers to care for newborns and young children;
• Protecting vulnerable children from abuse and exploitation;
• Helping communities in at-risk countries to be prepared in advance of natural disasters; and
• Improving children’s health through regular exercise and nutritious food in the U.S.

– Save the Children Mission Statement

Save the Children does work around the world to help children in need and when an earthquake of this magnitude hits anywhere in the world it will surely be needed. There is an estimated 580,000 children that maybe affected by the quake. There will be a lot of children that will be in dire need of assistance after an earthquake like this and Save the Children will do it’s part to help.

How can we help? We can help the children of Chile by contributing to the Save the Children’s Emergency Fund which helps the organization respond to those in need in the disaster zone. Recovery efforts have just begun but every little contribution will make a difference.

Donate to the Children’s Emergency Fund Now >>

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While I was redesigning my blog and looking for inspiration I stumbled upon an amazing web design site, SmashingMagazine.com, which is choc full of useful web design information and inspiration.  When I first found the site I couldn’t get off it because of all the great information it had.

Smashing Magazine was founded in 2006 with the purpose of providing readers information about the latest trends and techniques in web development.

While I was on the site I found myself constantly pondering things like “I want to read this, I want to try that, or that’s awesome”. The quality of content that SmashingMagazine.com offers makes it one of my top design resources. Since discovering the site when I redesigned my blog about 5 months ago, visiting Smashing Magazine has become one of my beginning steps in my design process for inspiration and the latest design trends.

Check out some of their recent posts:

• 50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms)
• The Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript Implementation
• Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples
• 35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites

Smashing Magazine is an awesome design resource so as designers lets take advantage of resources like Smashing Magazine to keep up with trends and continue to innovate the web.

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These images from Discovery.com of the Naica Mine crystals are so amazing I had to post about it. The images of these giant crystals are unreal and the magnitude of them almost gives you a feeling of insignificance.

Nestling up to a cauldron of pressurized, molten rock is almost never a good idea. But in Mexico’s Naica mine, the payoff is worth the risk.

About 900 feet below the surface, there is a chamber filled with gypsum. It’s the same stuff that goes in the drywall in your house, only in Naica it spent half a million years parboiling in a chamber filled with magma-heated water.

Suddenly miners showed up and started pumping the mineral-rich broth out to get at valuable silver and lead deposits nearby. The result is a cavern filled with crystals 36 feet long and weighing in at up to 55 tons, easily the largest in the world…

See the complete story at Discovery.com – The Mega Crystals of Naica Mine: Big Pics.

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When I was designing the new Ask-a-Pro Detailer blog for Detailed Image I figured out a way to do an image swap without using Javascript.

The basis of this image swap technique is to set a background image to be your image you want to have swapped when you hover over it. Then insert the default image which will sit on top of the background hiding the background. Create a style to change the opacity of the default image to full transparency when you hover over it, voila you have an image swap.

Requirements
CSS3 Property: Opacity
Opacity changes the transparency of an element. Most modern browsers already support this CSS3 property. Set values between 0.0 (full transparency) to 1.0 (no transparency).

CSS2 Property: Pseudo Class :hover
Pseudo Class :hover is a dynamic action that happens when you hover over an element.

Examples:

Basic image swap using CSS.

The Code:
HTML
<div id=”css-image-swap-1″>
<img id=”swap-1″ src=”default-image-url” alt=”CSS image swap” />
</div>

CSS
#css-image-swap-1{
width:300px; height:150px; background:url(swap-image-url);
}
#css-image-swap-1 img:hover{
opacity:0;
}

I mentioned above that this method should work with most the modern browsers but I know it doesn’t work for IE7 and older because IE totally sucks.

I’m sure this has been done before but I’d thought I’d share this with everyone. I didn’t find this particular technique when I searched for CSS image swap but I did find others using this basic concept using CSS visibility instead of CSS opacity. Both techniques will get the job done for an image swap.

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This Super Bowl weekend we got something fun in the works at Detailed Image.  We’re doing a Super Bowl free shipping promo with a special bonus for free products. The special bonus is if you pick the winner of the Super Bowl between the Colts and Saints you’ll automatically receive a free 8oz Optimum No Rinse and Microfiber All Purpose Towel.

This is another example of the creative promotions we can do at Pure Adapt. Last April we did this cool little Easter egg promotion where eligible orders received a random plastic egg with a gift certificate in it.

It’s exciting when we really get to be creative with our marketing.  We try to keep it fresh so that our promotions don’t get mundane and over done.  We’ve done a great job in my opinion in keeping things pretty flexible so that we can do promotions like this.  When I’m planning out our marketing promotions I can see it getting repetitive and it’s nice when you get something new out there for our customers.

The thing I like best about his promotion is how the customer gets involved in the promo for a chance to get some free products.

Here are the complete details to our Super Bowl XLIV promotion:

Super Bowl Free Shipping
Coupon Code:  superbowl44
Bonus - Pick the winner of the Super Bowl and get a free 8oz Optimum No Rinse (ONR) and 1 DI Microfiber All Purpose Towel. Enter your Super Bowl pick in the comment field as “Colts” or “Saints”.

Minimum purchase $75 is required for free shipping and bonus. You must place a valid order using coupon code superbowl44 to make your pick eligible for free products. This offer cannot be combined with any other offers. Free shipping is only valid to 48 contiguous US states. Offer ends Sunday, February 7, 2010 6:00 PM EST.

I’m looking forward to a great Super Sunday, can’t wait.

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