The style of a text link on a web page (hyperlink) should do two things effectively. It should clearly distinguish the link from normal text, so that users can see it at a glance, and it should create a clear hover effect, so users know when their mouse is hovering over it and that a click will activate the link.

The default link style in most browsers is blue with an underline. There is usually no default hover effect, other than the mouse pointer turning into a hand. The blue color and underline are widely recognized as links, so when designing your links you will want to keep that in mind. You don't have to stick to these conventions, but you can design very intuitive links by building off of them...

In the first part in this series you will learn very basic HTML and how to make a simple text-only website. This guide is focused on the absolute beginner, though you should be proficient in general computing tasks such as file and folder creation, navigating, and changing file extensions (on Windows, be sure to show file extensions).

You'll need a text editor to edit HTML with. Notepad or TextEdit will do for now. As you get better you will want a robust IDE such as TSW WebCoder or Adobe Dreamweaver. There are also free HTML editors such as CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor and Notepad++...

Reducing the file size of the images used in your web design can improve loading speeds, which will keep some visitors from leaving prematurely, and can reduce the load and bandwidth usage on your server. Large reductions in file size can be achieved by selecting the right format and quality, and taking the time to optimize each and every image that your design uses, no matter the size. I'm going to cover how to reduce the file size of both JPG and PNG images, and how you can do it without sacrificing the clarity of your images...

Having effective and well thought-out text spacing in your web design can increase the readability of the text, make it easier for users to scan through it and find specific points, and improve the look and feel of the design as a whole. Despite this, many designers ignore text spacing or give it considerably less attention than the graphical elements of their design. If your website relies at all on text to convey information, you would be shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring text spacing...

This guide will show you how to connect your Playstation 2 to your computer monitor and easily switch between the two on the fly. This guide has been migrated from my old guides site to here.

HDMI is not covered, but there are now HDMI switch boxes you can get, which will be a little simpler as long as your monitor has an HDMI input...

At some point when programming you probably realized that collision testing every object in your game is rather inefficient. A better way is to group objects based on their physical location in the game, and only collision test the bounds of the whole group. A quadtree does this, and can be used in 2D games to greatly speed up both collision detection and rendering...

If your site accepts user input, it's a good idea to understand the differences in newline characters between platforms and how to handle them (and it's just good to know in general). Say your site is running on a Unix host and receives comments or posts from Windows clients. Any HTML textarea form input sent from the Windows clients will contain newline characters that do not match those native to the Unix host. Likewise, if your site runs on a Windows host, the occasional Linux or Mac user will be sending non-native newline characters as well...

Here's a quick description of a unit vector for those that don't know. A unit vector is a vector with a magnitude (distance) of 1. The vector can be pointing in any direction, but the magnitude will always be 1. To get a unit vector from any old vector, you "normalize" that vector, which gives you a new vector with the same direction but a magnitude of 1. Unit vector and normalized vector are often used interchangeably...

When working with BitmapData and copyPixels, you'll quickly run into the limitation of not having an alpha attribute with which to change the transparency level of objects. If you're like me, you started out using Sprite and MovieClip in your games and could easily fade-in or fade-out objects using the alpha attribute. Unfortunately, BitmapData does not have the alpha attribute, so how do you adjust transparency dynamically while using copyPixels?

Creating semi-transparent BitmapData in ActionScript 3 is done using an ARGB hexadecimal value (32-bit). ARGB stands for Alpha-Red-Green-Blue and is just like an RGB hex value but with an alpha level at the beginning. Due to the alpha level, ARGB hex values are 8 hex digits and not 6. If you aren't familiar with hexadecimal, I suggest reading up on it before continuing...