The Chatterbox

Welcome to my little personal home on the web.

This is where you see rantings and ravings, coding help as well as all kinds of strange and diverse things that I end up dipping my finger in.

For those who don't already know me, my name is Randy Cullom. I build web sites. I use to build and market them for other people, however these days I only make sites for myself. It's much less stressful than doing it for other people, and more profitable too!

In addition to designing, coding and marketing web sites, I also run a few servers to house the sites that our sites reside on and watch over the servers for a few friends. Seriously, it's a lot less expensive to lease a dedicated server than it is to pay for hosting of multiple sites. It does take a little know-how though.

What will you find here? Well, there's my blog that is aptly named The Chatterbox. There you'll see me espousing about all sorts of related and unrelated subjects. They range from coding and building web sites, to how to market your web sites, to the weather, to anything that happens to pique my interest.

You'll also find some tools I have built because I or someone else needed them. There is the little WhoIs engine I built to query the various WhoIs servers around the world to figure out who owns a domain and/or who is responsible for a certain IP number. I use this mostly to report spammers since I detest them!

There is also a little CSS Rollover Creator that I whipped up to make it easier to create unique navigation blocks for your web sites. This is a variation on a theme from a Javascript rollover button creator that I created ages ago. I'm a big proponent of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. It's more user and search engine friendly than the old JS way of doing things.

I've also uploaded a little script I made for a friend called ImageFun. This is about the 20th version of this particular script. ImageFun is basically a Photo Gallery script, though it can be used for many other purposes. It started out as a javascript routine that would simply spit out the code you need to make image gallery pages where the larger images appear in a dynamically sized pop up window.

These days ImageFun is built in PHP and will actually create the thumbnail images for you if you would like. The code it spits out is still simple HTML and Javascript, but to use it on your server you will need to have PHP enabled. You'll also need to have a module called ImageMagick installed. Most servers these days have both of these available.

If you want to get a feeling for how ImageFun works, two sites it is currently being used on are Elia's Magic Moments Prom Dress site and the Planet Sound Community Arts site. On the first site click on any of the designers, then click on any of the thumbnail images of prom dresses. On the PSCA site, a wonderful organization by the way, go to any of the photograph Galleries and choose a thumbnail image.

I'll be adding other stuff that I have created over the years, or at least the things that I managed to save from a hard drive crash I had a few weeks back. Most of that stuff will require some updating since it was likely created years ago.

I'll try to post something interesting from time to time in the blog, but I don't currently have a set schedule for posting. It really depends upon what come across my desk and whether I have a moment to post about it. I'll try to get more consistent with that.