The problem. Years ago, computers only had 128 characters: a-z, A-Z, punctuation, etc. They only spoke English. Few kool symbols. But that was then, this is now.

I’ll spare you the entire evolution from then to now, all you need to know is now we have Unicode (UTF-8) which gives us thousands more characters/symbols. From The Official Google Blog:

For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings.

So we have more characters/symbols now. How many? Over a hundred-thousand Unicode characters/symbols. But there’s only about 60,000 characters you really need, enough to cover all the modern languages. Most computers/websites won’t recognize much beyond this, otherwise known as “Plane 0″ or the “Basic Multilingual Plane”.

In HTML, that’s just about everything between ! and  where “xxx” in &#xxx; is the decimal number of the Unicode symbol/character you want represented. If you’re wondering,  looks like this: . By the way, forget about hexadecimal numbers, decimal is preferred for representing characters/symbols this way.

If you have an older version of Windows, you may not have most of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which is why you can’t see many of these kool symbols. To see these characters/symbols in the Firefox browser you first need to install Code2000.

How to install the Code2000 characters/symbols. Download the .ZIP file, here. Extract it. Remember where you extracted it, you’re going to need the directory in a minute. Now click your “Start” button, click “Settings / Control Panel”, and inside your Control Panel you will see “Fonts”, double-click it. Now you will see all the fonts you have installed, but guess what, none of them have the kool symbols/characters you want. Now click “File / Install New Font” and locate the directory where you extracted the Code2000.ZIP archive. Now you should see “Code2000 (TrueType)”. Select it and click “OK”. You’re done!

Almost like magic, all your incomplete fonts inherit the kool symbols/characters of Code2000, automatically. Even though you’re using Times New Roman (or whatever font) in Firefox, Windows is smart enough to grab the appropriate, missing Unicode characters from Code2000.

Now you have thousands and thousands of new characters/symbols to play with. Remember to tell your friends to get these characters. Otherwise they can’t see what you’re writing.

Note: I don’t know the maker of Code2000. It’s a “shareware font” which means the font is free but the maker is asking for a donation if you can afford it.

α в ¢ ∂ є ƒ g н ι נ к ℓ м η σ ρ q я ѕ т υ ν ω χ у z
^^

i luv d alphabet in this style..i have my whole myspace page with this font and my msn name aswell =]

A line from the Doors, if you were wondering. This style of writing is loosely based on the ANSI writing we used to do in the early 90s. Only today we don’t have ANSI and consequently there’s way more code required. Isn’t it amazing how simple stuff gets so complicated?

Our solution back in the day was a program called TheDraw, this allowed us to “write in flames”. Well, it was faster to use TheDraw than to code every letter by hand. It was fun then and I’m sure it will be fun for people far into the future. This is sure to be popular, I can’t believe I’m giving this idea away!!! ;-)

In this example I used CSS. CSS is more complicated than ANSI but it’s also a lot more flexible. Back in the ANSI days we couldn’t resize letters. Notice in this example I gradually step down the size of letters in longer words to simulate how flames taper to a tip! This is just part of the algorithm, I’m not crazy enough to style each letter individually! But if you are, go right ahead!

The plan originally? A writing generator for Myspace comments. Only problem is, Myspace blocks most of my code. The other problem here, you’ll notice the fire animation doesn’t loop forever. I was going to fix that before I discovered this doesn’t work on Myspace.

But, if you want to you can still salvage this idea. And I’m going to tell you how to do it. Am I a nice guy or what? Actually, I’m giving this idea away because I have two totally new (unrelated) ideas and won’t have time to continue developing this idea. Have at it!

First, you might want to register some of the relevant domain names. I would register them myself but like I said, I have other ideas I’m working on. Some of these might be registered already, let me know what you come up with:

“fire writing” firewriting.com
“flame writing” flamewriting.com
“fire writer” firewriter.com
“flame writer” flamewriter.com
“write in fire” writeinfire.com
“write in flames” writeinflames.com
“write flames” writeflames.com
“write fire” writefire.com
“flame letters” flameletters.com
“flame words” flamewords.com
“fire letters” fireletters.com
“fire words” firewords.com
“fire generator” firegenerator.com
“fire writing generator”
“flame writing generator”
“fire letter generator”
“fire letters generator”
“flame letter generator”
“flame letters generator”

Seems like I could do that all day, right?

Anyway, now that you have some good domains, now you’re going to need some graphics. Here’s the tedious part. You’re going to want 26 animated letters, that’s 26 files! If you want uppercase too that’s going to cost you 52 files. To make matters more complicated, you probably want them all to be .GIF animated. Now you’re thinking: How am I going to .GIF animate all those files? Here’s some options:

1. Do them all by hand. It might take you forever but if you have that kind of patience you might come up with really incredible effects. You could make the letter “i” look like a candle with a little flame coming up at the top. You could synchronize the movement of the flames to make it look like there’s a small breeze blowing over the letters, use your imagination.

2. The fastest way to do it? Don’t animate the letters at all, just surround the letters with fire. Insert the same little fire animation between words where you might put a space. Not as cool but the letters might appear to be on fire. If you’re thinking: I could do this with CSS, don’t bother, I already tried it, Myspace blocks it!

3. Find a tool to “batch process” your letter images from a command prompt. The trick will be to find a tool that will batch process .gif animations. If you’re a UNIX guru this might be the way to go.

4. Find a graphics program w/ a macro system and/or a scripting language. If you know your graphics program inside and out, this might be the way to go. In fact, you could use the same script to generate all the letter graphics too. Something like this: open-file, draw-letter, shift-hue-to-red, paste-flame-animation, save.

If you’re driven enough you can do it. Or outsource the work to one of those freelance marketplaces.

Now you have all the graphics, you’re going to need a PHP script. The PHP script should take a textarea and convert the text into graphics. I’m not going to explain how you do this, you can figure it out yourself. There’s going to be three sections: textarea, preview, code. Now get to work! If your script goes viral, congrats! Let me know, we can trade links!

In closing, it’s too bad Myspace blocks so many codes. This is their one strength and they’re totally blowing it.

how do i get my writing to the right of my about me?
no one seems to understand what i mean so ill explain more.
you no how writing is on myspace normally?
i want it on the oppisite side,
not center,
the oppisite side?
help ive been trying to find out for 2 weeks.

Kelsey, I think this is what you want:

Looks like:

I made the background color yellow so you can really see the width of the "div" container. The "200px" is the width of the box, larger numbers make it wider, adjust the size to your needs. If that's not what you want let me know.

The "big" tag makes text bigger:

Looks like:
Big. Bigger. Biggest. Bigger. Big.

If you want an exact size use a span with a font-size in pixels:

Looks like:

Everything in here is 60 pixels high.

Think of a "span" like a span of time, for as long as you write inside this span, all the text will take on the style you define. You can add more style after the semicolon. Notice I added "line-height" so the text isn't bunched up:

Looks like:
This is a bold red serif font!

Let me know if that helped.

Image hotlinked from his work blog:

Check Martin's Behance profile for more info.

Looks like:

This text is SteelBlue!
This is SteelBlue too!

So it's a text generator but humor is more the emphasis, rather than the font. This is why I registered Koolwriting.com, I knew text generators would be popular. I'll post more "speech bubble" links as I find them.

I average 5,000 pageviews a day, pay 110 a month for a low end dedicated box and my site has load spikes 2 times a day. I installed WP Super Cache and while it has helped, I still get big traffic spikes and some crashes. My webhost says I need to upgrade to quadcore dedicated! For this many pageviews?? Crazy!

Struggling with you own success? Ads starting to pay off but you're in stormy waters? Server sinking fast, every traffic spike threatens your survival? Is your server slooooow today? Does your host already have a gun to your head? "Pay me more or suffer the consequences." Sound familiar?

Congratulations! You made it to Stage 2! Now the bad news: You're going to evaluate and reevaluate every line of XHTML, CSS and PHP. If you don't, you're paying the consequences in hosting charges.