Basic Tip :
BackUp to Avoid Catastrophe
You may have noticed the new backgrounds that are being used in a lot of people's e-mails and posts. The name coined for these kinds of backgrounds currently is "Corner Backs," or some variation of that phrase. These are backgrounds that have a "single" image in the upper right corner with usually the remainder of the background being black. Here is a tip from one of our readers on this new phenomenon. It's followed by a brief discussion on how to create a Corner Back, but deb's site is one of a few popping up by our fellow WebTvers with ready to transload Corner Backs.
Intermediate Tip :
Corner Backs
*deb* "
ADDITIONAL INFO The above is the gist of deb's e-mail. As she mentions, this is another of the WebTV exclusive traits or design. Even if you were to send an e-mail to Hotmail, for example, and view it via WebTV, Hotmail is a non-WebTV based provider and they do not support this.
The interesting thing, however, is although these backs were created for e-mail, they can also be utilized on home pages. In deb's case, in particular, the backs on her site are mostly created at 526 x 751 and fill a WebTV viewed background very nicely. Some are a little larger at 544 x 1000 on some sites. So, how do you make one? Well, we discussed two articles ago, in issue #34 on July 4th, how to customize backgrounds. Refer to the above link to retrieve that article. The basic thing to remember is corner images on transparent backgrounds take less time to load than corner images on a graphic background. Most if not all of the ready made corner backs I've seen are generated on transparent backgrounds. Other collections of corner backs can be found under deb's Links section on her site. Deb has almost 200 background images on her site alone at this point with almost a dozen links to other corner back sites.... Now that's a generous collection. Some of the site webmasters have a "submit your requests" feature on their sites and will create a custom back for you if they can (or their time permits) and may take from a few days to a few weeks for them to do so. Although it's been harped upon many many many times, it bears repeating: please remember to transload the backgrounds that you use. These generous folk have taken the time to create these images and they request and would be most appreciative if you transload the images to your own site.
A neat trick or effect with these backs would be to have them "scroll" in the background. They can be made to scroll either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The code for this is added to the <body> tag:
<body background="http://URL_of_cornerback" yspeed="10">
To have the image scroll vertically, use yspeed for horizontal use xspeed and for diagonal movement use both
<body background="http://URL_of_cornerback" xspeed="10" yspeed="20">
Since this is a WebTV exclusive trick not widely documented, I could not find the upper limit of the specified speed. From experience I do know a speed btween 5 and 10 is a pretty leisure pace (depending on the image & the make-up of your page). You want to decide on a pace that will make your page look intriguing without being distractive to your viewer. Another point to remember: if you have animated images on your page, background movement will be very jumpy and slow at best. Using animated images and background movement will also interfere with the image animation.
The following tip was noticed while browsing through one of the html newsgroups. It was sent by one of our members for use in the article.
"Not so much a building tip, as a security tip. I had my main page dumped by tripod..." twice, "...and had to rebuild. I went crazy mailing them, and getting nowhere. After the last re-build, I..." cut & pasted "...ALL codes, of ALL pages, and have them safe and sound in my saved mail folder. I also sent them to a friend who is on computer, who loaded them on zip file.... maybe over-kill, but I'm not going to have to go thru that again. I suggest to anyone who has lost a page, thru no fault of their own.... SAVE EVERYTHING...!! LeeAnne...aka...DragonLadee"
"Hello... I have found a way for Webtv users to have corner images in their backgrounds, and it seems to have become a huge hit! I had over 25,000 hits in less than a week to my page, and boy was I amazed!!!
:o) After only 4 days of the revealing of my site, I found that I had won one of Webtvs most desired awards!!...(Draacs Pick of the week).
...P.S. I have removed my corner image bg, since I know only webtv'ers can see it. :)