Background Action, old school

Freeway
1

Hi folks. I am trying one more time to use Freeway like I used to. I am using 3.5 and Tiger. I had gone over to SandVox and have been doing a lot of tweaks in the CSS and HTML output in BBEdit. Pagespinner has been a great help also. The last time I poked my head back in to Freeway I was asking about upgrading to 4.x or not, while using CSS with freeway

Now I am just sick and tired of trying this and trying that. I have to focus just on content creation and the heck with the rest of it. Assuming of course that by now, I have some good skiis so that what I create wont be junk either.

So I will likely revisit some old school basic questions to jog my memory and past use of Freeway. If at the end of this attempt and discussion I realize I really need freeway again and four is a good choice, I will treat myself to the $99 upgrade. I am not feeling a pull to Leopard yet though so if there is any penalty with four and Tiger, I Would wait on that switch for a while.

Question #1, Background Actions:
My action menus seem messed up so that may be part of the problem, I am not sure. There “should be” three ways of putting an action on a page, the upper Action menu, the button left double click on the action pallette, and the insert action of the tools menu. Only the double click on the button left of the action palette will show all the actions installed, the other methods will not.

I do have the background image action installed on the m,aster page. But it isn’t applied to any image. I Can’t see (remember) how to make it actually work with a background image All it shows me is how to center left center or right, horiz or vert. And turn scrolling on and off. The second tab is grayed out and it just isn’t doing anything.

Why this is relevant:
My site exists but I designed it on a 12" PowerBook. It looks too small on “normal” screens and I am thinking that a 900 pt width would do nicely. Naturally I can have white sides but I would prefer to be in control of how this will output. I want the header banner to go as far as needed to appear complete and centered in any browser or window. The problem is of course that if I set a width of 1800 and then I center my layout on that, then it shows way off center on the browser as it is still centering on the whole 1800 pt size.

I am pretty sure this is easily done and that I have done it before. But I can’t remember how? This should be just a repeating background image. I am assuming that I can create a composite gif background image and include a header and white body and colored wings. Then apply it NOT set to tile. I just cant remember how?

Thanks if you can say how this is done.

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Hi

If you show us what you are trying to recreate we will probably be better able to assist - have you a link to the site in question?

Background image handling is now built into FW4 and not a separate action.

As to how you create a tiling background for any size screen: http://softpress.com/kb/article.php?id=293

This also might help: http://softpress.com/kb/article.php?id=311

As to how actions are actually implemented is down to the particular action itself - some are just ‘page’ or ‘item’ actions and so can only be applied in the relevant way. There are also ‘object’ and ‘folder’ actions.

If you go into Edit>Actions… you will see a list of available actions and their types.

Page actions are applied using the Page>Actions menu (with no object selected on the page) I believe that Backround Image is one of these but don’t quote me as it has been some time since I upgraded from 3.5 and used it. So for that reason they are not all available using the methods you suggest.

Hope this helps some but if you can give us a link we will all be able to jump in and give advice how to achieve what you want.

David

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OK: http://thegoldenthread.net/

The site is “OK” now, but I need to take it up a notch, or two. There is no space for Adsense and I am rethinking my content. When I view this it looks quite small on browsers with larger screens. I did it in SandVox as I mentioned because I really didn’t want to get into the part of Freeway where I had to start worrying about what would validate and how to tweak this and that all the time. But of course I ended up doing that anyway. :wink:

TO answer my own question, there is a place on the pallet to select the background image, I just couldn’t remember how Freeway did that, now, I do. I decided to create a gif with a header and a large, page sized background. I set it to NOT tile. It looks good so far on my desktop in Safari and in OmniWeb.

I am now setting the page width to 900 or 100, haven’t completely decided, but larger than it was.

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Sometime around 13/1/08 (at 11:50 -0500) levelbest said:

OK: http://thegoldenthread.net/

(Not a criticism at all, just a techie aside: does
http://thegoldenthread.net/ work as a clickable link in the web
forum? The mixed ‘url’ pseudo-tags around it seemed to break that in
email here.)

This shouldn’t be at all hard to replicate in Freeway, if that’s what
you want to do.

I really didn’t want to get into the part of Freeway where I had to
start worrying about what would validate and how to tweak this and
that all the time. But of course I ended up doing that anyway. :wink:

Well, the good news is that it is generally not all that easy to make
pages that don’t validate! Not in a proper validator that isn’t
biased towards a particular method, as some seem to be.

Some older add-in actions may add or modify the code in ways that
don’t always validate perfectly in every level of HTML. But that’s
generally a far, far cry from what validators are actually trying to
prevent.

TO answer my own question, there is a place on the pallet to select
the background image, I just couldn’t remember how Freeway did that,
now, I do.

Bingo! Use the Inspector palette’s Background panel options to add a
background graphic. Or just hold down the Shift key as you
drag-and-drop a web-ready graphic onto your page; that’s a speedy
shortcut for the same task.

k

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