eBook & Internet Publishing News
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A few days ago, I I wrote about PopBox, a cool tool that allows you to make zoomable images on your web pages. The nice fellow who created PopBox, John S. Reid, saw my blog article and informed me of a little mistake.

I thought I was being clever by manually adding (using a graphics program) those borders round the thumbnail and zoomed-in versions of the images. Turns out that I wasn’t so clever after all - I was wasting my time - PopBox could have done it automatically for me. Oops!

We have completed our price review of the products at ScriptRocket.com - our web site which offers a range of flexible PHP scripts for webmasters. Some changes have already been implemented, but others will be going through shortly:-

• Polls - Create your own web polls - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Click/Counter Tracker - Invisibly count visitors to web pages or clicks on your advertising links - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Feedback Form - Email form to get feedback from your visitors - is now priced at US $14.95^*
• CBRocket - our flexible search engine and text link advertising solution for ClickBank affiliates, is still available at the old price for now - US $34.95^* - but the price will be rising on approximately the 23rd January. Pleas e purchase on January 23rd if you wish to get it at the current price!
• All other prices, are unchanged for now, though of course we do reserve the right to make further changes. It’s worth pointing out that the Essential Scripts - collection of scripts which includes containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form is now even better value than ever.

^* These prices don’t include VAT (Value Added Tax) which applies for European Union residents at their national rate.

ScriptRocket.com is our web site where we offer a number of powerful PHP scripts that you can use on your web site(s). These include:

• Piranha Feed - A script for quickly integrated automatically updated content from Amazon.com to your web pages. It also allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site. And all product links are tagged with your Amazon associate ID, allowing you to earn commissions from sales of these products.
• CBRocket - A ClickBank search engine for your site - it can also display context sensitive advertising links. With this script, the links are coded with your ClickBank nickname, allowing you to earn commissions from them.
• Top Site - start your own top sites list (other webmasters will send you traffic for free).
• Polls - Create your own web polls.
• Click/Counter Tracker - an invisible page counter and advertising tracking script.
• Feedback Form - Get feedback from your visitors
• Essential Scripts - A collection of scripts, at reduced price, containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form.

Anyway, while don’t often raise our prices, consider this post as advanced warning that we do intend to make some price rises on most, perhaps all, of the ScriptRocket products in the very near future. The new prices will should come into effect some time on Tuesday January 15th 2008^*. In short, if you want to purchase any of these products at the current (cheaper) prices, please do so on or before Monday January 14th 2008.

^* Although this is the planned day for the price changes, there are a few technical issues that we need to deal with… it’s there is a very small outside chance that the implementation of the changes may take slightly longer than we expect. Don’t bank on it though!

Happy New Year!

I’m already back at work, so let’s get down to it: I’ll begin the year with a quick plug for a wonderful, and free, tool for displaying image thumbnails. The tool is called “PopBox” and what it does is allow you to put thumbnail images in your web pages which when clicked, can expand, shrink, or stretch in various ways. The cool thing about PopBox is that it’s based around JavaScript (and a little CSS), so it’s easy to add to pretty much any web page - and you don’t need to mess around with Flash.

The tool is called PopBox, and it’s available from the following web site: http://www.c6software.com/Products/PopBox/

It’s worth checking out the site to see what it can do - and you’re probably already getting ideas for how you could use it. If you have a photogallery on your site - that’s one obvious application for starters. I’ve just added to our Guide to Muscle Gain (click on any one of the four little thumbnails of the pages, about half way down the page, just after the big image of the Table of Contents).

When you’re using PopBox, you don’t actually need to make up separate thumbnails for each image that you use it on. However, as with most things in life, a little extra effort can pay great dividends. On Guide to Muscle Gain, I actually spent a few minutes actually preparing the images and thumbnails for a better result:

(the grey background around the images below is not actually part of images, but was chosen just so you can see the edges of the images).

Step 1: Take a screenshot of the page Step 2: Scale down the screenshot image by 50% in both directions Step 3: Add a 2 pixel black border on all four sides of the image from step 1 (this becomes the zoomed in image) Step 4: Add a 2 pixel black border on all four sides of the image from step 2 (this becomes the thumbnail image)