Ah-Hah!!

Having seen some nice examples of sites on the Lightwave CSS content management system, I was inspired to create some templates in Photoshop that I think will are probably pretty do-able converted to CSS (plus maybe-gulp-tables-that I'm told are "like so last year"). But I had a nagging problem...how does one make a DIV block of say text and images with a semi-transparent solid colored background? Something where you'd like to visitor to still see the background pattern or image of your site, but having a background under your DIV block would make text & images more readable in there or just set them apart?

I Googled some solutions but the coding I found when tested didn't work. It's designed for CSS 3 which isn't universally supported yet...but probably will be supported in time. So, much to my glee, we tested out tiling a semi-opaque png tile in the background-image CSS tag and voila..it worked! There are probably lots of cool applications I'll think of later.

The slide show at the left (My self portraits look terrible -it gives me that "just farted" look)is from my backpacking trip with the Sierra Club in July 2008. The trip was in Northern California, in the Marble Mountains, near Etna,CA, amongst an explosion of wildflowers, and smoke from the fires. It was a fantastic experience and I'm going again this summer to do another backpacking trip from Mt.Hood to the Columbia River along the Pacific Crest Trail. Last summers trip was also along the legendary Pacific Crest Trail. There are crazy people that take 4 months and backpack the entire thing starting at the Mexican border in April and ending at the Canadian border in August or September, some solo. Our group encountered some of these souls... some traveled in pairs and just looked really tanned and kind of dirty. Some solo ones looked really hairy and dirty and traveled über light, having barely anything with them. The men without exception had enormous beards. I saw a few women, one even hiking in a skirt (guess it keeps things ventilated) and they looked okay. Having backpacked and hiked only 4-11 miles per day, I bathed daily...I could not take the thought of not really washing, even outdoors in cold water. It was awesome.