The Great Pet Lookups of Neopia by rebeccawolf |  |
Untitled Document
NEOPIA CENTRAL - So you've got your -own- lookup. It's special to you, and
made so no one can take it. Maybe you made the background yourself, maybe the
entire thing yourself, or maybe you worked off of a template. However you made
your lookup, you're probably satisfied with it by now, or perhaps you're still
experimenting.
But what about your pet's lookup?
It's something not immediately thought of in every owner's mind, but each pet
needs a good lookup, and a good page. I'm going to see if I can explain to you
how to make a lookup well. (The HTML tutorials should explain the entire page
thing good enough.)
Let's say you have the perfect lookup for yourself, in your opinion. Ever.
You're feeling quite satisfied with yourself, but something feels to be missing.
"...Ah! The hover colors, they're terrible!" No, silly, now when people go to
see your pet (being quite impressed by YOUR lookup and all), they see a normal
old page! Your lookup should have something to go with it, and an extension
of your personality in each way, so when working on your pet's little corner
of the web, keep that in mind. It would be rather interesting to see a pet and
owner's lookups match somewhat. Then again, perhaps your pet has their very
own personality made up, and you could go from that. You could also set it up
matching your pet's color. There's really no limit!
"So how to do this?" you ask. Well, providing you already know enough about
CSS and HTML, in the following paragraphs I'm going to roughly outline how you
can work with your pet's lookup. I'll also be explaining how to get around that
600 letters limit in each suggestion.
-Good old basic HTML. This could be as simple as adding anything such as a
light background, a font color change, or adding a picture or two. If you don't
know enough about webdesign to make your pet's lookup extremely fancy, then
if you use just simple little things you've learned in just-right ways, it can
make a big difference. The normal black description text probably would work
for a shadow pet, but what if you have a cloud pet? You could try making the
text sky blue. And why a light background? Well, if you use a dark one without
changing the font color or fading the images (more on that later), it will either
make the text impossible to see without highlighting it, or it will clash horribly
with the white backgrounds on the default Neopets images. Usually if you add
just a little HTML to a description, then it will give you enough space to write
a line or two on your Neopet, so this won't be a problem.
-Little More Advanced. This includes using tables to make the text glow/have
a shadow/wavy. It also includes adding a different font or links. You can find
how to do these things many places now (back when I first found out about the
glowing text, it was but a rumour and a myth, known to very, very few. I had
to be sworn to secrecy just to be told!), but they take a bit more room than
normal HTML. This can have pros and cons, but it will be mostly bug-free if
you're sure to type the code and URLs right. Also, you may want to use a font
coloriser, or alternate the colors every sentence or so. Depending on how much
you use, you can either have lines of text, or an image with your text in it
- explained more in the next section.
-CSS. Ironically, I know more about this than either of the other things I
talked about, so this will be a slight bit more lengthy. This will almost -always-
take up any decent amount of space you have for normal writing, so you should
make any text you want in the description into an image. This isn't too hard,
but it's a different story entirely. So for this, after the CSS code you use,
you just need to use the 'img src' image HTML line. Unless you know a good deal
about CSS already, it's probably not the best thing to use in a pet's lookup,
but if you can limit it down to just so much text (some programs will tell you
when it gets to be 600 letters or over), it looks absolutely awesome. Take my
Lupe's lookup, for example. I used about three or four different style sheets,
and she has her own background, faded AND gray-scaled images, gray text, her
own profile image, and a text image. Not too shabby. If you just look at it,
it seems like it took a lot of writing to do.
But the length of the entire code is a mere 585 letters.
Yes, that's right! It can be done with so little effort, and a bit of sizing
here and there. As far as I know, pets can also have their own lookup banners,
or at least they used to be able to.
So, that's all I can crank out now. Hopefully, it helped. See ya next week
(maybe)!
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