h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thankyou again for being so patient. I will go change it!Any chance of the html for the cute little smileys as well...maybe another night ?

woah!!! Fame at last )Thanx a million!!

Never mind, "Brits a bad rap". This brit seems to have missed a whole load of conversation here! (That'll teach me to got to bed, at the interesting bit) Yes please, can I have a nice British Fish. I'll go and look at Shazz'z tonight, (promise), but a flag would be great. Also and this is the tricky one, how do you get them to move? And just how DO you make them? And what is the answer? or perhaps more to the point what is the question? And could you just pop these five loaves and couple of fish along to the few thousand people on that hill over there for me?

Hi Boris I don't know why anyone would think that a cute little Brit Fish is an insult!!I too would like to animate mine..but will wait to see how yours turns out.re the people on the hill...I think that they would prefer a Big Mac..perhaps you can oblige

oops,sorry Hello Borin )

Sorry to intrude, but for smileys, see www.h2g2.com/P72316 and all will become less unclear, I think, I hope, well... maybe. Read the forums.... LOL

Have done thanx

Well, what I make can only be fish. Shazz's is a fish that looks like the Brit flag, but drunk an' with hair. Obviously. I'm not the one that animated the brown one it was Wingpig's, and I don't know if I'll be getting around to animating them soon, but when I do you'll be the first to know. To animate them, you make lots of pictures, each one slightly different (like the pictures of a flip book), and then save it all as one file called a "gif". Gifs are the only pictures that can animate on the web, although there are many other art formats which produce still pictures. The fishes that I make are done like this:

I drew a basic white-on-blue fish shape on a graphics program (kind of like a drawing board) on my computer. Whenever someone asks if I can make them a fish, I load this white-on-blue fish into the graphics program and manipulate it until it's how they want. First I change it to the colour the people want (in Shazz's case, I turned the fish blue, the background colour of the British flag). Then I draw the rest of the stuff on the fish, and save it. Then comes the tricky part- I have an ftp/web page space on the internet (that's like a storage area on the web, everyone can see it, but only if they have the right address, and only I can put things there) and when I want to show my picture (in this case the fish) anywhere, I tell the webpage to go to the address and load the picture up. To load the picture I use HTML tags, which are instructions in the language all computers with an internet browser can understand (HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language, but no one really needs to know that).

As for who you can give them to, once they're up, anyone can copy them and pass them around, I don't really mind. But the distribution would be your responsibility.

Answer and question- for questions about the meaning of liff please consult Douglas Adams as it's not my specialy.

Sorry that was so long, I was trying to be clear...

Thats one of the best explanations I've ever seen I have now installed lots of cool GB fish on my icq homepage..thanx again

Thanx very much for the explanation.

Whoops, sorry, I hit the go button too quickly. Once again, thanx for the lesson, it was greatly needed. So if I do a picture, say in Corel, and FTP it to my web space, I can then pick it up from there and drop it in my H2G2 page, is that about it? (Assuming I can get a handle on this HTML stuff)

Yep, just make sure that when you save it, it's a jpg or gif. If you need the HTML just ask, I'd be glad to help.