We have added a few new things you can do with Coolchaser. One of them is now you can use a small background image and tile it. It has to be less than 200px by 200px for it to work. You will still see it all stretched out in the editor, but it will be the normal size once you put it on your profile. I thought this may be confusing since you can’t see what it will look like in the editor. So, I made a video to show you how I made a layout using this type of background.

I sound like a big nerd, but you’ll get the idea!

Big thanks to http://screencast-o-matic.com for making this video possible.

I’m sure you tell your mom how much you love her everyday like I do but why not express your love on your MySpace layout as well? I found some cool Mother’s Day themes that will let you do just that!

Mother’s Day Rose Love by Lisa J.

I really like the banner on this layout, it’s totally a Mother’s Day card turned into a MySpace layout! I’m sure your mom will be happy seeing this on your page.

Pretty pink rose by Ashley

Can’t have the flower sent to your mom on time (uh-oh)? Well, in the meantime, send your mom a bouquet of pink roses by putting this on your page! Such a pretty theme with great use of graphics!

mother’s day by Rita

Everybody loves Betty Boop and so does your mom! A very fun and sparkly theme that will bring a smile to everybody’s face! (am I sounding too cheesy today? :D)

MOM by ♥Melinda♥

If you want something more different, this theme is for you! This is a more urban and chic theme for stylish moms! A very unique way of using black and white, I love it!

Happy Mothers Day by HappyCat

Another excellent theme that warms your heart, you can’t see it in this thumbnail, but it has such a sweet message on the network graphic too!

a mothers love by holli

More heart warming quotes! If you aren’t good with words like me, choosing this layout might help you express how you feel about your mom!

As usual, I couldn’t introduce all the other great Mother’s Day themes, but thanks to all of the talented people for sharing these beautiful themes!

It’s been a while since we had any updates on ClipClip, it’s not that we have forgotten about our loyal users - we were just a little too busy with other projects. But good news guys! We have our super engineer Weiwen working on ClipClip again and she has added some awesome new features!

The features are:
1. empower users to remove spam comments from their clips
2. empower group founders to remove spam comments from their groups
3. ask users to flag clips that aren’t belong to the group

That’s right, now you can remove or flag all those spams that were totally unrelated to your group.

For example, I created a group called “Clipclip tips” hoping people will share tips on how they use Clipclip back in Dec 13 2006. As of today, April 29, 2008, it had 37 spams out of 43 clips!! I asked people NOT to clip any spammy clips in the group but that didn’t stop the spammers at all Well, it took some time to remove all those damn spams but now I have my group back in control!

So those who were worried about creating a group, now you can have control over the contents so hope you create some interesting and useful groups to store your clips with your friends!

Happy clipping!

I love those Myspace Layouts where you can see the background through all the tables! I’m going to show you how to do this and make the perfect layout! If you are not sure what I mean here are two great examples of how to do this the right way:

Texas theme by Lost John:

Scroll theme by Chamorita:

NOW :: Here is how to make your own and make it look awesome!!

First: you have to create a layout in our Layout Editor.

Second: Choose how see through you want it using “Other Options”.

Third: You have to make sure a few things. Like, make sure you can read the text. If you can’t read the text, then try picking a different theme that will contrast with your background. As a general rule pick a theme with dark text if you have a light colored background. Or pick a theme with light text if you have a dark background. *Also Note* If you have a MAC this type of layout will not work right if you have a music player, video, slide show or other “widget” on your profile. MAC users should choose “none” for how see-through. Sorry MAC people!

EXAMPLES:

(This example is using Classic theme by KIKKI)

This next one is with “none” selected.

BAD EXAMPLE:

I hope this helps you make the best Myspace Layouts!!

Ask questions or show off your skills in our forum!

http://forums.coolchaser.com

On our sister site, Coolchaser.us, we now support other network sites such as Hi5, My Year Book, and Yuwie!

For example, this is my favorite Christmas layout made by Heathaaa!

http://www.coolchaser.com/layout/create/6095587

Now you can get layouts for other networks by putting the layout id to the end of the coolchaser.us url.

http://www.coolchaser.us/l/preview/6095587/

Isn’t that cool??

There are couple of bugs:

1) For Yuwie layouts with no network images, there’s a floating border So I think I need to take out those borders in general for Yuwie layouts. Go grab them now if you have a network graphic and a border which you want to use of Yuwie! (hint hint Lost John ;))

2) The font-family for the header is a bit screwed up for other networks.I think I had !important on places that I didn’t need. This will be fixed soon.

Let me know if you run into any other problems!

This is for all of you hard core MySpace Layout makers out there! I’m going to show you how you can make tons of layouts without having to change your profile every time you save. Let’s get started…

Step 1: Make the layout in the layout editor (duh!)

Step 2: Go to “Other Options” and UNCHECK the matching blog box. (see image example)

Step 3: Click “Update My Profile” and enter your info.

Step 4: When the security text appears, DON’T enter it. Instead, click the link just below the text entry box that says “Not working? You can update manually”. (see image example)

THAT’S IT! Clicking that link will take you straight to your Coolchaser layout history without changing your profile! Now go make tons of layouts and share them with all your friends!

Don’t forget, you can add the new Coolchaser Myspace Widget to your profile to show off all your awesome Myspace Layouts.

Get it HERE

Feel free to brag on your serious skills in our forum! You might end up being featured on our front page!

Coolchaser Forums!

Show Off Your Extreme Myspace Layout Designing Skills!

Take your addiction of making Myspace layouts to the next level. We have launched a new widget for your Myspace profile!

With this widget, now you can:

• Proudly display your CoolChaser.com layouts and themes on your Myspace profile!
• People can put your cool layouts on their own Myspace profile right from your page.
• If you make layouts for your friends, they can pick up their new layout from your profile page too!

Add the CoolChaser widget to your profile to start sharing your amazing creations with your friends. CLICK HERE!

I am going to show you an easy trick to fix comments that are too BIG!

Do you look at your profile and see that it’s sort of pushed to the left side, then scroll down further and find your comments section is huge? Or maybe your profile is now sooo wide that it’s off the screen and you have to scroll left and right to see everything!

OH NO! Well, no worries! HELP is here!

You can put this very easy code in your ‘Who I’d Like to Meet’ section and it will make the pics and videos people send you in a comment smaller.

<style>
.columnsWidening img {width:200px;}
.columnsWidening object, .columnsWidening embed {
width:250px !important;
height:200px !important;
}
</style>

If you use this code and your comments section is still wide, then you should scroll through and look for one that has a long link or a long line of text without spaces. That will also mess up your beautiful profile! If you find a comment like that, just delete it and everything will be normal again!

You can find more useful Myspace Codes in our forum!

http://forums.coolchaser.com/forums/3/topics/12

If you can’t find the code you are looking for, just ask! I’m always here to rescue your profile and save the Myspace day! Our forums are the best place to get help with your Myspace profile and learn cool things you can do with Coolchaser layouts. So don’t be shy to ask questions or show off your awesome layouts! See you there!

http://forums.coolchaser.com

Hey hey people! We just released another feature on our theme editor, the “tiny layout” option! Huraaaaay! We had couple of awesome tiny themes by Heathaaa! because she has special permission but now anybody can create tiny themes now! Here’s a screenshot of the new option on the theme editor!

Here’s a quick version that I made: (sorry not so good :()

Try it out and let me know of any bugs! I especially want to know if it’s alright that I forced the picture sizes to not ruin the layout, I did that for the flash movies too. Not sure if it will work on all profiles though so go try it out!!

You can create tiny themes here:

http://www.coolchaser.com/themes/create2

Enjoy~!!!

UPDATE (3/14/07): We updated our site so your blog page and band page should be showing background images for any new layouts created. Try it out!

==============================================

Looks like MySpace hired a new ambitious engineer! (ooops sorry for the cynical tone :D) Well, it seems like they are working hard to change some stuff that is messing up some of our layouts.

There were couple of changes:

1) They are converting all the single quotes (’) into an unicode character ’ for all the band profile pages and the regular blog pages.

So instead of a rule

background-image:url('http://somesite.com/image.gif');

It’s changing to

background-image:url(’http://somesite.com/image.gif’);

This prevents the rule to be read correctly and will basically ignore the rule and stop any images to show up correctly. How annoying!

It’s a bit a pain to fix it yourself so I would recommend inserting the layout again when we update our site’s code. Will announce on this blog whenever we are updated.

2) They are stripping out any non standard html tags

In order for users to easily change layouts, we had all our layout codes enclosed in a tag <coolchaser>. OK so this isn’t a valid html tag, but by enclosing in it, we were able to immediately recognize our code so we won’t delete any other tweak codes you might have had in your profile.

Anyway, last Saturday or so MySpace started stripping out all those non standard tags and made it into “…”

So, if you inserted your layout sometime around March 8 to 10th or so, changing your Coolchaser layout to a new one might have not worked.

This has been fixed on our site already. So if you find the layout replacement not working, manually delete the code, and try our site again to insert a new layout. Once you do that, the automatic update for any new layout from our site should work like before.

3) They are sooooooo slooooooooooowwww

OK, this is not a MySpace change perhaps, but MySpace has been painfully slooooooooowwwww lately. I mean we are sometimes slow because of so many traffic and since they have 100 times more traffic than us, it must be hard to have a fast and efficient site. Anyway, the sad thing is, when MySpace is slow, we become slow too

When myspace is slow, and we have lots of layout inserts waiting, and then when MySpace suddenly become fast again, we get slammed, and in the past few weeks, our servers couldn’t cope with that slamming and became even slower for up to a few hours after MySpace has recovered.

This might have resulted an error to show on our site such as “oops we messed up!” or simply the page doesn’t load to a new page and get stuck there for 6 hours (I get emails from people saying I waited for 5 hours or so, sorry about that!)

So we are going to have a “time out” thing soon, which is when we recognize the layout isn’t getting inserted, we will just switch automatically to show codes. I know, it’s a pain to manually copy that code, go to your profile, erase the existing code, and paste the new one, but at least I think people will feel like they are in control of the situation. Will also announce when this is implemented!

Phew! So that’s all for now, but will let you know when something like this happens again! Thanks again for trying us and for your loyalty! xoxoxox

Update 10.50pm Pacific Time: We’re back up, the scientists laborers have managed to turn the cart back on its wheels

Sorry guys, we seem to be having some technical difficulties. The scientists are currently working on it now.

Please try coming back again later today or tomorrow.

Thank you for your understanding.

Happy Valentines everyone! There have been so many cool Valentines themes so let me introduce some that I really liked!

Happy Valentines Day by Michelle

I like this theme because it uses the hearts on the banner and the name background (it’s animated!) Here I combined with a photo I found by searching “kiss” but any dark background would do

Valentine Onigiri by .|.<(+_+)>.|.

How cute!! Can it be any cuter really?? This theme uses a new feature that we just added on the theme editor too, you can make the network table’s background transparent! If you know what I’m talking about, you are a certified CoolChaser! LoL

Snoopy Valentine by Dawn LaRee

Dawn LaRee has been creating some really popular themes including her Cherry Blossom Theme (very beautiful!) I like all her themes but I like Snoopy so I picked this one

Valentine by Lydia

This is a great layout to show off your favorite background! Here I’m showing the one that Lydia used but you can put any kind of background and it will be your very own original Valentine’s layout!

Valentine Fairy by Carla

Here’s something different and sexy! Great use of the banner

pink be mine valentine by Heathaaa!

Ok last but not the least, here is Heathaaa!’s valentine’s theme that is super popular! Is your favorite color pink? Then this is a theme for you!

As always, there are sooooo much more wonderful themes created by our wonderful users and I’m sorry I couldn’t introduce all of them!

Update: Blog inserts are back up (Feb 24th 10pm PST)

Never rains but it pours! Sorry folks, we had a massive slowdown in performance for a few hours today. We’ve traced it down to a slowdown in MySpace’s blog updating performance which caused a cascading slowdown in our servers. We’ve turned off blog inserting temporarily, and will be working on a more permanent solution in the next few days.

Meanwhile, expect us to turn back blog layout inserts once MySpace has fixed their issues. Thanks for your patience and sorry for any inconvenienced caused

Only a week until the year 2008! How was your year 2007? It was a great year for CoolChaser all because of your guys, thanks for all the love and support So let’s start celebrating the brand new year by having a New Years layout, shall we?

New Year Party by Chocolate Football Fanette!

One of my favorite theme - it is very professional looking! And it’s so gooooold~!! Such a gorgeous theme

Happy New Year Sparkle by ♥Karen…♥

You can’t tell from this thumbnail but there are animated sparkles all over Very easy to match with any background, maybe you can use one of the photos you took at a party with all your friends and family lately! Thanks ♥Karen…♥ for creating so many nice themes!

New Years by Linds

Of course, you can’t forget champagne for New Years! Very elegant Here I matched with the keyword “champagne” as a background! Of course, stick with the non-alcohol if you are still under age!

Blue New Years by percheron

This theme is a pretty fun theme also! You can’t really tell from the thumb but there are all kinds of things going on using animated gifs like bubbles, lasers, and fireworks! Funky!

new year4 by JonesieMcJones

JonesieMcJones is a CoolChaser member since September and she already has 110 themes! This is a very cute New Year theme with confetti falling in the background

New Years Japonesque by Sachiko

OK sorry for the self promotion but since New Years is a huge thing in Japan (just like Christmas here!), I created this Japanese style New Years theme! Any Japanese CoolChasers out there? Then “Yoi Otoshio~!” (Have a great rest of the year!)

There are many other cool New Year themes that I couldn’t introduce here and I’m sure there will be more to come! Hurry and grab one now

Hey~ thank so much for visiting our site on Christmas Whether you are looking for a last minute Christmas layout, or just looking for creating your own original layout, hope you find what you are looking for here! Hope you all have a great and safe Christmas! Check back soon to create some awesome 2008 New Years layouts

How many days till Christmas? Not too many days, pressure pressure! Go grab one of the beautiful Christmas themes that were created by our wonderful CoolChasers before too late! Let me introduce some of the most popular and interesting Christmas themes just to get you guys excited! (or pressured!)

Christmas by 11-21-07 <3 10 MONTHS!! I LOVE YOU HONEY!!

This was one of the earliest Christmas theme that was created on our site and also one of the most beautiful and elegant It is just amazing how 11-21-07 <3 10 MONTHS!! I LOVE YOU HONEY!! created so many themes in such a short time! Her most popular theme includes the music theme which was used by 3342 people.

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown! by Starla

Starla is one of our super CoolChaser who created a very popular theme called Live Your Life which was used 2981 times within only a month. This Peanuts Christmas theme makes you feel so fuzzy and warm even if Charlie is out in the snow, doesn’t it?

Vintage Christmas by Jackie

Another warm and fuzzy Christmas theme by Jackie that I immediately liked! Many of her themes have a very warm feeling to it - if you like warm and girly themes, she is somebody to keep an eye on Her other popular Christmas theme is worth checking out too!

Sexy Santa Lady by Shady AKA Chamorita

I just love love love love this theme xoxoxo! I really like everything about it As always Chamorita (Shady is actually Chamorita :)) has great design skillz!

Christmas 021 - Snoopy’s Workshop by Lost John

Another Peanuts Christmas theme that just makes you smile! This is one of Lost John’s most popular Christmas theme which can be combined with lots of different backgrounds.. I tried a light blue snow flake background but a red background works too!

Snow Man Holiday Christmas by Heathaaa!

OK the last but not the least, one of my favorite one by Heathaaa! I just love love love this theme and I’m using it right now myself! hee hee!

Other good keywords to search for holiday themes are: candy cane, winter, and santa! Hope you all enjoy all the Holiday themes! If I have time, I’ll keep featuring more because there are just soo many beautiful ones!

MySpace has been experimenting with that box that says “XXX is in your network” and is causing the layout to look weird. It’s adding some weird space around and above the graphic like below:

We are not sure if this is a permanent thing or MySpace just messing around like before. They might revert back the changes since it’s messing up their own layoutfrom their own editor so we are waiting a bit more to see before we update our code on our site. But ifyou would like to fix it manually, paste this code in the “Who I’d like to meet” box (UPDATED: 12/3 3:21 PST):

<style>
.a {fix extended network border}
table table td.text table { border-collapse:collapse;  margin-top:-10px; } 

td.text table.blurbs,
td.text table.latestBlogEntry,
td.text table.friendSpace,
td.text table.friendsComments,
table table td.text table table,
table.friendSpace td.text table,
table.friendsComments td.text table { border-collapse:separate; margin-top:0px; }
.extendedNetwork { margin-bottom:-11px; } 

.a { ie fix }
* html .extendedNetwork { position:relative; margin-bottom:-5px; }
* html table table td.text table td { padding:0;}
* html table table td.text table td table td { padding:0 !important;}
* html td.text table.blurbs td,
* html td.text table.latestBlogEntry td,
* html td.text table.friendSpace td,
* html td.text table.friendsComments td,
* html table.friendSpace td.text table td,
* html table.friendsComments td.text table td {
  padding: 0 26px 15px 26px;
}
</style>

Thanks to Heathaaa! for helping fix this mess The details for this code can be read on this thread. Hope this helps!

We are proud to present Lost John as our new featured CoolChaser! Congratulations!

Lost John has been a CoolChaser since the end of August and he’s been creating many beautiful themes especially for Halloween and  Christmas! He’s also a very active member on our forum helping out with the CoolChaser community.

We also just started to nominate the next candidate to be featured on our forum, so if you would like to nominate your favorite theme artist, or somebody who you think deserves to be recognized by the community, go to this thread right now~! Or you can leave a comment to this blog. Make sure you have a link to that person’s page with all the themes and layouts so everybody can see their work

Currently the people who are being nominated are:

1) marileejean nominated by Heather
http://coolchaser.com/user/profile/823992

2) Starla nominated by Lost John
http://coolchaser.com/user/profile/1707767

3) Tammy nominated by Sachiko
http://coolchaser.com/user/profile/638574

If you don’t see your favorite theme artist here, let them know that you love their work by nominating them

We are saddened to have received a legal notice from Continental Enterprises acting on behalf of Hansen Beverage, the company that produces Monster brand energy drinks.

Basically, they are requiring that we remove all Monster backgrounds that CoolChaser users have submitted on our site.

Frankly, we are quite perplexed by their actions - why would a company want to piss off some 4,000 of, in their own words, Hansen’s most passionate and devoted enthusiasts? We have tried to come up with creative alternatives and suggested that we offer CoolChaser users the opportunity to replace their backgrounds with “official” ones created by Hansen, but they declined.

So, I’m sorry to say we have to comply to Continental and Hansen’s demands. For each of the 4,000 odd users who are affected, we will be individually sending you an email notifying of this incident. You can of course change your layout by simply visiting our layout editor:

http://coolchaser.com/layout/create

If you have further questions or would like to contact Hansen, please write to legaldept@ce-ip.com.

Thank you for using CoolChaser!

Have you created your CoolChaser layout couple of months ago? Then do you see all your text jumbled up on Firefox? Like this:

If so, we have updated all the code on our site for any newly created layouts, so please recreate the layout and reinsert it.

If you would like to just updated it manually, put this code after the <coolchaser> code in your about me box, or the who I’d like to meet box.

<style>table table tr td {line-height:1.4em;}</style>

And you should be fine!

Another thing you migh see is all your friend’s link on a seperate line like this:

View Gotham’s Friends:

All |

Online |

New

If so, try putting this code after the <coolchaser> code in your about me box or the who I’d like to meet box:

<style>

a.redlink:active, a.redlink:visited, a.redlink:link { display:inline; }

.friendSpace br { line-height:0; }

</style>

Just wanted to let you know of how to fix this if you created your layout a while ago

It’s almost Halloween and many people have been putting together sooo many great themes and layouts! Let me introduce some that I found and liked

Halloween Lg Prnt Generic01 by Lost John

Lost John has created so many great Halloween themes and layouts only in couple weeks or so! He is also very active on our forum so go check out his list on this thread! You won’t see it on this picture here but in the actual layout the skeleton is pretty creepy because it’s slowly swinging…. AAAAAA! I can almost hear that theme song from the “Halloween” movie! Ten ten ten ten ten ten…. You can check out all of his themes and layout on his profile page So many to choose from!

Witch by †åmm¥

As †åmm¥ is the queen of horror layouts, you can bet that her Halloween theme rocks too! Like many of her other themes, you don’t need to select any background as it is a complete layout without it, but of course you can add your favorite Jack o Lantern background to it to make your original!

Come Here by CHAMORITA

Another queen of themes is of course the one and only CHAMORITA! It is just sooo hard to pick only one from all her great themes! I just discovered her Mushroom theme and was totally getting high LOL! Basically you just can’t go wrong with her themes. She is also our new featured CoolChaser both on the homepage and the people page

ALL HALLOWS EVE by *F0r3v3r_H4unt3d*

What a fun Halloween layout! Here I combined it with “ghost wallpaper” and found a colorful background that matches it Love it!

Halloween!!! by @shley >>{needs Xs and Os!!!}

Sooo cute! XD If you want more anime style Halloween layouts, this is definitely for you! I’m not exactly sure who the character is (yes, I’m not otaku enough) so if someone knows who it is, let me know

Naruto Halloween by Brandi

For Naruto fans such as me! You might be thinking anything related to Naruto gets featured here! Anyway.. is that… Kakashi without his mask?! Ten ten ten ten ten ten…

And good news people! We are currently working on pushing out the search feature for the themes! So in the future you can just search for “thanksgiving” or “christmas” and you will be able to search for it and get the results rather than clicking the next button many many times!

Happy Halloween to everyone!

UPDATE: CoolChaser is back up following a successful server upgrade. Thanks all for your patience.

*****

CoolChaser will not be available at 3.30am PDT Oct 9th 2007 for around 90 minutes, as we do a server upgrade to speed up our databases. Sorry for the short notice and check this blog for updates!

As some of you may have noticed, we are showing Nabbr videos on our home page and other parts of the site. There are many reasons why we chose to work with Nabbr and why we are excited with this new development.

Nabbr offers us some hip, original content. I’ve never heard of the bands that Nabbr is representing, but I sure dig their music

Next, Nabbr helps CoolChaser stay free (yes, Nabbr actually pays us and offsets our rapidly exploding server hosting fees as we’ve become surprisingly popular (thank you!)

Finally, we’re still figuring out what next to work on at CoolChaser (besides fixing bugs and making the site more reliable!). From your feedback, we hear that you want to integrate more videos, slideshows and other widgets, and that you want to be able tweak everything. The Nabbr widget represents our first initial experiment into this brave new widget world.

Let us know what widgets you love, what you hate and what widget you wished someone would just get busy developing…if this list becomes popular, we may start a permanent page of popular widgets…

Last week CoolChaser had the 1,000,000th person create a layout! Woo Hoo! One Million! That’s HUGE! How huge? Can you imagine that in dollars? That’s one million dollars! That’s a lot of money right? Now imagine that in people! Yeah, that’s how huge it is! Woo Hoo!

The honorable 1,000,000th person who created a layout was.. (drum rolls)

TWISTER!

But of course, Twister couldn’t have become the one millionth user without all the other 999,999 CoolChasers, and I’m sure he would like to thank all of you guys for making this come true! Right, Twister? wink wink … OK, I’m not sure if he wants to thank you all but we, the whole CoolChaser crew would definitely like to thank ALL OF YOU for using CoolChaser and being such a great fan! So here’s is for all of you guys!