Welcome to BowserBasher's Lair.

BowserBasher's Lair is a personal site designed by me, with a little help from a few people along the way. face_grin

This is the third major version of my site, and will be incorporating the use of many new features and techniques that I have been learning. This new version remains fairly similar in style, but has taken one major design change, the menu (again). After looking for a way to do it, I found the perfect tutorial/example for building a drop down navigational menu entirely in PHP and HTML only, no javascript needed. I have altered the design to suit my site, but it is essentially the same as was described. The menu is divided up into the same categories as my old design, just now being at the top like this, I do not have pages where the menu is so much longer than the content on the page. Unfortunately, the menu does not seem to work on some mobile devices, I tested it on an iPhone, therefore I have manually placed a link to the Site Map and Home page in the top right of ever page.
The site will also take advantage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the <DIV> element to get a much simpler site layout, now centered on the page.

The main purpose of BowserBasher's Lair is just for me to have a place to show off, display or rant about anything I want to. You can check out the about BowserBasher page, for info on me. See me on Roller Coasters on my Roller Coaster picture page. See me with a couple of stars from The Lord of the Rings when I went to a Lord of the Rings signing. Or take a read of my Orlando Holiday.
There are many other places to visit too, like my Animal Crossing pages. These are all about my Animal Crossing towns which includes many, many pictures.

BowserBasher's Lair is designed to look good in all browsers, though I find that it looks best (and the way I intend it to look) in Mozilla Firefox. Whilst it is viewable in all other browsers, I recommend that you take a look at Firefox.
I was converted some time ago when a friend showed me what my original site design looked like in Firefox, and graciously helped me re-code my site so that it would look great in other browsers besides IE. I started using Firefox and have not regretted it.

To make BowserBasher's Lair I use HTML (HyperText Markup Language), PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I use Macromedia DreamWeaver 8 for all the coding and Adobe Photoshop to design my images. I have taken the time to make sure that this version of my site conforms to W3C recommendations, as much as I can. I am also proud to be able to display the Valid CSS! button button on my site.

Latest updates

Date to be added: The New Site
Today marks the unveiling of the new and improved BowserBasher's Lair. This third design is the best yet, taking advantage of a much better menu system than the previous one. I used this tutorial by Dreamweaver Tutorials to make the menu entirely in CSS and HTML, no javascript required at all. I'm very pleased with the way it turned out and it is very easy to add to when needed. I have centered the whole site in the browser, but after that, pretty much everything else is as it was. I've renamed pages, and reorganized some things, so some old links may not be working, but I will fix any that I come across.
I want to thank the many people that have helped me in any way with this design, or helped test this before I released it.

01/06/11: Sneak Peak at new site design
I have added a quick ramble about my new site design. Read it in the Ramblings section.

01/05/11: New batch of Animal Crossing photos added
I have added another batch of Animal Crossing photos to the Oz gallery. These will be some of the last as I really no longer play the game. I am going to attempt to at least make it up to 500 though.

I have started the process of redesigning BowserBasher's Lair. It will still have the familiar look, it will just be tidier and neater. sorry, but I don't have a time frame for when I will get it all done.

16/04/11: More Nintendo 3DS photos added
I have added lots more 3DS photos to the 3DS General Gallery, Pilotwings Gallery and the Nintendogs and Cats Gallery. Enjoy.

10/04/11: Nintendogs + Cats Gallery
I have added another 3DS gallery, the Nintendogs + Cats Gallery. This will hold all the photos that I take from the 3DS game. I'll also be taking some AR photos from within the game too.

02/04/11: Pilotwings Gallery
I have added a Pilotwings Gallery which includes the many photos that I am taking whilst playing pilotwings Resort on the Nintendo 3DS. I have also added a few more images to the 3DS general Gallery too.

29/03/11: 3DS Galleries
With the release of the Nintendo DS, everyone has been using the MiiPics and StarPics applications to take pictures of their Mii's and Nintendo characters in their rooms. I'm no different and have been doing the same. I have created the 3DS General Gallery that will hold all the MiiPics and StarPics that I create. I will be adding game galleries at later dates too. Enjoy.

16/02/11: Hosting update complete
I have completed the hosting upgrade for my site. This doesn't mean much on this end, but it now means that I have unlimited space and bandwidth from now on.

01/02/11: One more Photoshop Tutorial
Yup, another one added. This one is a tutorial on how to make realistic looking flames in Photoshop. I've seen many that use text but I didn't want the text in mine, so I made this. Check out Realistic Flames.

29/01/11: One New Animal Crossing Comic
Just added one more Animal Crossing Comic, The Forged Painting. I love making these, I may not make many, but when inspiration hits, they come out really great. Enjoy.

28/01/11: Two New Photoshop Tutorials and animated emotes
Two more Photoshop Tutorials today. I've known how to do these for some time, and thought I'd add these to my site. These are very simple tutorials on how to add a frame to any photo. Black & White Border ads a simple black and white border to your photo. Whilst Blurred Border adds a fancy blurred border to your photo. Have fun.

Before I go, I mentioned about animated Gif's. Well here are the first two that I ever made.

and

I made these in both Photoshop and Fireworks. I plan to replace the current emotes that I have on BowserBasher's Lair with ones like this in the future.

24/01/11: New Animal Crossing photos
I have added a further 20 Animal Crossing photos to the Oz Photo Gallery. Some nice stuff in there. This takes the total number of photos to 470!
I've also started learning how to make animated GIF's and will soon show them off on here soon.

06/11/10: Added another new Photoshop tutorial
Yup, one more, I've added another very simple to make wallpaper. This time it creates very nice swirls. I call it Swirls Wallpaper.

05/11/10: Added a new Photoshop tutorial
I've added a new tutorial to the Photoshop tutorial section. This is a very simple to make wallpaper that can be used to make any background stand out. Try it out and have fun, Striped Abstract Wallpaper.

01/11/10 : Added more Oz photos
I've added another 17 photos to the Oz Photo Gallery. Many of these are a month or two old. I can't believe that even after a few years of playing the game, I am still taking new photos all the time still.
I've also removed TheShire text Gallery, as I feel that it is no longer needed.

31/10/10 : Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween everyone. To celebrate, I booted up my Animal Crossing game to go see Jack, at first I couldn't think of a comic to do, but as I started playing, it just all fell into place. I give to you Halloween Hijinks.
I also added a quick something to my Ramblings page.

18/09/10 : New Animal Crossing Comic
Yup, a new Animal Crossing comic has been added again. Please enjoy Gracie and the Days of Old.
I feel I have a few more in me at this time, so please watch out for one or two more to be added soon.

I have also removed all updates from before 2009 from the front page. As always they can be found on the Updates Page.

05/09/10 : One more Photoshop Tutorial added
I've added one more Photoshop Tutorial to the site. This is a very nice looking Lava Planet Tutorial. I hope you get something out of all the tutorials that I have presented on my site.

03/09/10 : A New AC Comic
When I turned on my Animal Crossing game today it was raining, better still, a thunderstorm was going on. I came out my house and saw a finned fish swimming in the ocean, so I decided to catch it. Then suddenly an idea hit me, and I decided to make The Day of the Thunderstorm.

01/09/10 : Two more Tutorials added.
I've added yet another two tutorials, a lovely exploding planet and a very simple lightning effect. I plan to do a few more of these for my favourite planet/space tutorials that I have enjoyed making.

31/08/10 : New Tutorials and Animal Crossing photos
I have added a few more Photoshop tutorials to the side menu and have updated my Let's go to the City photo gallery with another 11 new photos.

30/08/10 : Photoshop Tutorials
A while ago I created these planet images in Photoshop. I used tutorials from around the web to make them, but wanted to place my favourite's here on my site for others to see. So I have started to make tutorials and placed them on BowserBasher's Lair. You can find the first of these, the Basic Planet tutorial by following the link.

08/05/10 : Added a few Oz Images
A few more photos from my AC town have been added.

31/05/09 : More Animal Crossing Comics and Flash animation.
I have uploaded all the remaining Animal Crossing comics that I had made, but never uploaded. They can all be found in the menu to the left. Enjoy.
If you keep up with the Oz photo gallery, you may notice that I have had to restart my town. This is because after sending my Wii to Nintendo for cleaning, it was returned to me with all my data missing, erased, gone.
Something new, I have found some time to learn a little Flash. I have wanted to do this for some time, but never got round to it. You can find my work in My Ramblings section.

01/02/09 : Animal Crossing Comics.
I had started making these exclusively for the staff of ACC, but I have decided that they are too good to keep to us alone. So I will be sharing these creations on my site for everyone. All the comics are created by me, using screen shots that I have taken in Lets go to the City. I then use an effect in photoshop to create a more comic book like style. Then it is just a case of using Comic Life to create the comic itself. I hope you enjoy these.
You can find the links on the menu to the left, where you will find The Adventures of Three, which was also the first one I made, and Frosty the Snowman.