Home       Tutorials       Quick-Tips       Reviews       About       Contact       Podcast       Register

» Monday Stuff

It’s another Monday, it’s another start of the week. I have a lot of things to share with you this week and It’s gonna be a really cool week. One of them is of course the artist interview as every week (and I’m not yet going to give away who it is). I’ve also got an article or two planned as well as some new tutorials! But let’s get started with some Monday Stuff!

• I do a lot of work with the WordPress publishing system and I really do like it. Obviously there are things I like to see in it, but overall it’s really really good and powerful. I do recommend it as a good and light cms + blog system. However it can be a daunting task to learn to customize any new script which is why I’m going to send you over to a series called Designing for WordPress by Chris Coyier at CSS-Tricks!
   
• Since I’m going to be working with moving computers around a lot today I’m going to give you a tip or two there to make it easier. They may seem obvious, but so many don’t practise it. Tidy the cables up. Especially good in small areas where it’s much nicer to have some cable foldings to put them in to minimise mess and possible outage. Also, if you’re opening the computer to do any replacement, make sure to both pull out the plug and set the switch to 0. Also use a special bracelet to ground yourself. 
   
• Finally, I’m going to leave you with a podcast or two today. First off, go and check out my Creative Suite Tips and Tricks podcast for tutorials, weekly, on the entire creative suite. Then if you are a photographer, go and check out the Image Doctors from the Nikonians Talk Radio. 

» Create an expanding CSS box in DW

I got a question from a buddy of mine, Dino. He wanted to know how to make an expandable CSS box inside of Dreamweaver. I wrote him a reply and figured that it also would do pretty good as a video tutorial. Now keep in mind that I’m doing this all in code. Why? Because it is simple in this case and learning it doesn’t do any harm!

» Wednesday News

A lot has been happening in the tech world, especially since the iPhone 3G release. I’m going to try and focus a bit less on all iPhone news and instead go in on the other things that’re happening.

• What is the world coming to?! A father of three got complaints from other parents when he was at a park with his sons taking pictures of them. He was accused of being a pervert and even for taking pictures of children and putting them on the internet. The whole story ended with the father getting a police officer to confirm to them that he was doing nothing wrong. Read the full story.
   
• Last week I told you about the interview Scott Kelby did with attorney Ed Greenberg. Well this week on this weeks Photoshop User TV, Scott is doing a follow-up interview with photographer and copyright advocate Jack Reznicki. It pretty much takes off where we left with Ed last week and finishes up the major concerns a photographer and graphics designer might have. Scott has the interview clip on his blog.
   
• A buddy of mine turned me onto a very cool site called woork. On the site Antonio Lupetti talks about different techniques, scripts and css styles to make cool web things. The posts are always interesting and contains great information overall.

» Late “Last” Monday News

I’ve been very busy today sorting and working with photos from my week away last week and getting back into things so that’s why there have been this little delay in the news post.

• Last Wednesday the ISO group decided to take the Adobe PDF document seriously and approved it as an ISO standard. From now and on the format will be recognised as format ISO32000-1 and it will be controlled by the organisation.
   
• Last week also Google announced that the search engine is now indexing flash! According to their official blog they have now "perfected the algorithm" to now index flash. This is all pretty exciting as it makes SEO with flash a lot easier! Read more about it at Viget Inspire.
   
• Last but not least Nik Software has announced the release of Color Efex Pro 3.0 for Nikon Capture NX 2.0. Existing users can upgrade to the 3.0 version for free. The software is available in a Complete ($179.95) and a Select ($99.95) edition.

And as it turned out a terrible lot of "last"’s

» Monday Quickies

It’s a very relaxing Monday for me because I’m sitting here in the quietness and I’m just relaxing and enjoying the time. I thought however you guys should get a few quick news updates as always.

• If you are new to CSS coding you should check out this good tutorial on using float elements form the base up. It’s just All About Floats. It’s the base of website coding nowadays and you should really know it.
   
• Apple has gone ahead and released OS X 10.5.4 which fixes a few bugs and improves things overall. You can view all the updates in an Apple Helpfile. The update can be downloaded right from the Software Update.

The image above is a little test macro image I shot while walking around here on the island today. Have a great evening/night/day wherever you are and I’ll see you back tomorrow!

» Late Tuesday Things

It’s busy times right now preparing the shop windows and all for the summer and sales and I’m a bit of the in-house web designer and design/tech guy so I actually get to do a lot of it.

• Microsoft has released a critical update to Office for Mac 2008 bringing it up to 12.1.1. It should fix several things mainly stability and performance issues. The update is available through the Auto Updater which you can get to by going into either Office application and choose "Check for Updates".
   
• Here’s a little tip for you, something I always do. If you are trying to design something, start with a piece of paper and a pencil (having an eraser nearby would be pretty nifty as well). This way you can lay up a lot of things and write comments to yourself before working and finalising it on the computer. Also very easy to show to other people near you for quick-feedback.
   
• If you are looking for an advanced text editor also for the Mac that greatly supports coding, then you should look no further than Smultron. It’s a really good editor that supports all major code languages you want to code in mainly for the web but also for more trivial tasks like doing a to-do list. Check it out!
   
• I’m in the market for a new lens, mainly a macro lens (can’t be too expensive so the Nikon 105 VR is out unfortunately) and if any of you have any experience with one, post a comment and tell me because I’d love to hear it! Needs to be good for macro and portraits. I have a pretty good idea on what to check out but any input and hands-on experience wouldn’t hurt.

» My top 5 list of WordPress Plugins

There are quite a few plugins that this site couldn’t live without and that I’m really glad exist. I’m going to share my top list of WordPress plugins, big or small doesn’t matter here so even if they do just one little thing, it might be a thing that I really like and makes running the site much easier.

cformsII
This is really one of these big and glorious plugins that does make your life easier as well. cforms is the plugin powering the contact form on the site and it is really a truly amazing free plugin. It lets you manage the forms you need (how many you need) and with ease style them and insert more complex features.

All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is the reciept for google sucess. I’m really serious. If you have a WordPress blog and you want more control over description and keywords on your post, this one is for you.

StatPress
The master of statistics on your blog I really say this is. StatPress collects visitor information including all the detailed fun stuff you’d want to see as well as the simple visitor and referrer stats. Just choose the way you want to view it, StatPress collects it all for you in any case!

Plugin Central
This is a really different but cool plugin. It lets you quickly and easily install plugins from your dashboard without needing to download files to your computer and upload through FTP. It’s a really fast way to install new plugins. I just wish it had the ability to remove them also if needed.

Dean’s FCKEditor for WordPress
This plugin replaces the default WordPress editor with the lot more advanced FCK Editor! It works like a charm and makes posting a lot more feature rich.

 

» Wednesday Stuff

 

Third time a go this time then? I’ve been trying to post this post three times now and all times I’ve accidentally quit the window in one way or another, causing this one to close and loose all writing.So lets try one more time now then.

• Scott Kelby has turned his recent "No-Blog Wednesday" into "Guest-Blog Wednesday" and about time as well, we were definitely missing something on Wednesdays (nah, just kidding Scott, you deserve your break). Anyway, this first week it is Vincent Versace who is doing the blogging with an article about "how to take better photos".
   
• The Orphan Works Act are coming closer to a vote all the time now and I’m getting an article written on its basics and possibly getting that up this week so keep your eyes on the site.
   
• I came across a cool flash component called 3D Wall. It basically lets you create a 3D Wall with photos as a slideshow in flash. All in all it is a pretty cool thing I must say and very simple to do. It’s available for $99 from their website.

» Friday Coolies

It’s Friday today and since yesterday was a silent blog Thursday, I have a lot of things up today. Now, for those of you wondering, all is well with the person I talked about yesterday and only got a sprained leg and bruises.

• I get some questions to me sometimes on how I manage to run a business and manage to do all this etc. while still keeping up with school (getting almost straight A’s, so no slacking here) and life in general. Well, if you are running a business from home it’s the things that David Ziser mentioned in this blog, Digital Pro Talk yesterday, with "20 Pointers for running your business out of home".
   
• A trend these days in Web Design is to use resizable image backgrounds in websites to really make a website out of a photo or similar. This week CSS-Tricks posted a tutorial/article on how to make it. It takes up three different methods and rank them, good, better, best. If you want to know how to, read the article!
   
• I thought I’d tip all of you off on an article which I read back when I started out, but which still does apply very much. The article is called Becoming A Web Designer by Mat Dwyer and it is well, really awesomely made with a lot of insight and tips. It is well worth a read any day, even for someone who’s been in the industry for a little while.

» Late Wednesday Quickies

It’s getting late here when I’m typing this and I’m almost about to head to bed but I thought I should do a little update before. I just finished an extremely busy evening. Right after school I had to go to a three hour intro course to driving, which is mandatory for everyone wanting to start practise driving here in this country, feels good to have it done but it was painfully slow, especially knowing you have a french test tomorrow Wish me luck.

• Free books are always cool and the guys over at SitePoint has right now got a full book available to download, yours to keep forever, called "The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques". It’s said to be a great book for designers and I just downloaded it myself. It’ll be a little time before I can read it myself though. Got to much on my plate, but it sounds cool and you can only download it for free for the next 30 days!
   
• I’m becoming more of an InDesign addict and really starting to using the program a lot more (it’s fun). Apart from noticing that in the tutorial index I’ve found a cool site for you all other InDesign users as well. It is called InDesignSecrets and run by Anne-Marie Concepcion. It’s a really good tips blog that makes a good read any day.
   
• If you do a lot of RGB to CMYK or CMYK to RGB colour conversions, then you’ll probably appreciate this little colour conversion tool available online, for free!