Child Opportunity Zone is a new client and also a non-profit agency for childhood and adult literacy through the Pawtucket School District for which I work twice a week teaching English to immigrants. This is the proposal design. It will likely be modified before implementation.

The Slow Cook is a long-time client, but as he grows, it is necessary to build small graphics to showcase his adventures. Keeping in mind his branding, I build things as he needs them. With The Slow Cook, they usually like my mock-ups and go with them without significant changes.

The Providence Granola Project is a really great local granola company, for which I have submitted this as a start to branding their “Dive Deep into a Bowl’a Granola” Tagline. I did not make the illustrations, I only pieced them together into something coherent, though, I think it could benefit from having the scuba divers possibly inside a bowl of granola and maybe the jellyfish being made from little raisins or cashews or something like that. Awaiting adjustments.

Notice the difference between the shadow under Clinton’s chin. That kind of shadow only occurs in strong light and evidenced by the grey background, the men are enjoying overcast weather. Something tells me the body on the left isn’t Bush’s either, but it’s a better patch job than what was given to Clinton.

The second problem is that Clinton’s jawline isn’t that sharp and his neck shouldn’t be that slender. In fact, in this picture his neck doesn’t even connect to his body.  The whole idea behind photo manipulation is to be sly about it: nobody should be able to immediately know an image has been manipulated.

Considering perspective,  Clinton should be larger than Bush because he is closer to the lens. This angle suggests that the person who took the photograph below the men, either the men are on a stage or on stilts. We can’t be sure, but either way we should see more of clinton’s nostril and the underside of his chin. In the “fixed” version I made,  I recognize that this should be the case, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking for an image. The point to this how-to is to show that a poor job can be done in a half hour, but the image is far worse than a poor job.

If I had used Photoshop and had taken the time to find the right picture from the internet (or if this were a real job, have the phtoos supplied), I could have been far more realistic, but since I’m only doing this for example and I already had Fireworks open, I didn’t bother opening Photoshop.

image on left is a screen capture from internet browsing

right image is from LIFE Magazine illustrating how necks are important. This, too, is probably photoshopped a little, but it still looks natural.  I flipped the image to put it in the correct direction. I am only using these images to show how little time it really takes to do it right.

The first thing I did was try to find a similar head of Clinton. Then I selected the parts I didn’t want (the blue), then inversed the selection…

…and cut the selection.

Then I pasted his head into the working graphic.

Notice how far away Clinton’s head is from his shoulders. This requires finding another image to replace his body in order to have his head in this position.

I found a nice suit on this guy.

I cut the background of the suit and positioned it, then cut off the edges.

Using the Smear tool, I smeared the neck of the black man into the neck of Clinton.

I brought the layer with Clinton’s head to the front, then smeared his original neck into the black man’s neck.

Then I turned down the saturation.

Then I cropped the image.

Blogger sent out an email to its FTP customers:

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• W are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

The “Read More” Feature allows you to break your post up into a small lead in, keeping the front page of your blog or site nice and tidy. It looks something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum  amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

When one clicks the Read More link, s/he is taken to the full post.

To use the feature, place your cursor in the place you would like your link to live. For instance, in this post, I placed my cursor after the word “rebum.”

Then click the icon illustrated above. When you hover over it with your mouse it will say “Insert more” tag Alt+Shift+T.  The Alt+Shift+T allows you to use that key combination instead of moving your mouse to click the icon.

Why should I use the Read More feature?

• keeps the site tidy
• keeps the design intact
• keeps current content visible
• allows you to track your readership better

For instance, say you have written a 6,000 word piece and you post it. All of a sudden, your sidebars look empty because your site becomes extremely long, and your earlier content is buried under 6000 words. (You can see how long this post is with only 425 words.) Burying content translates into a loss of readership and potential value decrease (in the event you ever wish to sell your site).

Also, by having the Read More feature intact, it allows you to see more clearly which posts your readers are interested in reading because the reader is required to activate a link, rather than passively reading it on your front page.

So use the feature, and use it often. Everyone will be glad that you did.

For internet browsing, images should be
800px on the longest side and at 72ppi.

There are times you’ll want it larger, but use this as a rule of thumb. Computer monitors don’t need as many pixels as printers do, so it’s a really good idea to optimize your images for the web to ensure quick download speeds. Remember that your users have to download a copy of your image to their computer in order to see it, so if you have a 3mb image, that could mean anywhere between 30s to 5 minutes of download time, depending on the user’s connection. Even 30s is too long. So you want to get your images to be under 500kb (1/2 a MB) or less if possible.  I usually aim for images to be between 75kb > 150kb. Typically, that’s plenty of pixel information for the web.

This was made for Sustainable Building Specialists, but it applies to anyone using the NextGen Plugin for WordPress.

First upload images to a gallery. Now we’ll assume that at least one of your images is enormous.

1. Go to the Gallery Icon and choose Manage Gallery
2. Check the images you want to re-size. You can choose to re-size all of them with the one-click option at the top, or choose individual images to resize.
3. Choose your action in the drop-down box and click OK.

The only other important thing to note is what size your NextGen is set to use. I believe the default is 800×600, but you can change that number in the options under Gallery > Options.

That’s it! It’s really that simple. You’ll notice there are a number of things you can do in that dropdown box, so if you had some extra time and felt like it, you could easily make a test gallery and perform each of the options and see what happens. That’s the best way to learn what to (and not to) do.

To use this technique you will need a text editor, an ftp client, and ftp access to your server. I recommend using TextWrangler for code editing and Cyberduck for the ftp client if you do not have Adobe Dreamweaver. As always, before making any changes to your files, make sure you back-up your database and theme files.

For this tutorial I’ll use the public style/member style scenario. Ready?

Here’s how to do it:

For the public style of the site you will continue to use the regular header.php and style.css.

For the member style you will need to do as follows:

Open up header.php in a texteditor and rename it by saving as memberheader.php and then upload this file. This essentially makes a copy of the original header but with a new name.

Open up style.css and rename it by saving as memberstyle.css and then upload this file. This makes a copy of the original stylesheet but with a new name.

Attach that new stylesheet to your new header by finding

<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>

in the memberheader.php and replacing with with the file path to your new memberstyle.css stylesheet e.g.

http://www.yourwebsite/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/newstyle.css

Now create a page template. Open up index.php or page.php in your text editor and save/upload as committeepages.php.

Add this to the very top of the page template before all other code:

<?php /* Template Name: Committee Pages*/?>

Now find this:

<?php get_header(); ?>

And replace it with this:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/memberheader.php'); ?>

Now the theme has not one but TWO stylesheets. For all member pages just go to edit pages in the admin of your site, select the page to edit, then select your new template and that new stylesheet will apply to it. Leaving the page set to the Default will keep the original header and style.css.

To make the member pages look different from the public pages just edit either one of the stylesheets and change the look/layout there.

Original images taken with a medium resolution camcorder

There are occasions where a client may need a photo merged for publicity. In this case, my clients were traveling abroad with only each other, so they would take pictures of each other, but couldn’t always have a photo taken of them together.

I was given a set of four photographs in which both men were in an approximate similar area.

Merging of this kind works really well when the subjects are in a similar environment. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when merging photographs is that they are taking two images from completely different realities and trying to merge them. The reason it works best in a cohesive environment is because of lighting and reflection of environment on the object(s), in this case, skin.

Human skin is made up of a myriad of colors which are both absorbent and reflective, so if, say, one person was at the beach and another in a dungeon, the light on the skin is going to be vastly different and therefore look “faked” when you try to merge them. It may work on occasion, but overall, I think that it’s an undesirable effect.

Beau & Thompson Lange in Indonesia

It should also be noted that to make seamless merges, the original images should be rather large These images were taken on location in Indonesia with a portable camcorder. The original images yielded 1488px x 1288px and were well under 1mb each. Those aren’t huge files, but they’re big enough.

I did this by taking the image of Thompson on the right and using that as the background. I (rather sloppily) “cut” Beau (left) out of his photograph and literally dropped him into the other photograph on a new layer. Then I cleaned up the image and blended the edges. I did this several years ago, so trying to remember exactly everything I did is impossible, but I know it was something like this because back then I didn’t even know how to do channel masks.

You’ll notice that there is some strange cyan outlining the body of the temple; that’s originally from the quality of the camera. In this case, the clients use rough-quality as a trademark for branding their own DIY aesthetic, so it was fine to have medium resolution images to start. And because we wanted to blend some color into the sky, we chose to enhance the saturation a bit and even emphasize the DIY method. It’s part of their schtick, so it’s all good. For other clients, this may not be appropriate.

Here’s a link to a larger image for inspection.

The Dashboard is the first page you’ll see when you log in.

The first thing you’ll want to do is click on “Write” in the top left corner or “Write a New Post” in the orange bar from your Dashboard. Notice along the top left of your screen there are areas to Write, Manage, Design, Comments & (in this case) Gallery. These may be different on your site according to what plugsin you have, but you will always have the first four areas from which to choose.

Notice the areas which are active are highlighted orange. For example the above image is in the Write Post area. If you were in the Write Page area, your text would be orange on Write and Page and so on. Once you’re in the Write Post area, go ahead and write your post!

In the Write Post area, you should have a series of icons to help you write your post flawlessly and stylishly.

Make yourself familiar with the icons for ease of use. If you know some html, you can add special html tags or styling by clicking the HTML icon (top right of post area).

HTML tags are different than post tags. Use post tags to group ideas together. When a user clicks on a tag, he will be taken to any post that carries the same tag, so try to be somewhat consistent.

Use categories to group together bigger ideas. You can manage your categories from the Dashboard > Manage > Categories.

Remember to save your work after each edit.

I prefer to have two windows or two tabs open in my browser. One to make edits and the other to see how it looks after I’ve published or saved.

To refresh your browser, simply press F5 or the curly arrow in your browser icon bar.

So if you were an ambassador for Politifork, accept my apologies for not letting you know earlier, but keep on blogging in the free world!