Bridge CS4 Contact Sheet Creation from Ben W on Vimeo.

using Adobe Bridge CS4 to create contact sheets in PDF form is much faster than using The Photoshop contact sheet creation option

You can learn more at Axiotron. Video from Mahalo.

from Drawn via Kottke.

This would be a wonderful product for those who use Adobe’s suite but don’t know all the keyboard shortcuts; a layout that displays them would be indispensable.

I’ve recently discovered the beauty of the GTD system and am in the process of integrating GTDTiddlyWiki into my life to organize all aspects of my life. There are a number of resources regarding the GTD mindest; I am partial to 43 folders. There are definitely a number of benefits to using this mindset to organize things, but it seems like a lot to adhere to. I am always interested consolidating and this looks like a great way. The real question is whether or not I will stick to this plan.

I especially love the feature of printing directly to 3×5 cards, aka the HipsterPDA. That and the fact the Wiki is contained in one file that can go anywhere makes me think I may be able to make this one stick. Has anybody had experience with the GTD system or any other resources for organizing the many areas of one’s life easily?

Wordpress and Plugins

• Google XML Sitemaps (this is excellent for automatically generating a sitemap and notifying Google each time you update your blog. )
• Akismet (this comes packaged with WordPress but you must activate it to keep comment spam at bay.)
• Filosofo Gravatars (for displaying a commenter’s gravatar when applicable, although I may soon be switching to something using mybloglog instead.)
• Similar Posts (For automatically recommending posts that are similar to the one being viewed – obviously not very useful to me right now as there isn’t much content.)
• Subscribe to comments (To allow visitors to be notified via email when someone posts a comment on an article they have commented on.)
• Commentluv (Automatically attempts to find a commenter’s RSS feed if applicable and display their latest headline with any comments they leave.)
• PHP Exec (To execute PHP code within WordPress posts.

There are quite a few more plugins I have tried out any may implement in the future. I may use a flickr plugin and a last.fm plugin to display my latest submissions to those sites.

Firefox Plugins

Firefox is my browser of choice for many reasons, its extensibility is one of them.

• Firebug (this extenstion is amazing when you are designing and need to make small tweaks to get your css just right, it cut down on tons of debug time for me.)
• IETab (Enables a tab to render pages using your installed Internet Explorer engine, useful for cross browser testing – doesn’t work in tandem with FireBug though.)
• MeasureIt (Allows you to click on an icon and measure anything you see in your browser window, also great for small tweaks to css.)
• ColorZilla (use a color picker to find out what any color on any web page is and even copy it in hex format if you want)
• Super DragAndGo (While not really a web developer extension, this allows me to click and hold a link and drag it to open it in a new tab – it’s like “throwing” a link to open a new tab for it.)

Online Resources

• Browsershots (tool for generating screenshots in a ridiculous number of browsers you probably don’t have access to. Wait times can be painful though.)
• W3Schools (a simple, straightforward css reference)
• Colourlovers (great idea generator for color palettes)
• Smashing Magazine (awesome repository of resources for both web and graphic designers)

Software

• Notepad++ (Great for editing many files, recently became my editor of choice over editplus)
• FlashFXP (Also a new program for me, up until recently I used SmartFTP)
• xampp (enabled me to install wordpress locally on a Windows machine, great for a fast testing environment)
• iTunes (for keeping the music rolling without a hitch – also see my last.fm profile)
• multiple IE (allows standalone installations of Internet Explorer back to version 3 for testing layouts – essential after I realized browsershots was taking way too long for my liking)

More to come…

When I finally decided that I wanted to hang my virtual shingle out for business I had to make a decision about what back end I wanted to power my home on the web. While I have often dabbled in different CMS platforms, I’ve never really built a template from scratch for one. The closest I had come before was a heavily modified Joomla template for a previous job. After working with Joomla I knew I wanted to stay away from such a bloated CMS which was certainly overkill for my needs.

Choosing a CMS

After a little research, it became obvious that overall the most used blogging platform of blogs i read regularly is WordPress. Most of these blogs are centered around graphic design or web design, so this made me comfortable that WordPress could handle my needs if it already does so for most of these blogs.Once this decision was made, I decided to arm myself with as much knowledge as possible before beginning to design a template. I knew there were many premade themes available and even considered sandbox for it’s seeming ease of customization. In the end, I wanted to take the opportunity to create the template from nothing to really make it my own.

So, I collected ideas from the core group of blogs I frequent and did my best to determine what plugins I would need to really make the site my own. I relied on suggestions from other bloggers, as well as the WordPress repository of plugins to find them. I can’t underestimate the importance of really brainstorming what you want to present before you attempt to design the theme. If you don’t, you may find yourself like I have in the past trying to basically retrofit my design after the fact because I had forgotten about a really useful plugin I needed to integrate into the design.

The Design Process

With a list of plugins and basic layout ideas, I sketched a few preliminaries on paper. This was also really useful to me, because I find a blank Photoshop canvas without direction can lead to some bad decisions with the layout. I took the paper sketches and parlayed them into a gray scale Photoshop layout relatively quickly. I find designing in gray scale helps a lot in the beginning with focus on content and the presentation of said content. Without worrying about color, contrast can be used in gray scale to create the proper hierarchy of a design. This allowed me to focus on that first, then bring in color scheme ideas later.

I utilized the wonderful colourlovers.com as a color scheme springboard, then ran with my own style to create the particular colors seen here.

After I had the layout set up in Photoshop, I researched quite a bit on the best way to slice the images in order to create a fast-loading and validating page. wpdesigner.com’s wonderful tutorial on creating a WordPress theme from scratch was fundamental in my success of going from .psd file to working theme.

I took the advice of installing WordPress locally using xammp on my windows machine and unzipping WordPress into the “htdocs” folder. This makes it really easy if you run windows to see instantly any changes you have made to your files. I simply edit the files in Notepad++ and save them, then refresh my localhost/blog location. This is much less time-consuming than using a remote install of WordPress on your web server and FTP’ing all your files to see changes. Besides, the content on my own machine is private and I don’t have to worry about visitors tripping over my code editing on my real blog.

The Technical Issues

Utilizing WP-Designer’s tutorial alongside numerous Css references and examples, I sliced and coded my layout into a working WordPress theme. I tested all my code in Firefox and utilized the Firebug plugin extensively. I also used the IEtab plugin to see what it was looking like in my IE installation. After realizing I had some problems with older IE versions and my .png transparency, I located multiple IE to install the older versions simultaneously on my local machine to test them all. I decided that support for IE prior to version 5.5 was not something I am concerned with. The bulk of my intended audience will most likely use Firefox or a newer version of IE.

I initially discovered the .png transparency problem when running my live site through browsershots.org, but the long wait and my inability to find a working .png fix for IE led to my discovery of multiple IE. Incidentally, the only solution I could find that worked was using an image for my header instead of a div with a background applied, if anyone knows of a remedy to this please let me know.

Making it all publicly available

Once I had essentially gotten the layout where I wanted it to be, the next step was to find a web host. After a little bit of searching I settled on ANHost based on information from Pearsonified. I wanted to use midphase but the yearly payment option wasn’t something I wanted to be hooked into. ANHost initially looked like you could pay monthly and is now owned by midphase so it seemed like a good fit. Well, after reading through all the pre-sales information and placing my order, ANHost’s receipt proceeded to inform me I would be paying yearly.

I immediately hopped on live chat with a rep and began explaining the situation. Through a somewhat painless twenty-odd minute chat the rep informed me she would email a billing specialist to see what could be done. I spoke on the phone with the billing rep the next day after she had left me a message, and everything was set up so I would be on a monthly payment plan instead of yearly which is why I avoided midphase to begin with. The assistance I received was above average for sure, but it could have been avoided altogether with properly written disclaimer’s during the ordering process.

I haven’t experienced enough beyond this with ANHost to lean one way or another on their services, but of course this has left me with a bad taste in my mouth very early on. I hadn’t even received my site information before I had to contact customer service with a problem. Only time will tell if ANHost/midphase is a company I would recommend.

So now I’ve made my way through the brainstorming of a design, the creation of the design in Photoshop, implementing it with WordPress and selecting a host and uploading my files. This leaves me here with a new blog where I can promote my services and share interesting and useful stories about design.

To be continued…