If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. (more…)
I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. (more…)
Over fifty-percent of the DVDs I burn in DVD Studio Pro 4 (DSP) fail and become coasters, and every fifth or sixth DVD I burn forces me to restart my Dual G5 Mac Pro! The problem is that I have to Force Quit DVD Studio Pro when it is burns or formats the DVD. I wait about five minutes after the status bar has stopped moving. I then force quit DVD Studio Pro with the DVD unable to eject without restarting OS-X. There are ways of ejecting the DVD through holes with paper clips, but I might as well restart my computer than do that. I hate it when Apple thinks they know best by not allowing for an eject button that is on the front of the computer and not software supported via the keyboard. I have the same drive (Pioneer DVR-109) on my PC at home, and do not have this many problems!
To burn video DVDs, I’ve switched to the open source burning software, Burn. I’m sure many other programs will work that support the video DVD file system.
Since I have switched, I have a 20% coaster rate, and this program verifies the data, too (which as far as I know DSP doesn’t do). Most importantly, I have not had to restart my computer yet! I must mention that I am burning at 4x. I going to guess that the DSP default (and only setting) is to burn at the maximum rate of the drive which is 8X.
As a side note, we buy hub-printable white Taiyo-Yuden 8x DVD-Rs from AllMediaOutlet for all our DVD burning. We also buy silver non-hub-printable Ritek CD-Rs for out CD burning. As far as I know, no one makes hub-printable silver CD-R or DVDs.
Are there better consumer DVD-Rs out there?
I have used a few project management software packages ArtLogik, AceProject, and dotProject (open source) at my current job and a former job. At my current job, online project management did not last long. Since we are small company of under 10 employees that do not pass projects back and forth often, there is not a great need for the overhead of project management software.
Personal Timesheet
We use job folders that an archive copy of the project on DVD and time sheets go into. Before tallying the final time sheet that is printed from Excel, I use a personal time sheet that I write on. It is a seven column time sheet with the date, start and end times, a short description, the hours of the task, the comp number (only used for print projects), and a column to check if I have transferred the time to the final time sheet that goes into the job folder.
Final Time Sheet
The final time sheet that is archived with the digital copy of the project files is an Excel template. It has a place for the job number client and project in the heading. The way these three spreadsheet cells are set up that increases productivity is that one can complete the information for all three cells, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them into the file name of the Excel file. Thus the filename will be .xls and Spotlighting (from OS-X) the correct files in the future will be easy.
After the heading, is a list of the tasks with their date, description and total time. Below the task hours that are billed are additional fees that can be charged such comp approvals, ftp approvals, pdf approvals, and DVD approvals. This is all where material costs would be listed. These section has five columns: the date, a description of there service, who the material was sent to, how it was sent, and who said to send it. This level of description allows for a paper trail of who did what and when.
I hope that these thoughts and files help you in your project management. How do you do project management in your business? Do you use a paper trail? Track it all online?
I have not tested Dreamweaver CS3, but prior versions of the program do a mediocre job of displaying CSS correctly. For instance, div tags do not always display correctly without inline style tags–which we all know is such a coding faux pas. This has led to a departure from using a WYSIWYG editor and to using the browser to construct webpages. Below are the best aids I have found in debugging and editing webpages in the browser Mozilla FireFox.
Suggested extensions for making coding easier
The Web Developer FireFox extension was the first FireFox extension I ever installed. It was mid-2004, and I was frustrated with Cascading Style Sheets. I was using CSS, not for the first time, but I was using CSS for margins and padding and widths– all those things we used spacer gifs and tables for back in the web?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s infancy–for the first time. The sole reason that I would have even paid for this extension was the Outline tab and it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s ?¢‚Ǩ?ìOutline Block Level Elements.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù The fact that I could actually know where one element ended and another begin was a godsend. There are many more uses for the plug-in. Almost too many to name here. The highlights that I use (or used to use) regularly are:
I have only mentioned Web Developer first because it was my gateway drug of FireFox extensions. I use Firebug more often now that CSS is even more prevalent then it was in 2004, thus simplifying the HTML and making hand-coding HTML much easier. Firebug focuses solely on the content of a page and doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have the browser related features such as disabling the cache or resizing the browser window. It shines when you want to tweak HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly.
The way Firebug works is by clicking the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìInspect?¢‚Ǩ¬ù button and selecting an element on the page. The HTML and CSS associated with that element is then displayed. The inheritance and overriding of CSS attributes can be seen (hence the cascading in cascading style sheets) and any CSS attributes can be edited or disabled.
Firebug helped make my CSS leaner. Before I discovered it, I often ignored the inheritance features of CSS and repeated the same attributes numerous times, since inheritance is an abstraction that is hard to remember without either modeling (which Firebug does) or precise documentation. Firebug shows this inheritance, thus making the relationships between.
Firebug will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, padding, and sizes for you–similar to what you would have in a WYSIWYG editor. Since offsets, margins, and padding can often overlap, there is a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìLayout?¢‚Ǩ¬ù tab that allow editing of these qualities and shows their relationships.
If you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve ever clicked through a large site in order to test all the hyperlinks, you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll find this simple add-on convenient and productive. It will highlight valid and invalid links of a page. Once Link Checker is installed, you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll have to add the toolbar button yourself.
You could use the guides in Firebug, but most times, one just wants to quickly estimate the correct margin or padding. This add-on gives the height and width in pixels of a rectangle that can be drawn atop the webpage.
ColorZilla adds an eyedropper tool to the status bar that allows color sampling and copies RGB values (in five different ways) to the clipboard. This means you don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have to go back to Illustrator or PhotoShop to grab RGB values for your CSS.
A note about Internet Explorer
Unfortunately, the majority of web users browse with Microsoft Internet Explorer and thus testing a site with IE is necessary. At work, I create my websites on an Apple Macintosh and have an old Dell laptop with IE 6 installed to test websites with Internet Explorer. A tool that I have not used extensively, but does help sometimes in debugging under IE is Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.
When you are involved in the final production of a print or electronic piece, trying to walk the line of using the copy/text of one supervisor and the graphic design/layout of a different supervisor is difficult, because they both can’t win without using less than a 80% horizontal type shift. 
–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com
This is a Fast Company article about managing Generation Y/Millennials. I thought it was humorous, but only because much of it is true.
FC: Scenes from the Culture Clash
Excerpt:
“They are the traumatized bosses, as well as the 47-year-old woman from HR who has been hassled time and again by her youngest workers and their parents.”
–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com
As the last semester for the next batch of job hopefuls gets into full swing, I wanted to offer my advice. (Much of this is aimed at the college junior though). We were introducing ourselves at church the other day (in a small group). Everyone mentions their job–even if it’s under their breath. I introduced myself as saying that I worked at an ad agency and do exactly what I did college–except that it’s better quality–and I get paid for it. As we went around the room, I was surprised at the number of people that this is not true for.
–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com