Posted by ljmacphee on December 31, 2007 under gimp, graphics, how to | 
Some images that you post online you wish to protect. A very simple way to watermark your image is to to create a transparent image the same size as your original, put your logo or website url in white, copy that to a new layer in the original image and change the transparency to what ever pleases you.
Original image
Create an image the same size
Use the ‘advanced options when you create the watermark and make the background transparent.
In your original image to go Dialogs->Layers
In the layers dialog create a new layer same as the first by clicking the copy button on the bottom ( 2 pictures )
Go to the watermark image and click edit->copy
Go to the original image and click edit->paste
You can use the arrow keys on your key board to move the watermark’s position
Slide the Opacity slider in the layers dialog until you like the way the watermark looks in your image.
Posted by ljmacphee on December 28, 2007 under blogging |
All the wonderful things that have made it easier to find and process information on the net have also dulled the net.
Wiki is a great group encyclopedia. But like all committee work it lacks personality. Also there is a re-occurring problem with people writing and editing their own or their companies Wiki entries to their satisfaction.
Blogs are wonderful but if everyone out there is writing five to ten posts a week we’re all going to be covering a lot of the same information. RSS feeds let you process huge amounts of information. But it’s not the same as visiting. And aggregator sites are the lowest interest sites of all. They are just someone else’s idea of what your RSS feed should look like.
Social sites are peaking as well. As pointed out by Cory Doctrow everyone can find you on a social network. Those people you willingly left behind in your life have a creepy way of crawling back in to your life in web 2.0.
Websites have evolved in ways that make it easier for search engines and therefore people to find them. Search engines are evolving and as they get better it will become easier to be found by the search engines with out worrying about keywords or the format of your site.
Many sites need the ad revenues to cover costs. So like news sites they avoid topics likely to offend.
So until the next thing makes itself known I’m going to do my part. All the blogs have had sections added. Photos on some, scripts on others, but they are all branching out. It’s time. There will be more branching out over the next several months. More photos are going up on my sites than on my Flickr account now.
Blogging’s cool but we’re all ready for something new. I’m betting that will be the mobile web, which will one day be known as Web 3.0.
Posted by ljmacphee on December 26, 2007 under blogging |
Writer’s block got your fingers? It gets easier as you blog longer. I’m writing 3 posts weekly for 5 blogs and misc posts for two other blogs. That 15 or more posts each and every week. I started out with a bang, hit a wall about 3 months into blogging, now it’s gotten easy.
All week long I look for interesting topics; online, tv, books, movies, radio, magazines, and in conversations and forums. Anytime I see an interesting topic I make a note. Most of my time is spent digging into books, the net, code and whatnot looking for new things to bring my readers. Come Monday morning I usually have twice as many topics as posts. But some topics turn out to be duds. Either every single blog in your niche has covered them or with some there just isn’t enough information to fill out a post. The more topics you can find offline that haven’t been beaten to death online already the better. For me that is the hardest part of blogging, finding new topics.
Monday mornings I write. I create a post for each topic and post date it. Then I round up resources of interest, add in links and read up on the subject. Then I write. Bad. I just talk with no attention to grammar, spelling or continuity. I just write.
Tuesdays I get away from the desk and out of the house. Or I write scripts and programs. Sometimes I just study some AI or other subject that catches my eye. If you spend all your time blogging you’ll have nothing to talk about but blogging. That’s a pretty full, heavily competitive niche.
Wednesdays it is back to writing. Now the typos and spelling get fixed. I re-write the paragraphs so the subject flows nicely and I polish it up. This is when I check, write and re-write the headlines.
Thursdays I put in back links where ever I can. If you get scraped ( and you will get scraped, if you aren’t you should be worried ) you’ll have some links home and two if some one is interested in a topic you can send them to more information on your site rather than elsewhere.
Fridays is back up day, back up the blogs, update site maps etc.
Saturdays and Sundays I leave blogging alone. If you don’t have a life you’ll have nothing to write about.
Posted by ljmacphee on December 24, 2007 under things you should know |
LOL obviously these researches don’t run their own websites.
University Park, Pa. – Web site policy makers who use robots.txt files as gatekeepers to specify what is open and what is off limits to Web crawlers have a bias that favors Google over other search engines, say Penn State researchers whose study of more than 7,500 Web sites revealed Google’s advantage.
That finding was surprising, said C. Lee Giles, the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology who led the research team which developed a new search engine—BotSeer—for the study. . . . [read more Study shows Google favored over other search engines]
Why is Google preferred? Google provides the easy to use AdSense program to help webmasters earn some money, Google has Webmaster tools and Analytics for webmasters, and Google, right now at least, is the best of the search engines. However much better we would like Google to be, it hands down trumps the others. Probably because Google is so webmaster friendly. But most important of all; it is Google who sends us the most traffic from search engines.
See also:
BotSeer, a search engine providing information on robot.txt files across the internet