October 1st, 2009 § 0
I’ve been trying to get around to creating a new portfolio for a long time now and I’ve just launched my new portfolio at http://portfolio.jamisonkissh.com. I attempted to keep the minimalist look of my blog that I adore but I’m not sure if I succeeded, please let me know what you think!
August 12th, 2009 § 4
I’m writing this in hopes to save someone from having the same wild goose chase that I went through attempting to discover why a set of images would not show up in IE. I knew the image was there, I could navigate directly to the image’s location and be returned the little red “X” but not be given a 404 as if I were going to an image that didn’t exist. This seemed strange to me seeing as how I knew that it was a valid .jpg file and I knew that any modern browser should by all means support a jpeg. This sent me on a chase for an answer. I ended up over at designerstalk.com where a few members pointed me in the right direction. It took three tries but none of the previous tries hurt the first, they only improved the page. Finally one member said that he’d experienced a similar issue with jpegs saved in CMYK so back I went to the original images and sure enough all the images that would not display were CMYK images. I setup a batch to re-save and change the color mode to RGB and sure enough my images are all showing up now!
August 11th, 2009 § 0
I had a bit of a strange issue when I inadvertently stumbled upon a series of images that I had put online that were inverted in appearance, however this wasn’t perfect either. I went to the server and pulled the folder with the affected images down to my computer and noticed that even in Quick Look I still couldn’t see the image correctly. Going off a (seemingly) unrelated issue I had posted on DesignersTalk.com and will write about tomorrow I tried opening the images in Photoshop and re-saving them, that worked. So I set up a batch and let all the images open and re-save. Now I’m not entirely sure why this was happening however I am able to say that this is certainly a method to try if you ever run into something like this with your images.
July 26th, 2009 § 0
This past Friday I realized how valuable I find free software and at times it even motivates me to purchase the full version. I had been using a program for automated backups called SyncBack by 2BrightSparks was 100% free and at no point did it ask me to purchase the full version. The different versions don’t really offer many differences but below is the comparison list offered by 2BrightSparks on their site.
SyncBack SE is also an excellent application if you’re looking for a backup solution for any windows computer, it supports FTP and password protected network files. I would absolutely recommend the program for Windows.
July 21st, 2009 § 0
I know it’s a little late and WhatTheFont! has been around for quite some time now however I felt it was necessary to share my positive experience with it.
Earlier today I was charged with remaking my companies current logo (which was created before my time) and to do so while trying to preserve a similar style. I had no clue where to even start and didn’t quite have the time to page through all the different fonts that I had to chose from. This is when I turned to ILoveTypography.com to hopefully find a solution, I did – WhatTheFont! The web based application uploaded the current banner from our site where it split it into pieces and I had to help it figure out which letters were which. The application then processed for a couple of seconds and returned three possible answers. The first of which was some form of University. After searching the computer on which the logo originated I found that University Regular was indeed a font that was installed. After a few minutes in Illustrator it turned out to be the exact font. Long story short, WhatTheFont! worked well and saved the day!
I encourage you to test out WhatTheFont! at WhatTheFont.com
June 30th, 2009 § 0
Well a few days ago I setup my company’s Facebook page and after playing around with it for a little while I decided yesterday that I might as well try an ad. After all the minimum daily price was $1 with the minimum maximum bid at $0.01. Since I was paying for this experiment out of my pocket I set the daily budget to $3.00 and the maximum bid to $0.60 (just below their recomendation). Now keeping in mind that this is a very small scale experiment of what is possible I’ve ended up with 15 clicks over two days and 86,375 impressions as of the time of writing this post. From this I doubled our fan base (from six to twelve), like I said it’s a small experiment. However if this scales up and does so proportionally we should be able to drive quite a few people to our fan page and on top of that quite a few to our website.
As far as the visits that Facebook has driven to our site I’m not entirely sure how to track in Google Analytics because of the strange little frame that Facebook place on top of the page if you visit a shared link. I’m not sure if the referer is still Facebook.com or if I should be looking for something else. If anyone knows the answer and is willing to answer that question for me I’d greatly appreciate and I would gladly share the numbers.
My bottom line here is that if the numbers and results that I see (6/15 become fans) I think there is a great potential in Facebook and advertising your page on Facebook. Just think, one person becomes a fan, it shows up in their friends news feeds and so on. Facebook’s newsfeed especially provides the framework for a carefully crafted campaign to become viral and to do so VERY quickly.
June 20th, 2009 § 0
I’ve been using the Mac OS X app Coda for a while now and I figured it’s about time to write a review on it.
The app it’s self is downloadable as a 30 day free trial from the developer, Panic’s website. If you haven’t downloaded and tried Coda yet I’d say absolutely go for it! If you’re debating about purchasing it or not that’s what I’m here for.
I myself am a fairly frugal person so paying the $99 price tag was a little tough however I brought myself to do it when I was doing a bunch of back-end work for my company’s website. After tearing a little bit from paying for it I was extremely grateful and it’s come in handy more than once. I’ll start off by explaining some of my favorite features. The fact that the app has a built in FTP client so I can quickly open, save and upload files is absolutely the best thing any editor could do. This keeps your work-flow moving quickly and it kept me from getting distracted changing apps all the time to upload to the test server. On top of having a built in FTP manager it allows you to test locally and even preview the page within the app it’s self.
The next two features that I love are within the text editor it’s self. The first feature which becomes immediately apparent when you open a page is the color coded text. When you open an existing document the app attempts to determine what kind of text is present in the file (HTML, CSS, etc) and color code the tags accordingly. For me this is the greatest time saver and lets me quickly look back to make sure that I closed all my open tags. It also makes looking at all the text a hell of a lot easier on your eyes.
My next favorite feature in the editor pane is tag suggestions. After defining what type of text it is that you’re working with the app will start to suggest possible tags that you’re going to use as you persay open a bracket. If you open a tag such as <img>it will keep the cursor within the second bracket so that you can easily hit space and start to type in parameters. The app will also add the closing tag so that you can immediately move to typing in what you need to and move on. On top of tag suggestions the editor also has a built in spell checker (or perhaps it uses Mac OS X’s) either way it’s a great feature to have in the app.
One of the last bonus points that the application scores with me is it’s built in preview window in which you ‘re able to view the site as it is but it also has a feature very similar to the “inspect element” tool that can be found in Google Chrome and Safari (with developer mode on). It allows you to easily pinpoint code errors by drilling down to the error. While on the topic of error checking the app also has the ability to check for errors and suggest corrections.
Overall I think this app is the best investment I could have made and is perhaps one of the best pieces of software I have purchased ever. If you’re even contemplating the purchase absolutely go for it, you’ll learn to love it!
Coda on Panic’s site
March 2nd, 2009 § 0
I’ve got some reason to believe that Google and the other search giants recently changed their algorithms. I work for Design Connection managing SEO for our site trying to rank highly for the term “house plans” however over the past couple of day’s I noticed that we dropped… significantly. We moved from six to thirteen overnight and have remained for nearly a week despite any content changes and recachings. I also just read an article on SEOMoz.org about how all of a sudden there is a lot of requests on ELance for writers to make hundreds of articles with their requested context. I’m going to take this as meaning that these SEO guys requesting these articles have realized that the algorithm changed and there is a new need for off site content. Not only do I need to work on social media I now need to work on getting related content off-site… well off to work I go!
This also leads me to think… is there not a good way to improve your ranking without being obnoxious and doing what most people consider spam? This is what really bothers the crap out of me with SEO.
February 17th, 2009 § 2
A friend of mine and I need some help. We designed a logo but we’re not sure how readable it is. If you could do us a huge favor and just tell me what you think it says it’d be greatly appreciated.
[VIA]
January 21st, 2009 § 0
Well I’ve begun working on a side project at work to test a theory that if the url contains the search keyword you’re going to rank better. However I’m looking for a couple of things, the first and primary being constructive criticism and the second if you can think of anything else you’d like to see please let me know. Please check out our/my new site House Plans Connection. And please let me know what you think in the comments here.