Interactive Llama

If you are interested in the open-source image gallery web application, Gallery, you have probably read the Thirteen Ways To Add SEO To Gallery2. If you haven’t, then read that tutorial first. Within that tutorial, I mention a bulk renaming script that I have used for years with Gallery2 to change titles and keywords. This post is about that title and keyword generating bulk script. It removes some common naming conventions from the titles and removes common words from the keyword list. Do people really want to see all the photographs that contain the articles, “a,” “an” and “the.” I certainly wouldn’t.

The default title for Gallery2 item uploads is the file name of the image. It easier to name your files well from the beginning from the safety of either than edit the URL, titles, and keywords for your item after they are uploaded. My naming convention for a file name is photo_set-photo_subset-people_or_objects. For a photo of my parents, my bride and myself at my wedding, I used “wedding-party-parents-rachel-stephen.jpg” (more…)

The need

Professional web developers have been aware of CSS sprites since 2004. They are the background graphics that change position based on mouse hover thus eliminating the need for JavaScript image swaps and image caching since the “mouse on” and “mouse off” are one image. I have been using sprites for years. It is a more tedious process than clicking Swap image on a DreamWeaver drop down menu, but it produces more accessible and more clean code. The most tedious part of creating CSS sprites for menu navigation is aligning the static (in-active) and hover (active) images. This script solves this problem by taking two images and merging them into one. I hope this increases your productivity and creates a more standards-compliant web.

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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. (more…)

To the designer, it’s a pain only using Arial and Times New Roman for headlines (well, the MacHead designers are probably using Helvetica and Times, but I regress. . .) , so one uses images. The problem is that images are static unless you have an image generation script package installed on your web server to create images on-the-fly.

So what’s one to do?

A friend of mine actually sent me a link to Mike Davidson’s site on sIFR 2.0 (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) two years ago. I had forgotten about it until my creative director wanted a headline in a pixel font in a database driven site.

The concept

sIFR can replace short amounts of text with text rendered in the typeface you choose–whether or not your users have the font installed on their computer. A flash movie is created on the client side and uses JavaScript to pass text to it from the HTML (that’s correct, no coding the text twice). That means with a few lines of Javascript, you can use any fancy font you want for headlines and pullout quotes.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com