Useful Stuff

RAW Workflow 2

  OK, I know a little bit more about the workflow now... this is a continuation of the post on my new RAW workflow.

   A. Because DNG files carry keywords with them when saved as JPG, the next step should be to assign your keywords before creating the JPG files, otherwise you'll double your work. I'm using Photo Mechanic, which is favored by the news industry. I'm now in the process of building what they call Structured Keywords, which is a hierarchically-arranged list of keywords. This means that you can have thousands of available keywords, but only have to look at a handful at any given moment. This is an extremely cool feature, far more powerful than anything I've seen in Adobe's Lightroom. Lightroom has a much prettier interface, but it's amazingly slow compared to Photo Mechanic, and requires you to add all your images into its database, a process that could take hours, while PM just loads individual folders as needed.

   I should note that I've been contemplating building an image database for years, but it's always been such a daunting task that I've put it off for another day. But Structured Keywords eliminates the need for an outside database (with all its potential linking problems, size, etc.) and allows me to put keywords and other IPTC metadata directly into the image itself, so that the images themselves become the records in the database. And because this is an industry standard, lots of entities use the same metadata. I use Zenfolio to host my photos online, for example. Once I get keywords on my images and get them uploaded, anyone on Zenfolio can find my images if they search for a keyword I've used. I'm not sure if this also works when searching outside of Zenfolio (like with Google) or not, but suspect that it might.

   B. After keywords and other metadata are added, I will create JPG files from all of the images I want to upload or otherwise distribute. The reason for waiting until afterwards is because PhotoShop (the software I use to create the JPG file) saves the metadata to the JPG, too... so it makes for half the work.

   I'll post more info on this workflow as I develop it further.

iWeb Disaster Averted

   I thought I had a disaster on my hands this morning, but discovered a workaround. I'm about to go on the road for awhile, and needed to figure out another workaround: how to eliminate the font spacing problems Snow Leopard caused in iWeb, Pages, and Numbers. Some fonts are OK, while others are really screwed up. Hoefler Text, which is the font of all of my new websites (Original Green, New Urban Guild, and Mouzon Design) experiences tons of extra space between lines in Snow Leopard, totally screwing everything up.

   Because I didn't want to mess with the Original Green site, I created a new site with the default Site name (www.originalgreen.org/Site) and fiddled with the spacing until it was right. For the record, 14 point Hoefler Text Regular requires a line spacing of 0.72 in Snow Leopard to look just like itself at a line spacing of 1.2 in Leopard. Mission accomplished. Or so I thought.

   On a whim, I keyed in http://www.originalgreen.org, and to my horror, it went to http://www.originalgreen.org/Site, not http://www.originalgreen.org/OG, which is the real Original Green site. I did some Googling and discovered that I could delete the Site files fairly easily. They were on my iDisk at Web>Sites. When I got there, I found both the OG folder and the Site folder. I deleted the Site folder. Now, when I went to http://www.originalgreen.org, MobileMe gave me an error message. So it was still looking for Site, which was no longer there. I went to the OG site, created a dummy blog post, and posted it, hoping that would reset whatever was pointing to the now nonexistent Site. No luck. 

   After another frantic round of Googling yielded nothing, I noticed that within the iDisk>Web>Sites folder, there are two files I couldn't account for: index.html and Sites.rss. I copied them to my desktop for safekeeping and deleted them off my iDisk. I made a minor change to the dummy blog post on the OG site, published it, and everything's fine!!

Technorati - Finally Claimed My Blogs!

   I finally got both of my blogs listed on Technorati! If you don't know already, Technorati is supposedly the biggest blog rating service out there. Creating an account was easy enough, but claiming my two blogs (Useful Stuff, which you're reading, and the Original Green Blog) was almost impossible. I tried probably a dozen times over the past six months to claim the blogs, but to no avail. Something always went inexplicably wrong. Today, I did the exact same stuff, and it worked. Go figure. In any case, you've gotta claim your blogs for them to start gaining authority with Technorati. Authority comes when other blogs link to you.

   Two other things...

   A.    Depending on which blog software you use, you may need to "ping" Technorati whenever you do a new blog post. Typepad supposedly pings Technorati automatically, but Technorati was about 50 days behind on the Useful Stuff blog... but when I pinged it, it brought it up to the minute. iWeb makes no pretenses about pinging, so you've gotta do that yourself. Either way, ping to be safe.

   B.    When you do a blog post, fave it on Technorati. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's gotta help.

iWeb site verification on Google Webmaster Tools

  This is important, but it looks impossible at first. You can add your site easily enough, but when you try to verify, it tells you to put a code in the HTML of the site. As you probably know, iWeb saves you from having to know about HTML, but the downside is that it's all locked up where you can't easily get to it. So it seems impossible.

   There is another option, however. When you click "Verify" there's a pull-down menu that says "Meta tag." Change it to "HTML file." It'll say "Create the HTML verification file specified below and upload it to http://www.originalgreen.org." Oops, how do I do that? Sounds like more HTML gobbledygook that I can't get to, right? But what I did was copied the verification file name (google48d2351489d13ac8.html, for example) and went to my Original Green file in iWeb.

   Just adding a page with that name wouldn't do, because if you're hosting on MobileMe, then it adds your domain designation before any page name. So if I tried to add a page named google48d2351489d13ac8.html, then it would come out as http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/google48d2351489d13ac8.html rather than the http://www.originalgreen.org/google48d2351489d13ac8.html that Google is looking for... because the http://www.originalgreen.org forwards to web.me.com, which then sends it to your iWeb site, which has to have a name in your domain file. In my case, I use OG for the Original Green site, NUG for the New Urban Guild, MDZ for Mouzon Design, etc.

   So here's what you do: In iWeb, click on File:New Site. Click on the site in the page panel on the left side of the window... it'll take you to the Site Publishing Settings page. Paste your code (google48d2351489d13ac8.html, in my case) into the Site Name box. Publish the site. Then go back to the Google Webmaster Tools browser window and click verify. After the site is verified, you can remove the gobbledygook site from iWeb. That's all there is to it! Takes all of three minutes once you figure out what to do.

Saturday Updates

I have my MacBook Pro set up to check for updates once a week, on Saturday morning. It's been so long since I did it I hope I'm telling it right, but if I recall correctly, all you have to do is to click "Check Now" on a Saturday morning, then make sure it's set to do it once a week. Why? Because in the rare instances when a software update breaks something else, it's not on a workday where it would disrupt things too badly. Also, I'm more likely to be home on weekends where I can get to my main Time Machine backups.

Share This

   I've found the coolest social web buttons. It's from a company called ShareThis. Basically, it lets you put a single sharing button on your blog, and when someone clicks it, it pulls up all of the most popular social web sites... so you can email to a friend, fave on Technorati, Digg it, share on facebook, etc. Take a look... it's far simpler than trying to collect all of the social web site buttons yourself, then keep them current as things change.

   There are problems, however. For example, I've tried to put one on this blog, but it's just that blank box beneath the orange Subscribe chiclet. See what I mean? There are instructions on the ShareThis website telling me how to put their button on a TypePad blog. I followed them precisely, or so I believe... still, a blank box.

   I also put the button on the Original Green blog, courtesy of iWeb Buddy. Previously, I struggled for months to figure out how to do it, but ShareThis simply isn't built for iWeb... yet. But iWeb Buddy solved that. But all is not peachy. Click into any blog post. Can you find the ShareThis button? Had to look awhile, didn't you? If you still don't see it, it's in the lower left corner. Now click on it. Nothing happens, right? But yeah, something does flash in the corner of your eye. That was your scroll bar resizing itself, almost out of your field of view. That's because the ShareThis button opens its window down and to the right, off the current window. So you have to know to scroll down so that you can then see the window, and enjoy its usefulness.

   Still, it's worth it, because my chiclet woes would be compounded trying to work out issues like this with every social web company. But I sure hope ShareThis will take this seriously and make these tweaks. Ideally, they'd build iWeb functionality into their button and allow me to put it wherever on my blog I want to, like an HTML snippet. Matter of fact, just build it to BE and HTML snippet. Tons of other stuff works in iWeb that way. C'mon, ShareThis... surely you can pull this off! iWeb users are a growing crowd.

iWeb Limitations

The general limitation to iWeb is also its strength: it's designed for people that don't want to have to learn HTML, so it makes a lot of decisions for you. If you want to be up quickly, then you need to pick one of their themes, for example. Fortunately, the graphics people at Apple are very, very good, so their themes cover a broad spectrum and are beautifully designed. When I put up the Original Green site (www.originalgreen.org,) I picked their Layered Paper theme and used it straight out of the box.

   But I'm now building a New Urban Guild site (some pages are up) a Guild Foundation site (not up yet) and a Mouzon Design site (the most complete.) I worked for days to figure out how to create themes myself. The most complete instructions are found on the 11 Mystics site but they only get you part of the way there. I finally decided my time would be better spent doing other things, so I Googled "iWeb Custom Theme." The best and most responsive company I found was iPresentee. They are now finishing up the last tweaks on the three themes; I'm hoping they might get them to me today, or early next week at the latest. They built all three themes for $700. I'll let you know when I receive them, and then you can see how quickly content goes up after that by watching the progress of the sites if you're interested.

   The other significant limitation, IMO, is the blogging archive mechanism. Industrial-strength blogs like TypePad, Wordpress, etc., have automatic archiving, usually by month. iWeb, OTOH, simply stacks them up in the same place forever. This makes for a pretty long page list once you've been blogging for awhile. Seth Godin now has over 3,000 blog posts... he's been doing it every day for almost a decade. You can work around this by manually creating a new blog every year or whatever... it's just that the others do it automatically.

   In both cases, however, iWeb is well worth it to me, because otherwise, I simply wouldn't have any of these sites up, nor any hope of doing so.

New Urban Bloggers

I've started a Google Group called New Urban Bloggers. It's for people in the place-making professions (planners, architects, developers, builders) who focus on the New Urbanism, and who are either blogging already or are thinking about it. It's a closed group to avoid spammers, but if you'd like to join, go to this link and click the "Apply for group membership" on the right side of the screen.

   It's only for those who are interested in blogging or who have already begun to blog. If you're not in one of those two categories, then by all means, please DON'T join this group, because it would just be more email clutter for you, with no benefit in return. But if you are, then it could save you a ton of time as we learn from each other (unless you're highly adept at blogging already, like John Massengale, for example.) If you are, please join us anyway so we can learn from you.

   As to the bigger question of "why should I blog?"...

   A. As movements, the New Urbanism and the New Classicism were once tiny niches... and we're not much bigger today. The mainstream press, and the architectural and planning presses, either ignore us most of the time, or when they do publish something about us, it's fairly often negative, especially in the architectural press. Blogs are the best way yet invented of allowing non-presidents to do the Reagan/Obama thing: bypass the press and go directly to the people. For years, we've made the case that the people love our stuff even if the experts do not. Here's our chance to connect and prove our point.

   B. As individuals, the best opportunities most of us have today to establish authority in a much wider audience than our current friends and colleagues are to blog or engage in other Web 2.0 interactions. If the ideas you're writing about are compelling and useful, then they can go viral, spreading around the world. The Original Green cause on facebook, for example, has over 4,000 members from every continent except Antarctica. A tiny fraction are people I know; most are people I never would have had any contact with.

   C. Our movements and the individuals within them focus to varying degrees on traditions. I'm highly interested in the fact that blogging is a living tradition that has begun within the last decade... showing that there are living traditions out there, just not in architecture. And there are several parallels between the blogging tradition and potential future living traditions in architecture. In other words, there is much that could be learned about the ways wisdom is spread and shared in the blogosphere that could be useful in our work.

   One more thing... the point of creating the New Urban Bloggers network is to make sure that we're each aware of the others' blogs. By linking and by blogging to expand on a colleague's post, we're enhancing the vibrancy of our network, accelerating the chances that we'll all get noticed in the blogosphere. There's no reason any of us should want their colleagues to be unaware of their blog.

iWeb Buddy

   iWeb Buddy is a great little piece of software on several counts... so much so that Apple ought to buy it and fold it into iWeb. Here's what it does:

   A.  It lets you track your website with Google Analytics without breaking your blog comments.

   B.  It lets you put HTML in the page headers or footers. I know nothing about HTML, but I can copy and paste.

   C.  It lets you add keywords to your pages.

   D.  It lets you add your Feedburner address. I have a Feedburner account because someone says it helps spread the blog, but I don't know anything about the inner workings, nor do I really want to if I can avoid it.

   E.  It adds the RSS feed URL to each blog entry. This apparently makes each entry easier to find by services like Technorati, although I don't really want to take the time to learn why if I can avoid it.

   F.  It supposedly (see problems below) lets you add social bookmarking icons, so you can share on facebook, Digg, Technorati, del.ici.ous, etc.

   That's the great stuff... here's the problem: iWeb is web design for the rest of us... non-HTML-literate people who likely will stay that way because (like the implications of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full album title) they have far too much stuff going on and one more thing to learn just might make their heads explode. That's why iWeb is so great... regular people can build great-looking websites quickly all by themselves... no need to hire a web design company and spend a lot of money. 

   But iWeb Buddy has documentation that apparently assumes that we DO understand all the web acronym (HTML, RSS, etc.) stuff. In other words, it's probably accurate, but how do I know the difference? It just doesn't tell me enough. How does Feedburner work, and how do I know when iWeb Buddy has successfully linked my blog to Feedburner? How do I know if the RSS feed URL thingie is working right? Faith shouldn't be a requirement of web software.

   When you get down to it, iWeb buddy only does a handful of things. One simple, concise, and explanatory page of text for each feature should do the trick. The text should explain the whole story of four things:

   1.  What to do in iWeb Buddy.

   2.  What the things you just did will do to iWeb.

   3.  How that will make iWeb interact differently with the "outside world."

   4.  What the "outside world" stuff does for me.

   The existing documentation does item 1 fairly well, items 2 and 3 slightly, and item 4 not at all. It should do all four of them in excellent fashion. Who knows, writing those handful (less than a dozen) pages of explanation just might make the difference that gets a lot more people to use iWeb Buddy, which in turn could make the difference in a juicy buyout from Apple... or not.

Losing Earthlink

  For several years, I've hosted everything with Earthlink. Web, email, ftp, and (rudimentary) listserv. All in very Web 1.0 manner. And at over $100/month for Mouzon.com and newurbanguild.com. I discovered iWeb a year ago and within a week, I had www.originalgreen.org up without learning a stitch of HTML. Amazingly empowering. Hosted by Apple's MobileMe.

   Is iWeb still a bit limited? Yes. Apple needs to buy iWeb Buddy and fold those capabilities directly into the program, for example. But iWeb is the difference between me being able to quickly put content up whenever I like, and having to hire a web developer and wait on them to do it. Ever wonder why websites quit getting updated? It's just too hard and too expensive. iWeb is a game-changer.

   Recently, I put up www.Mouzon.com. With iWeb, of course. Problem is, that broke my Earthlink-hosted Mouzon.com email. Because I could never figure it out due in part to the language barrier with Earthlink's tech support people in India, I switched my Mouzon.com email hosting to my domain registrar: MyDomain.com. Less than $1/ month.

   I've recently put up www.newurbanguild.com with iWeb, which of course broke the Guild email. But the Guild is more complicated because I also use it for FTP hosting and the (rudimentary) Guild listserv, two things that the more basic MyDomain email won't do. So, around the time limitations of a recent charrette, I've spent many hours on the phone with Earthlink's tech support people in India. My most recent half-day on the phone ended 36 hours ago, and the email is still down. Has been for almost two weeks now. In times like these, you can't afford that kind of downtime.

   I've now switched the Guild listserv over to Google Groups. Google Groups are much more like full-featured listservs, and can't be spammed because they only accept email from existing members, whereas spam was always a problem with the Guild list on Earthlink.

   That leaves just ftp. I woke up at 4 AM, puzzling over it. And then it occurred to me. Apple's iDisk experience is now very slick... you don't have to know anything about FTP to post something there. And it's a very cool experience from the user side, too... no fussing with FTP clients, usernames and passwords... just click the link to download what's been shared with you. So I'm about to switch over the Guild email to MyDomain, and finally put an end to the miserable Earthlink customer service experience.

   Total cost? I never put all of these websites up on Earthlink because it would have been so expensive, both for development and hosting. But if I had, it would have been around $250/month, not counting tens of thousands of dollars in development costs. I now have up, or will soon have up, www.originalgreen.org, www.mouzon.com, www.newurbanguild.com, and www.guildfoundation.org, all on a single MobileMe family plan at $150/year. I'll likely eventually build a new www.katrinacottages.com and move it to MobileMe, since the family plan allows five sites. So that's five sites for $150/year, or $2.50/site/month. Email is slightly under $1/month with MyDomain (which also registers domains at under $10/year.) And the listserv is free on Google Groups, and the iDisk is part of what you get with MobileMe. So the total cost per domain is less than $3.50/month... versus around $50/month doing everything through Earthlink.

   Save 93% on monthly costs and 100% of the tens of thousands in development costs, don't have to deal with language-barrier tech support (Apple's and MyDomain's are US-based,) put up content and change the structure of the website whenever I like... what's not to love about that?