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I've been freelancing full-time for 3 years now (although I started freelancing about 6 years ago), and after all this time, I've finally found a method for planning my project schedule and keeping my commitments in check. read more »

A reader asked if there was a way to apply the Photoshop Thumbnail script I wrote to all open documents, so I figured I'd post it up here for everyone to see. read more »

If you have comments activated on your Drupal site, and you allow non-members to leave comments, by default Drupal will append "(not verified)" to the names of people who leave comments and aren't logged in to your site. On many sites (like mine, for instance), people aren't even allowed to register accounts, meaning every comment has that pesky "(not verified)" text with it! I find that unfriendly, so here's how you can change that. read more »

Yesterday I found this article showing how to add a button to the Yahoo UI Autocomplete Control to make it behave like a combo box (i.e. all of the autocomplete's suggestions are listed in a dropdown when the button is clicked).

I was working on doing exactly this before I found the article, but had run into some buggy behavior in my implementation. I was doing it basically the same way this article suggests, having the button call the Autocomplete's sendQuery() method, passing it an empty string. But the button would only work the first time it was clicked; after that, clicking the button would return no results in the Autocomplete.

What this article pointed out to me is that the input element for the Autocomplete should have focus before you call sendQuery(), to ensure the query results in the dropdown being populated. This behavior certainly seems like a bug to me. read more »

Last month I wrote a post on using Photoshop and Javascript to generate thumbnails. That's useful if you have to process a bunch of images for a website you're making, but what if you want to have a function on your website that accepts image uploads and then dynamically generates thumbnails? There's a lot that goes into that, but today I'm going to provide a basic PHP function (using ImageMagick) that gets the image processing part of the job done. read more »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called Conditional Image Resizing with Photoshop and JavaScript that illustrated how to write a script to perform quick photo cleanup and resizing within a bounded area. Today I want to talk about a similar technique for generating thumbnail images. The fundamentals are the same, but the goal is slightly different. read more »

Often I find myself having to do a lot of bulk image processing when I'm working on websites: resizing a bunch of pictures to a certain width or height, color adjustments, and sharpening, usually. It can be the most mind-numbing part of my work, and I'm always looking for ways to avoid that.

In Photoshop, you can use actions to help you automate a lot of repetitive work. However, the shortcoming I've found with actions is their lack of conditional behavior. For example, let's say I have a big batch of images, some portrait-oriented (taller than they are wide) and some landscape-oriented (vice versa), and I want to resize each of them to fit within a 500 x 500 pixel square. If the image is portrait-oriented, then I need to resize proportionally, setting the height to 500 pixels. If it's landscape-oriented, then I should resize proportionally with a 500 pixel width, instead of height. I've never found a good way to do this with a single action. But where actions fail, JavaScript comes to the rescue. read more »

Today, Google Analytics is telling me that, over the past two days, there's been a surge in traffic for sphericle.com, where I occasionally post music that I've made. The site usually gets a few hits per day, but on Friday it had 60 visitors, and Saturday saw 180! Great news, right? I wondered, how did this happen? Where are these visitors coming from? read more »

I'd like to share how I go about hosting development versions of websites on my Apple laptop (it's a 12" Powerbook G4). These instructions should work for anyone running OS X 10.3 and up (probably even earlier versions, as well). I'm talking about the regular OS X, not OS X Server.

The goal for these instructions is to be able to run a local version of a website, under a domain name of your choosing. Incredibly useful for development. read more »

Here's a bit of Javascript you can use on your website's 404 page so that when you look at your stats in Google Analytics, all the missing pages that your visitors tried to visit are grouped into one place. This technique can be useful as it gives you a single place to look in your stats for any bad URLs that people visit often, perhaps as the result of a mistyped link, or a deleted page. read more »