What follows is a smorgasbord of quick tips that, as a web developer, I use nearly every day.

The Marquee tool is your best friend

As I mentioned in the comments on the pixel-perfect guides post, the marquee tool (keyboard shortcut: m) is the most frequently active tool in my Photoshop toolbox. Aside from its utility as a guide-placement aide, I also use it to quickly extract elements from a layout, to measure element size or spacing, or to define crop- and fill-areas.

Element Extraction

The marquee tool is a selection tool, meant to allow you to define a working area. I use it most often to select an element—like thumbnails, buttons, embellishments, bits of backgrounds, whatever—that I need to save as a separate image file.

First, make a selection around the element; it doesn’t have to be precise, you can refine it later. You may also press the space-bar while you’re defining your selection to move it around before committing the size and position. Next, copy (Cmd- C) the selection to the clipboard, create a new document (Cmd- N, Enter), and paste (Cmd- V) the copied element into the new document.

Now you can save or export the element, or, if necessary, you can refine it further using the following cropping technique.

Cropping

The crop tool allows you to alter a crop area after you define it, but for simple crops, the marquee tool is often just as quick, if not quicker, especially if you have assigned a keyboard shortcut to the crop menu item. Cropping, rather than copy/pasting a selection, is an easier way to extract an element requiring transparency.

To use this technique, you simply define a selection around your element as above, then select the Crop menu item from the Image menu, or use your keyboard shortcut. If you’re using this technique to preserve transparency around (or within) an element, you should turn off any layers that are visible within the transparent areas before you save or export to a file.

To refine an element I’ve already separated using one of the above techniques, I’ll often Select All (Cmd- A), move the resulting selection down and to the right (using the arrow keys) to where the element’s top and left edges should be, then crop. Then I’ll move the selection up and to the left to where the element’s bottom and right edges should be, and crop again. This may seem a bit fiddly, and unnecessary if you take care when making your initial selections, but you’d be surprised how often a seemingly accurate selection is off by a pixel or two, leaving you to clean it up afterward anyway. Also, dealing with less-well-defined edges, like drop shadows, can sometimes be easier when you’ve already cropped away nearby distracting elements.

Measurements and Spacing

To use the marquee tool for measurements, simply draw a square selection around—or between—the object(s) you need to measure, then check the selection’s pixel dimensions in the Info panel.

If I want to ensure consistent spacing between members of a group of elements, I might draw a marquee the size of the intended white-space, then simply move that selection around to establish or double-check the positioning of the other elements.

If you’re using this technique to establish spacing, it works best to first set all your guides using the selection, deselect it (Cmd-d), then create or move your elements into place. If you’re using it to double-check alignment or spacing, don’t forget to deselect the selection before attempting to move an offending element. If you attempt to move an element while you have an active selection, the move tool will affect the contents of the selection, rather than the layer as a whole, which in this case is probably not your intention.

Filling and Painting

If you want to fill a discrete area with a color (or gradient, or whatever), you can define a selection using the marquee tool and use fill shortcuts (like Cmd-backspace) or the Fill menu item. You can do the same thing to fill an entire layer, by doing “Select All”, but it isn’t necessary since using fill with NO selection automatically fills the entire layer.

Also, when using the various paint, erase, or manipulation tools (smudge, blur, etc.), an active selection will confine their effect, thereby protecting areas of the image outside that selection.

Most of the above tips will work with any of the selection tools, but I typically use the square marquee tool for these since its simple geometry makes it easier to obtain measurements and spacing.

Move Tool for Layer Discovery

The move tool also can serve many purposes, one interesting and very useful (but not immediately apparent) one being its ability to help you discover the layer on which a visible element resides. To do this, with the move tool active, simply right-click (or Ctrl-click, I think, for you single button-ers) on the layout element you’re attempting to isolate, and a context menu will pop up containing a list of all the layers which have content under the mouse pointer’s current position.

If your creative designers are cruel, evil people, it may be difficult to figure out which Layer 10, or Layer 10 copy, is the appropriate one. If however, they are caring, thoughtful designers who appropriately name and nest their layers, it should be readily apparent which layer, or at least which layer group, contains your element. Select the layer you think contains your element from the list, and that layer should be selected and scrolled-to in the Layers pallet. You can check whether you picked correctly by clicking the eyeball icon on the selected layer to hide/show it, and see if the element disappears. If not, try a few other eyeballs until you hit the right one.

Quick Trimming and Cropping

Back when I was forced to use Windows on a daily basis, I could easily jump to any menu item by means of the Alt-key dance. For instance, to initiate the crop menu item, I’d hit Alt, then I, Then P, and it’d be done. I became really good at this, and had several of these menu items committed to muscle memory. I’ve since been allowed to move to Mac, but have yet to discover such a simple way of activating menu items that don’t have pre-defined keyboard shortcuts. Because the lack of shortcuts for Crop and Trim were causing me grief, I’ve set up custom shortcuts.

Thankfully, you can easily set your own keyboard shortcuts using Mac’s Keyboard Preferences. I have my Crop menu item setup with Cmd-Shift-P, and the Trim tool with Cmd-Shift-T. Now I can make a marquee selection, hit my keyboard shortcut, and have my crop completed in a fraction of the time it would take me to mouse up to the menu.

Quickly Select a Layer’s Contents

To quickly make a selection around the contents of a particular layer, simply hold down the Cmd key (Ctrl for you PC guys, I think) and click on the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette. Photoshop will create a selection containing all the visible elements on the layer, respecting transparent areas around the outside (which will be partially selected depending on their level of transparency). I believe this works for most layer types, but probably not for all (like effects or filter layers, I imagine).

The More You Know: Keyboard Shortcuts

I mentioned a couple of the custom shortcuts I use, and you may well have some of your own favorite or often-used features that need the same treatment, but Photoshop does have many simple and very useful pre-defined keyboard shortcuts. Some of them, mainly items in the toolbox, don’t even require modifier keys like Cmd, Ctrl, or Alt. Here are the ones I find myself using most often:

m

activates the marquee tool

v

activates the move tool

z

activates the zoom tool

Cmd-d

de-selects an active selection

spacebar

when using many of Photoshop’s tools, pressing the space bar will temporarily switch to the “hand” tool.

num keys

with many of the non-paint tools, hitting a number-key will alter the current layer’s opacity (0-9 for 0-90%, 100 for 100%); while with a paint-related tool, the number keys will usually affect the tool’s opacity.

Cmd- 0, Cmd- 1, Cmd- +, Cmd- -

Combined with the “Command” key, the Zero, One, Plus, and Minus keys control the zoom-level of the currently active window. Cmd- 0 (zero) zooms to fit the current file or selection to screen. Cmd- 1 (one) zooms to 100%, or “actual pixels” view. Cmd- + (plus) zooms in, while Cmd- - (minus) zooms out. Cmd- 0 is especially useful, for example, when transforming an item that is larger than will fit within the current viewport—using Cmd- 0 in this instance will zoom out so that all of the transform handles are in view.

Cmd- ;

Shows or hides the guide lines that assist in checking—or enforcing—alignment of elements.

Cmd- Option- Shift- S

Initiates the “Save for Web and Devices” function, which allows you to export files that are optimized for specific uses. As a web developer, this is the most common way I save files when I’m extracting elements for a new site. (note: I believe this is part of the default keyboard shortcut set on Windows, but it may not be on Mac. Check your setup, and if you’re a web developer, you need a keyboard shortcut for this function.)

I hope that these tips and tricks come in handy, and maybe give you a different perspective on some of Photoshop’s tools. Again, I use many of these tricks every single time I run Photoshop, and I know that learning them has saved me incalculable time and effort.

If you find these—or variations on these—to be useful, I hope you’ll chime in with a comment to let me know how they’ve helped you. If you use other basic things like this that make your life easier every day, and that I didn’t cover, I hope you’ll add them to the discussion as well.

When my niece was born, I decided that I wanted to do something original, creative, and personal for her each year for Christmas. Since she was living overseas, and I knew I might only get to see her (and therefore to share a book with her) a few times a year at best, I struck on the idea of doing an audio CD of me reading some of my favorite children’s stories to her. Thus: Storytime.

In 2006, for my third CD, I had a couple realizations—first, that there are only so many kids books I consider “favorites”, and second, that my niece, being a girl, would be more interested in “girl” stories than the “boy” stories I used to read. So, I would have to branch out into unfamiliar, and at times, uncomfortable territory. Case in point, our first track from 2006.

I picked (at my wife’s prompting, I’m sure) because it’s a Christmas story, and because girls love Strawberry Shortcake.

In this story, a diminutive, passive-aggressive redhead with a speech impediment is making plans for a big Christmas party. It seems, however, that all her friends are “too busy” to arrive in time to help with the last of the setup, so Shortcake heads out to visit each of them with a giant guilt trip. Finally, by the time she gets home, all her friends have arrived for the party, but since she’s been out wandering the streets instead of getting ready, her friends have to help her finish up anyway.

Ah, and one other thing about the 2006 CD—I realized that with my niece turning 3 years old, it was time for me to stop reading to her, and start reading with her. This resulted in me choosing books that she might be able to follow along in as I read, or to read on her own. Most of the other stories on this CD fit this criteria as well, though most are also better than this one.

A discussion at Daily Writing Tips about em-dashes, specifically regarding when to use them, spun in the direction of how to produce em-dash characters.

The immediate and obvious suggestion was to rely on word processors’ automatic character replacement—which generally involves swapping out two minus signs for “—” as-you-type. It was also pointed out, however, that there are specific key sequences you can use within different OSes to produce these characters without benefit of a word processor.

Direct/Universal Entry

For accomplishing this on Linux, one of the commenters offered up a sequence that included a “Compose” key—a key I was not familiar with. It turns out, the “Compose” key was apparently present on some older systems, but isn’t on “standard” US keyboards. It is possible, however, to turn one of your “extra” keys into a compose key, should you wish, using your system’s keyboard preferences.

The Compose key sequences provide an easy-to-remember way to create extended characters, largely using “logical” key grouping to produce, for example, an “ã” by combining a “~” with an “a” character. In the case of an em-dash, the sequence is minus-minus-minus. (I attempted entering this as characters, but, interestingly enough, WordPress automatically converts three minus signs into an em-dash.)

For those of us without “Compose” keys, or who prefer to stick with the default keyboard layout, there is another option—the key sequence Ctrl-Shift-u allows you to enter the Unicode value of any character you want to produce. For an em-dash the value is 2014, so you’d press Ctrl-Shift-u, then 2014, then enter. The downside to the Unicode method is that you need to know or have all the unicode values handy for the keys you might want to use.

Windows and Mac users have their own key sequences, and requirements. Windows users also have to memorize a table of numerical character values, while the Mac implementation is more similar to the ComposeKey sequences, using key sequences and modifiers.

To recap our em-dash example:

For Linux:
<composekey>, ---
OR
Ctrl-Shift-u, 2014, <enter>.
ComposeKey Sequences | Unicode Characters

For Windows:
Alt-0151Alt key sequences

For Mac:
Shift-Option-minusOption key sequences

Less Direct Methods

Of course, there are also other, less direct methods to get some of the characters. Windows and most Linux distros should come with a Character Map app of some kind, which will let you see all the special characters, and usually copy and paste them. I don’t know offhand of an app that comes with Mac OS X by default, but there are certainly some to be found—I have one on my dashboard at work.

Recently, and part of what has prompted this post, I have found myself either going to a web page that I know has an em-dash in it, or simply Googling “em-dash” and copy/pasting the first instance I find in the results. This is one of those crazy internet-enabled “workaround” methods that I’ve been too lazy or too busy to find an alternative for, before now.

If you’re a heavy keyboard user, the above methods will improve your efficiency when using special characters, but, of course, it also depends on your willingness or ability to memorize character codes or key sequences.

Do you have a preferred method of producing these characters? Maybe you’ve put together a cheat-sheet to help you learn (or off-load the need to learn) the various codes and sequences? I’d be interested to hear how you deal with these special characters in your daily work. Go ahead and leave us a comment and share what you’ve found most helpful.

Linux—solution, or problem?

For various reasons, I’ve settled on Linux as my platform of choice, which has its benefits and occasional deficits. As a continual tinkerer, I tend to run more up-to-date but less stable versions of software, which means the tools I use for certain tasks sometimes have to change while a project shakes the bugs out.

For example, I have gone through Picasa, F-Spot, DigiKam, and Shotwell, only to find that they all have bugs, problems, or fundamental design flaws that make them unacceptable to me.

In my opinion, F-Spot is the best photo manager on Linux, but the last few major versions have been worryingly unstable. Shotwell is good, but has also been somewhat unstable—though this may be attributable to the aggressive development cycle of earlier versions—and I have generally been opposed to their versioning model and the inability to save metadata directly to photo files². DigiKam has a respectable feature-set for a photo organizer, but isn’t user-friendly. And while Picasa runs under Wine, Google is no longer producing or supporting a bundled Linux build.

Essentially, there is no native Linux photo management software on which I can rely.

A further complication—multi-user, multi-platform

My wife is also an amateur photographer, and since most of our pictures are of joint interest (family, children, vacations, etc.), we’d like to maintain a unified collection, rather than having multiple copies of the same photographs floating around on multiple machines in various states of processing. She’s also a die-hard Mac fan at this point, so even if I found a suitable tool for myself on Linux, it might be difficult to get that software to play nicely with what she’s running.

The third complication is that my wife is most decidedly not a computer geek, and she has a very demanding career, so any solution she adopts must be easy to understand and as transparent as possible. And should she ever have an issue, I would be coming to her rescue, so our solution for her must be something with which I can stay familiar.

The workable, if not ideal, solution

After months of research and consideration, it became clear that the easiest way to meet my major criteria—a unified collection, stable software, and easy enough for my wife to actually use—was for us both to use the same software. From here, it wasn’t hard to settle on Adobe Lightroom. I was already familiar with Lightroom after years of watching Photoshop User TV, and though it doesn’t run on Linux, it does run on both Mac and Windows. Since I generally buy computers with Windows pre-installed, it’s a pretty safe bet I’ll always have some way of running it.

Currently, I run Lightroom in a Windows virtual machine, or boot from my laptop’s original Windows partition³. It’s a bit of a cheat, but I decided I’d rather “cheat on” Linux with Lightroom, than spend hours a week fighting broken software. Also, it meant my wife had one less thing to complain about me wasting my time on.

So, how do I salvage my pride and keep this photo workflow Linux-based? I keep Linux in charge of what Linux is good at—single-purpose tools and server stuff.

The Software

Rapid Photo Downloader

[Linux] Handles file import.

Adobe DNG Converter

[Wine on Linux] Converts camera RAW files to Adobe’s DNG format.

Unison

[Linux] collection backup/synchronization

VirtualBox

[Linux] Hardware virtualization

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

[Mac, Windows VM on Linux] The photography workflow workhorse

The Workflow

1. Import:

   I use Rapid Photo Downloader to pull RAW and JPEG files from my camera’s cards. It is Linux only, and it is the single best app for the purpose that I’ve found, on any platform. It handles import from the card, metadata based file renaming and directory structure creation, and simultaneous backup of originals to a separate location. It is blazingly fast. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t automatically recognize my iPhone, nor will it read images directly from it, but this is more a problem of the underlying OS than of RPD itself.

   I’ve set RPD up to import photos to my collection in the following directory structure:
   <CollectionDir>/YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD/
   I didn’t use the third level directory (YYYY-MM-DD) originally, but Lightroom’s importer isn’t as configurable as RPD, so the above structure was the closest Lightroom preset to what I was already using.

   For file renaming, I use the exiflow file naming convention, which looks like this:
   YYYYMMDD_cXX65789_mr000.jpg
   I realized long ago that attempting to maintain a collection with unique filenames, or keywords in filenames was simply untenable, so I have committed to putting good metadata in filenames and to rely on IPTC/XMP keywords for filtering. The exiflow convention gives me the date, camera model, original image number, photographer’s initials, and a code to manage versioning. Another reason I picked up the exiflow convention is that, before RPD was created, I used exiflow’s tools to import and automatically rename photos, and an exiflow plugin to fix F-Spot’s versioning.

   My wife will use Lightroom to import photos on her machine. As I mentioned above, Lightroom’s importer is not as configurable, but it can at least approximate the file and directory naming conventions I use.

2. Pre-processing:

   I convert all of our RAW photos to DNG because, at least theoretically, it’s a more open format than the various proprietary camera RAW formats. Unfortunately, Linux has poor DNG support⁴, so I have settled on running the official Adobe DNG Converter for Windows under Wine.

   After importing with RPD, I run the camera RAW files through DNG Converter, then delete the originals (since RPD has already backed them up).

   Lightroom automatically converts the camera RAW files to DNG during the import process, so that’s one less step my wife has to worry about.

3. Backup:

   As I mentioned, Rapid Photo Downloader automatically copies the original images to a backup location—in my case, to a folder on my NAS box. Presently, I only keep one copy of the originals, while i have multiple backups of my main photo collection. Unfortunately, I only started keeping these originals last year when I shot my brother’s wedding, so there are several years worth of photos for which I no longer have the original-off-the-card files.

   To my knowledge, Lightroom doesn’t offer simultaneous backup of the original files, so it’s not perfect, and though I intend to do most of the importing myself, it means I need to find a solution for my wife to easily make such backups.

   To maintain backups of the active collection, I use Unison to sync between my machine and the local backup, and between the local and remote backups. Unison can be a little fiddly, and mistakes can be catastrophic, but it is the best multipoint synchronization option I’ve found (or was when I was actively researching it, anyway).

4. Processing:

   There are a few options for RAW processing on Linux—UFRaw, RawTherapee, and Bibble to name a few—but none of them have the usability or versatility of Lightroom. It offers full library management, keywording, “smart collections”, and more editing, developing, and processing features than I can figure out how to use. And when I’m finished with processing, it has exporters & uploaders to move the final images into my various online photo services, and a print module to handle physical output as well. So, everything in this step is handled by Lightroom, and I don’t have to make any concessions or adjustments since we’re both using it.

5. Collaboration:

   I keep the “master” collection on my laptop, which is where I import photos and do file/directory maintenance. My collection is synced to a local backup, which serves as the central repository, and changes that I make get moved to that repository every couple hours.

   Rather than maintain a separate collection on my wife’s laptop (which hasn’t the disk space for it), she accesses the repository directly, via a network shared folder. She imports to, reads from, and saves edits directly to this network share. When she launches Lightroom, she first has to synchronize the collection’s folders, which automatically imports any new images into her local library, and updates any existing images with edits I’ve made elsewhere.

   I have Lightroom setup identically on my work laptop (a Mac), so if for some reason I need to access our collection at work, I have to take the same synchronization steps. This also helps keep me familiar with the process, and aware of any issues my wife might run into on her own machine.

   There are a couple major fail points with this method of collaborating or sharing our collection: first, it requires manually triggered folder synchronization, and second, there is a possibility that we could both be working on the same files, introducing a sync conflict, and likely resulting in one of us losing our edits. The first issue requires us both to establish a consistent routine with the software, and the second requires us to communicate effectively if we’re both working on the same collection.

   Hopefully Adobe will introduce “shared library” support at some point in a future version, which might help alleviate some of the potential issues.

Some final thoughts

Even on a single platform, it isn’t easy to find good software that does everything you need, and to establish a photographic workflow that makes sense. Even the best end-to-end workflow application available doesn’t offer every feature I would like, but thankfully the workflows it supports can be supplemented by the judicious application of some narrow-focus tools. And, with only a few concessions in the realm of personal principles (such as never running Windows again), I can stay rooted on my platform of choice, while enjoying the benefits of better commercial software support. Perhaps one day Adobe will get off their lazy tailbones and make Photoshop and Lightroom the crown jewels of software development that they could be, by making them truly cross-platform.

Until then, or until F-spot or Shotwell become more stable and full-featured applications that better support a full end-to-end workflow, or until Bibble gets off their high-horse and supports DNG, I guess I’ll just have to make do.

If you’ve struggled with setting up a photographic workflow on multiple or just a single platform, and have any insights, I would love to hear them. Especially you Linux photographers (I know you’re out there). How do you manage your photos? How do you facilitate sharing your collection with others? What’s your backup strategy? Answers to any of these questions would be welcomed in the comments below.

He said:

“[When living on a boat] you really learn to appreciate the small things. Like grapes. They taste better when you’re on a boat. Because you realize once they’re gone, you don’t get any more until you pull in again.”

His statement illustrates one positive result of a well cultivated understanding of impermanence—because you know something won’t last forever, you can appreciate it more while you have it.

Some of my older posts, like the ones about suffering and attachment or the Four Noble Truths, mention impermanence without going too deep. Since impermanence is one of Buddhism’s core concepts, I thought I should give it a closer look.

The Nature of Reality

It may seem ridiculously obvious to consider that everything that currently exists will eventually cease to exist, but the average Joe or Jane doesn’t usually sit around thinking about it. When they’re playing with their Weimaraner, they don’t consider that it won’t be around in 11 years, and when they’re sipping their coffee it doesn’t occur to them that our Sun will one day expand into a red giant and turn the surface of the Earth—along with their favorite mug—into a sea of molten rock.

The inevitable nature of reality is that nothing lasts forever.

The Nature of Thought

To my understanding, Buddhism believes that thought and emotion (mental states in general, really) arise from causes and conditions—they are a reaction to the things that are. We ascribe “form” to reality, and in so doing create a framework on which to hang our thoughts. “I think, therefore I am” illustrates the traditional Descartian view of self-aware existence, while the Buddhist take on it might be more like “things are, therefore I think I am.” There is a co-dependent relationship between the things and the thinking, between self and other.

If form and reality are inherently impermanent, then thoughts and emotions must be doubly so.

The Lessons of Fundamental Impermanence

As my brother pointed out, facing impermanence directly can help you appreciate what you’ve got. The last slice of cake, the last cookie, the last week with your daughter before college, the last walk through your old house before you hand over the keys, these types of things heighten that sense of impermanence and encourage you to process the experiences in a more directly present way. You know that, as the saying goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it too—once it’s gone, you don’t get to enjoy either the anticipation or the delicious taste again.

Conversely, if you’ve had a particularly bad day at work, you’ve been in an accident, or your daughter skipped her second nap and is apparently summoning hell-born demons, the reality is that no matter how much these things suck, they are impermanent—they will not last forever. You’ll go home from work, your leg will heal, and your daughter will finally give up and . The bad things, the annoying things, the boring things will all eventually end in some way, and give way to another set of conditions which may be better or worse.

Flipping both these ideas of impermanence over, we can also see how positive and negative conditions can contribute to opposing experiences. Having savored the delicious grapes, my brother might lament that they’re gone. He might be thinking of them and not fully enjoying the delicious meal in front of him. Likewise I, knowing that my daughter hasn’t taken a good nap all day, might dread the thought of fighting her for an hour before bed, which might then color my appreciation of the playtime we share after dinner.

If we could see into the future, we could use that knowledge to temper our negative experiences—”man, you think you’ve got it bad now!“, or “chin up, soldier, in 10 minutes, you win the lottery!” But, of course, that’s not an option, so we have to figure out some other way of getting through them.

This Too Shall Pass

I’ve listened to recorded talks at Dharma Seed for a few years, and one of my favorite anecdotes is about the monarch who requests a single sentence from his wise men, which will always be applicable in any situation. The wise men confer, and bring the king the words “this too shall pass”. An excellent encapsulation of the idea of impermanence, this phrase is as applicable when conditions are favorable, as when they are not. When times are bad, it reminds us that they won’t always be so. When times are good, it reminds us that they can’t last forever.

If we find ourselves getting caught up in our attachments, we can pull out this phrase to humble or uplift us, or to simply wake us up enough that we can take the moment as it is without having to cram it into the box of our expectations or drape it with our pleasures or pains. However, having this phrase, or any expedient, to help reinforce our understanding and acceptance of impermanence doesn’t really get us any further down the path—it merely points us in the right direction.

Impermanence and Attachment

The Buddhist path leading to the end of suffering depends on our ability to relinquish our attachments to inherently impermanent conditions. Perhaps that’s a gross oversimplification, but it’s adequate for our purposes. We can consider the impermanence of reality and the implications that holds for us, but if we don’t then apply that to our web of attachments we’re not learning anything. If we properly integrate this understanding of impermanence and learn to appreciate the current moment in the current moment, then, I suspect, many of our attachments will at least loosen.

There is no overnight success to be had, but many opportunities for incremental success, and I think that is good enough for a start.

Websites exist for sharing information.

Whether it’s news of your latest big product release, general info about your company or industry, or a story about your day in the park with your dog, chances are you’re putting it out there for people to read. Since the days of Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, and, of course, Google, search engines have been a big part of that goal.

Building your site to entice search engines to index and favorably place your pages has gone from the brute-force spider-baiting methods of the late 90′s, to the… well, brute-force spider-baiting methods of the 2000′s.

SEO has become an acronym, but many SEO companies still seem focused on keyword bombing, link farming, and site “build-out.” This approach does kind of work, so these guys can get away with it up to a point and sell their clients on their “success,” but it usually means leaving two things behind: 1) your customers, and 2) sane, usable content.

There is a better way. It is possible to build search engine friendly sites without making your site look like a dictionary or random pile of keywords. With a little bit of time and effort, a good understanding of your site’s real goals (“getting a top search ranking” is not a real goal), and some thoughtful copywriting, you can serve your customers a readable, usable site and still rank well in your target searches.

As I see it, there are two basic principles of SEO:

1. Understand how the spiders see your site’s pages,
2. and create compelling, accessible, usable content, and organize it so spiders can see it.

I’ll talk about these a bit more in-depth, but not necessarily in great detail–this post is merely intended to offer an overview, and perhaps a better general approach to SEO, not blow-by-blow implementation guidelines. With that disclaimer in place, let’s continue…

Understand how the spiders see your site’s pages

It’s a bit of a technical question, and it does vary from search engine to search engine, but it is crucial to understand what a spider sees when it visits your pages.

First, look at your site’s code. Go to a page, right-click, and select “View Source,” “View Page Source,” or your browser’s equivalent function. The window that pops up is the soup that a spider has to strain to get to the meat of your site.

Most spiders are smart enough to ignore irrelevant content (pretty much everything above <body… except some of the ones that start with <meta…). The spider is looking for links, both deeper into your site (so it can index more of your pages), and also to other sites (so it can discover your site’s relevance). It is also looking for copy—textual content. It gets some of this from the content visible to your users, some from things like alt and title attributes, and some from linked or embedded filenames.

The spiders grab all* that juicy content, wrap it up in a little sack, and send it home to digest.

The search engine will then take your stripped down content and process it through their algorithms. The key things they’re looking for are:

• relevance, which is a measure of not just what keywords you use, but how they relate to each other,
• and how your site relates to itself and to other sites covering the same subjects.

So yes, you can get away with a bit of keyword bombing and link farming, but search engines have gotten pretty good at spotting it, meaning that you have to also have good, relevant content to help your keywords not look like obvious spam or spider-bait.

Which leads us into our second principle…

Create compelling, accessible, usable content, and organize it so spiders can see it.

The number one problem with keyword bombing is that it’s very hard to integrate into consumer friendly, readable, and usable content. You’ll likely end up with paragraphs of content where every third word is a keyword, and, no matter how good your copywriters are, your visitor is going to feel like she’s reading gibberish.

As I mentioned above, creating good content is primarily dependent on understanding your site’s goals and your audience’s needs. The content should support those things. First develop a good site strategy—aligned with your client’s branding, tapped into industry trends, and mindful of SEO—then set your star copywriter loose to pull it together into a cohesive and compelling package.

“SEO is simply a positive side effect of good content strategy.” **

Sure, you want to cover the basics by ensuring your keywords are in title, meta, and header tags, and sprinkled throughout the rest of your content, but it’s much more important that you have an easily navigable site structure and clear, readable, interrelated content. Not only does it create a better user experience for the average visitor with a constantly decreasing attention span, but it’s also more enticing to the spider and more understandable to the search engine’s indexing algorithms.

More important still, you want your visitors to recommend your site to others, especially in contexts that are relevant to your site’s goals. Visitors are only going to do that if they can quickly make sense of your content, and if it answers a question, solves a problem, or simply provides information that piques their interest.

The emperor is dead, long live the king.

Obviously, there’s much more to creating compelling user and search-engine friendly sites than what I’ve covered here, and this only scratches the surface of arguments against “traditional” SEO practices. In my experience and opinion, however, these two are the most basic principles upon which one should base all SEO.

In summation: Compelling content is king, while content caked with keywords is merely an emperor with no clothes.

is a cute little story about a stuffed, toy rabbit who longs to be “real.” Initially of little interest to his owner, or to the other toys with whom he is thrown together, eventually the rabbit becomes the much-loved favorite of the boy. After the boy contracts an illness which requires the purging of those belongings he keeps closest to him, the rabbit is thrown out of the house, to be incinerated. Filled with love for the boy, and sadness at their separation, the rabbit’s single tear summons the “toy fairy,” who completes his transformation and deposits him in the forest among the other real rabbits.

The 2005 CD may’ve been shorter, but that was ok ’cause it had this story on it. Also, I managed to sneak Spidey into the CD jacket, which was fun.

In this post, I’m going to look at a singular expression of this problem, but it should be remembered that this is just one possible example. The possibility of font resizing should be considered when designing any and every piece of a website.

The Concept

For our example, we’ll consider a simple content box, self-contained and isolated from the rest of the webpage—a bordered box with some text and a nice varied-gradient background, like so:

The Problem

In a situation like this, when constructed in HTML, the size of the container must increase as the font-size increases (unless you’re OK with locking it down and having the text spill over or disappear behind the box borders). Sounds fine, right? The problem is that, as the container changes shape or size, so must the background.

The background can be set to start in the top, center, bottom, left, or right; may repeat vertically, horizontally, or both, or may remain fixed to the start position. With a background not designed to tile, the tiling becomes obvious. With a non-repeating background, the background color of the page or element will be exposed. In either event, without sufficient forethought the result will likely be quite ugly.

Some Examples

The first box is our “normal” example, included again for comparison. As you can see in the second box, we run out of gradient, and in the third box, the tiling is very obvious. Neither situation is desirable.

Possible “solutions”

There are, of course, various ways of dealing with these issues, either during HTML production, or within the design itself.

One Big Image

Kind of an old school solution, the content area can always be created as a single image including the borders, background, text, etc. This is, of course, terrible for searchability, and terrible for vision impaired users unless some other concessions are made in the HTML.

Text as Image

Equally old school, with the same issues as the “One Big Image” solution, this also comes with its own unique issues. Effectively, we’re talking about saving the gradient to it’s own file, and saving the text as a separate image file. Really the only benefit to this solution is that the gradient background could then be re-used for multiple (of the same sized) content boxes, with the text image laid over them.

Do It in Flash

With the widespread acceptance of Flash—and javascript packages like swfObject that make it easier to build in alternate (non-flash) content—building complex content boxes in Flash is no longer an unreasonable proposition. Using flash also opens up many other possibilities (like subtle visual effects, or more complex interactions) with hardly any more overhead than a large background image. The potential problems with Flash are, once again, searchability and usability for the vision-impaired. Still, these issues should be addressed by judicious and appropriate use of alternate content.

Improve the Gradient

The final solution would be to simply improve the gradient such that it reasonably accommodates the foreseeable problems with the particular content box.

Enlarge the Gradient
First option is simply to enlarge the gradient—take whatever it is you have done, and extend it beyond the borders of the content box so that as more of the gradient is exposed, it doesn’t look like crap. Big thing here is that the extended gradient should still work well with whatever content is over it—so don’t graduate to dark colors if the copy in your box is also dark. This solution probably gives the designer more control over the gradient as a whole, but also means that if the box expands beyond an expected point, you’ll just have the same issues all over again. So, you have to put some thought into how and where the expansion will occur, and how much of it to reasonably expect.

Fade it to a solid background color
If you you can modify it so that it graduates to a solid color on one or more sides, your gradient might be able to be locked into an appropriate corner of the box, with that solid color applied to the background. Then the gradient image will just fade right into the background color and the box can expand however much it needs to.

Make it Tile-friendly
If you can modify the gradient such that it tiles well and doesn’t interfere with the content, go for it. Tiled backgrounds save on bandwidth, download times, and storage space on the server. Tiled background do NOT, however, save memory usage on the client machine (at least the last I heard…). Tiled backgrounds also allow for “unlimited” expansion.

Recommendation: Improve the Gradient

Of the main “possible” solutions, really the most recommended is improving the gradient (or preferably designing it with these things in mind in the first place). Flash is a good option for very complex content areas, but is overkill for the simpler elements. Improving the gradient gives you more control, while keeping the HTML flexible, usable, accessible, and SEO-friendly.

An Example

Conclusion

Obviously, I’m no designer, and the examples I’ve shown here are super-simplified for our purposes. In the real world, there are usually even more complex considerations, but those dealt with here are fairly fundamental. If you’re going to be designing these nice little content boxes with pretty, complex backgrounds and big, bold fonts, you have to remember what happens to that fantastic design when it gets in the hands of the HTML guys and finally in the browsers of the end users—neither group is kind.

If you have questions or other possible solutions to this type of background image problem, or if you have other examples of how well thought-out design is a prerequisite for building good HTML, please share by leaving a comment.

This classic story includes references which modern kids will likely never be exposed to elsewhere—like actual shutters, kerchief and caps as sleepwear, and sugarplums. Of course, this story also is one of the primary introductions for children to Santa’s peculiar attributes, and also has an easy to memorize roster of Santa’s pre-Rudolph reindeer.

There are many stories and songs about Santa and his reindeer, but this is one of the absolute fundamental texts of Santology.

Yesterday was my and my wife’s anniversary. Since she’s on a crappy rotation now, and working the 6p – 4a shift, I took a half day so I could hang out with her for a few hours. We had a great afternoon, not doing anything really special apart from being together.

We went out and had a nice lunch where we had our first date, went to the mall to see if we could reserve our new iPhones, went to the other mall to try our first Orange Julius (just “ok”) and to browse at the furniture store. Wonderfully ordinary “couple” stuff.

The funny thing is, I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate our anniversary. We’re not fancy-big-production type people, so a low key, mundane adventure is just about perfect for us. Just being together is enough.

And I think that’s a perfect testament to our marriage as well. Everyone’s relationships are different, but for us, we’re the most content and most happy when we’re together. Even after four years. Or, I should say, especially after four years.

The most awesome thing is, that as much as I loved my wife the day I married her, I love her a little bit more every day.