Look! Labels!

After what seemed like an eternity, my Blogger account was migrated from Old to New Blogger last Friday night (GMT)!

The transition was, almost, seamless, and proved the edict that one should always backup a template (to a text editor such as bbedit)! For some reason, which I haven't had time nor desire to explore, illegal characters were introduced! However, a quick cut n' paste and, presto, time to start exploring all the new features.

For me, tags have always, literally, been the missing link on my blogs!

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.

The notion of manually adding tags, to existing posts, seemed daunting and arduous in the extreme! And there was no guarantee that the addition of tags would increase Technorati and Google traffic and, by extension, readership. Thankfully, New Blogger introduces Labels (AKA tags) and there's no coding required (a panacea for those of us with heavily customised templates). Labels are available out of the box! Thank you Blogger.

The result? All posts should soon contain relevant tags and, hopefully, improve the reading experience in ways my prose, alone, never could!

Creating Fireworks

A couple of months ago I wrote a post that documented the chronology of my web designing adventures to date. To recap. My workflow includes (but is not limited to) Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop, BBEdit and, on the very rare occasion that Dreamweaver outwits me, GoLive CS.

Until recently Photoshop has been my preferred end-to-end image editor. However, Ryan referred me to Fireworks! Never one to ignore his good advice, I took a closer look and am hooked on its balanced compression. So much so that eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the bespoke Forbidden Planet animated GIF above my first post! Adobe would be unwise to retire Fireworks.

Off topic. Please be sure to visit Cloister Bell for my latest musings on Doctor Who, Lost and cool collectibles.

California Dreamin'

This post is brought to you, dear reader, later than anticipated! Lets just say that offline life supersedes online. However, MWSF 2006 delivered on Intel-based desktop and laptop Macs. The MacBook (new nomenclature for PowerBook line) may take a lot of getting used to, but the machine looks devine. The iMac was a surprise, although I'd prefer to have seen an Intel Mac mini.

Whilst the hardware transition met or exceeded expectations. The software, for me, was far more interesting. Google Earth made its official public debut, Microsoft started offering Flip4Mac (for Windows Media playback in QuickTime) for free and Apple inevitably shipped iLife '06; a quintet of robust authoring tools. Get your order in today!

iPhoto received a major code rewrite and all-new gleaming GUI. Will its new sibling, iWeb, resurrect the simplicity of Adobe's PageMill 3.0 coupled with the clean code of BBEdit? If not, Karelia Software may have the answer with Sandvox!

Open All Hours

You might have noticed the new link to my eBay page in the sidebar! In 2003, prior to a personal tragedy that is still in 'shakedown', I signed-up with the intention of buying elusive memorabilia and selling items (always in excellent condition). Please drop by and happy bidding (terms and conditions apply).

With the transition from established website management tools (including Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive), to an extensible blog publishing platform, gaining momentum. I thought it was beneficial to undertake a trial separation from GoLive (my preferred client since 2001) and spend some quality time with BBEdit. This blog's template is now exclusively hand-coded in Bare Bones' award-winning product. It doesn't suck.®

The web should be platform agnostic. Yet the Mac plays second fiddle to Windows and Blogger for Word add-in is the latest offender. Come on we demand better. Google rant over.