laura j. rinaldi

Itouch, without the manual

I bought an itouch the other day. It does not come with a manual. I suppose this is because it is supposed to be intuative. And I suppose in some ways it is. And I am actually the kind of person that doesn't mind learning through doing too much. I learned almost all the progams I know that way, except for photoshop. So, when I saw there was a book out from the missing manual series I almost bought it. But by that time I had figured out all, or most of the cool tips it was going to reveal to me.

This has happened to me before, that I figure something out and find the new info lacking. The wosrt time it happened was with Pagemaker. This was when it first came out and I taught it to meself, from a borrowed copy, that did not have a manual. I kept thinking that if I could only get my hands on one it would let me do all the things that up to that point I hadn't been able to. But, no. The manual, when I did finally get it had nothing new.

So, I have been plugging away with my itouch, learning more everyday, including how to do this entry using it. This means, that wherever I have wifi, I can blog, and, so, this entry, was made from bed.

Multi-Tasking while on a conference call

I was reminded, the other day, that there are only so many things you can do while talking on the phone. You can knit, you can move things around on a page, but you can't read email, or write the same, because it appears to take the same part of the brain.

I was helping a client set up her blog, one more in WordPress by the way, and we were going over every little thing she would need to know. I couldn't not listen, because it was over the phone, and I had to be in front of the computer too, so I could watch what she was doing, and comment. Unlike most of my other client, who had blogged before, she had never done so, so even though WordPress is mostly intuitive, it wasn't for her. She was a bit frustrated by the style sheets, which I gave up explaining how to alter, and just altered for her, as well as for tags.

So, what did I do for the two hour call? I knitted. I couldn't answer email, well not a lot, I couldn't. And I certainly couldn't work on anything else.

And now, having set her up, I wonder why I am still using TypePad, when I have been recommending WordPress over it? I guess because I have been using it for so long. I think, however, that soon I will make the switch, because with each new client blog, I realize how much more I could do with it.

How to solve, or not solve Dreamweaver CS3 problems.

As my mother used to say, when we asked her to help us with our homework, what about all the other kids who don't have reference librarians for mothers.

Well, not we have google and the web, but what about for al those people who don't search around to find the answer to stupid questions.

So what was my stupid question? I guess it was "Why does Dreamweaver keep doing bad things", although i would have phrased it differently than that. The problem has been that within the past two years, Dreamweaver has crashed so hard it has lost all it's settings. At first, it would lose the bility to view a page in a browser. Later, it would forget which files I had previously opened, and then, the final insult, it would forget allt he websites that I had. It would always wait until I had quite  a bit before forgetting. The last time it happened, I backed up a few. This time when it happened, I went through and backed up the whole lot.

But I still had the problem that the program was unstable.  I'm hoping in version CS4, that they make it so you can have several sites open at once, sort of like in Fetch. In the meantime, I have to go back and forth between sites, all day long, to update them.

So, in searching around, I figured I would find the problem to the crashes, but what it came down to was, ultimatly, that I had to reinstall CS3, and not just a simple upgrade, but an uninstall and reinstall, despite all the advice.

So that is how I spent my Saturday. And I would have liked to have done something else.

And I still don't know what caused the problem.  And the advise from the web basically says to just rebuild things. *sigh*.

Yahoo Shine, and I ask, ain't I am woman?

There was big hoopla on Monday as Yahoo launched it's new destination site, Shine. It sounded like a promising site, a sort of Salon place to go, but what was the first thing that greated me when I checked it out. Hollywood celberty interviews, fashion...all the stuff that one finds in those "women's " magazines. It thought it would be hipper. After all, it was supposed to be aimed at women between 25-54 years old, and I am still in that age range and I'm certainly a woman, last time I checked. Nothing, and I mean nothing on the page appealed to me. Today, as I wrote this, the headline at the top of the page is "Fancy lingerie you can actually afford". Are there women out there, in my age range, who actually care about this? I guess it makes sense, the sort of content that is there, since the editor-in-cheif is from Elle and Jane, two magazines I wouldn't pick, even if the alternative was Golf Digest.

I suppose Yahoo doesn't really care, and feels that creating a site about chatter is just fine. But here is what I read, as a woman, as a human, on a daily basis:

• ValleyWag
• BoingBoing
• io9
• Point of View
• Comic Curmudgeon

There are a few more that I read, but not every day.

The article in the Mercury News said that this is supposed to be competeing with such sites as BlogHer and Sugar. I tried reading some of the sites that Sugar put out, but found it wasn't talking to me, so stopped.

One of the sites that the article mentioned as The Women on the Web, which, at first glance, actually looks as though it might be interesting. Still light and fluffy, but interesting light and fluffy.

Fun with PDFs or wow, they've improved Acorbat 8

I am used to getting files that I really can't used in the form they are in. This is the life of a freelancer. Often the source files can't be found, or the creative artist is out of town, or some reason that all the client can give me is a pdf. I have learned, over the years, to extract every last drop from every PDF that I have had to work with.

The good news, is that each edition of Acrobat has gotten better. One can now export to html (although the results could not be put up on a page, at least you can have the pieces. But, you can also just grab text, and reflow it (which you could do before, but it wasn't always smooth. And you can click on a graphic, and export it by copying, and pasting into Photoshop. You could always do that by opening in Illustrator, but with so many ways to get things out of PDFs, perhaps I don't need the source files anymore.

And, I have been not asking for them either. If I can, I don't want to use word, or have to wait for a version to be created in Photoshop, if I can get it from the PDF, instead of Word.

I love that a product that used to be just for showing what something looked like, can do so much more. Printers, in fact, ask for Acrobat files instead of the sources files, because they are so much easier to work with.

Wikipedia has a lot on Acrobat. a lot of which i had forgotten, such as that there were others out there trying to be what Acrobat become. After that, a whole industry grew out of ad-ons to Acrobat.

Me, I'm just glad they keep improving it.

I can think of lots of things I would rather do than work on spec

I got a call for a potential client the other day. It was an agency that wanted to know if I would like to work with them to bring in clients. I would look at Websites, and tell them what I think they should change on them, how they should be redesigned, and then they would present this to their potential clients. Oh, it would only take about an hour of my time, and just think of all the work it would bring in.

I was a little taken back. "I see, so you asking me to work on spec?" I said.

"Well, it would bring you work. You would get them to use our services, and we would use you."

"And how would I be compensated?" I asked. 'You get a salary to work on these spec creatives that you aren't charging your client. How would you compensate me?"

She said she would get back to me, and never did.

I related this story to a colleague and said, "Well, if I wasn't busy...maybe..." but she cut me off. "Spec creative? Work for free? There are lots of things I would rather do than work on spec. Even around my house, cleaning my office."

And she is right. There is enough work out there that clients will pay me for, that it doesn't make sense to work for free.  I don't mind giving advice to my own clients, that is different. It is the value added I offer, but somehow, giving advice to non-clients, that I may never get, that aren't even mine, for free?

Yes, I guess there is lots more I could be doing, such as all the work that pays the bills.

A different css file for every browser?

By now, we all know that every browser sees every site slightly differently, just as they see the colors and sometimes even the graphics differently. And, I know from experience and talking to other deisgners, that often if something has to look just so, they do it as a graphic. Words are words, and they will flow and look different, and we have all coem to accept that.

Or so I thought, until I inherited a php site. I usually love working with php sites. Seeing how the designers and programmers have made things work. It is amazing. There are so many cool tricks out there, and I am always learning new things, or new ways to do things.

However, with the recent web site, the client set up a sniffer to detect which browser was looking at the site, and thus could tell the browser which style sheet to use. Now, this is not to say that some browsers, such as IE 4, didn't give grief to css users. Eric Myers writes about it extensively. And Digital Design Blog has links to all that it has gathered on the subject. What is interesting is that most designers just accept that things will not look exactly the way they want, and move on. In fact, in A List Apart, they suggest just building a really good CSS.

My quandary, however, is that the client is currently OK with the site, but wants changes that are caused by weird things in the CSS. Normally, I wouldn't let the client know that there was anything really wrong with their site, and just fix it, but this I had to tell them. I told them I didn't want to break the site to fix it, which I don't. I may have to, however.

Yahool Mail Plus finally updates for Safari

I didn't notice at first. I prefer to view my yahoo mail in Safari as opposed to FireFox, on my Mac, becaue Safari tends to load faster these days. However, I always hate having to switch over to classic Yahoo every time I log in. So, I was surprised to find that it wasn't asking me to make the switch the other day, and it was actually viewable in Safari. How long has this been going on? I only noticed the other week, although in the yahoo blog, apparently it was coming in Feb., but of the top three stories in Google, I don't see one that says the exact date it happened. I know it wasn't working in Feb, or I would have noticed it then.

Be that as it may, I am happy that it has happened. Actually, the only reason I check Yahoo mail at all is to check my junk mail folder. I have everything else sent to my pop account. But, on occasion, yahoo grabs client mail, and won't let go, so I have to slog through junk mail to find what someone has written me. It is far easier to do in the newest Yahoo mail, so that's why it is great that it is being supported in Safari.

Now, if only TypePad would upgrade for Safari, and I would be happy.

WordPress, so many choices for design

Now that my daughter has a blog and several of my clients are asking me to set up their wordrpess blogs, I am amazed to find how many designs there are out there. I guess I find this odd, because coming from the world of website design, as opposed to blog design, I find it odd to use a template. I am used to creating from scratch, instead of taking a foundation and upgrading and mucking about with it.

On the other hand, it is interesting to see what people have come up with. Some are amazingly creative, and I have found a few that I want to take and make my own, so to speak, but it is still odd to work that way, look for a design that is close to what I want and modify it.

I suppose the answer is to design my own, but with so many good designs out there, i find that I would be doing the work that others have done before me, which comes out as a bit of a waste of time.

So, back to the WordPress themes I will go, looking for that perfect blog template to show off my clients house building. Once I have it just as I want it, I'll put up a link. For now, let's just say it hasn't found its right shell.

Fire is not going to be updated, and now Yahoo will make it obsolete

Ever since I was told about the IM client, Fire, for the Mac, I have been using it. Not all my clients and friends are on Yahoo. Some are on MSN, some are on AIM, and although I even have some on Google and Skype, this was good enough, as it was a catchall for most of them.

And I knew Fire wasn't going to updated. They stopped supporting in last year.I have tried to use Adium, the heir apparent, but don't like it as much, so I figured I would just stick it out, and stay with what I had.

But Yahoo has other ideas. I am now getting alerts that Yahoo IM, version 5.6 will no longer be supported, as of April 2.  What a pain.

So, now I guess, since Yahoo is where most of my contacts are, I'll be forced to move over to Adium. There really isn't anything wrong with Adium, other than, for some reason, it doesn't log into my AIM account. I just hate the idea of having to have three or for IM windows open, because one client does almost all.

At least I don't have to have several phones... wait, I do.