Free Batch Image Resizing Software

Posted by David | Filed under Software

Recently for a website, I had to re-size a large number of photos as the pixel resolution of the images was too high for the PHP software to create a thumbnail over the server, but in reality they were far to big for the web taking over my 20″ 1680×1050 screen no doubt swapping smaller resolution screens!

Fortunately I stumbled across some really useful software on the internet. The software is called Picture Resizer 3.0 (or PhotoReize, it doesn’t seem to know what to call itself!) this software on its own seems pretty limiting only resizing photos to a width of 400 pixels with the height kept to the correct ratio for the new pixel resolution.

An addon I also found to this called PhotoResize Options Express allowed for me to chose the new width resolution more efficiently.  This ad-don is simply added into the Photo Resize folder and it starts working just after you rename the original PhotoResize executable.

I was amazed at how fast this program work, I had over 100 photos to do and it literally did them all within a couple seconds, this would have taken me over 30 minutes at least to do in PaintShop Pro!

Overall a great set of free software, and another bonus of not having to install a program onto my computer that will clog everything up as they are both standalone (or standalone dependent in the case of the later)

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Read more | Comments (0) | Sunday, 10th Aug 2008

Sitemaps

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

Sitemaps are an incredibly useful tool for website owners, they are an XML document that spiders can look at to more efficiently crawl through a website in a more intelligent manner.  They also allow for added information about the pages including when they were last updated, how often the page gets changed and how important it is compared to other URLs.

Sitemaps are complementary to Robots.txt while one excludes a search engine from certain areas of your site, the other includes areas.  You can include your site map in your Robots.txt by adding the following code to it.

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/mysitemap.xml/

Before creating your own site map you may want to find out whether the software package you are using is capable of doing so for you automatically, this can save you some effort!

For WordPress there are available SiteMap plugins, however supposedly there will be an integrated sitemap in WordPress 2.7

There are also online Sitemap generators including this one here. 

Once you have created your sitemap you must submit it to search engines, each one has their own way of doing it.

Google via Webmaster Tools, Yahoo via Site Explorer, and Ask! via copying the below into your browser and amending the URL as required.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

Sitemaps have a maximum limit of 50,000 URLs (but you should probably not go this high!) and or 10MB in size.

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Read more | Comments (0) | Saturday, 9th Aug 2008

My Current Top 5 WordPress Themes

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

There are some really impressive WordPress themes available out there, personally I am a fan of simplicity and professional looking design which show off their Web 2.0 looks! Here are my Top 5 WordPress themes that I’ve found/been created as of August 2008.

When I judge a theme I look at is practicalities as well, an amazing theme may not be very versatile or may depend a lot on fancy Paint Shop Pro work or have specific pictures integral to the design

Number 5 – D’Sanctuary

At Number 5 is a theme at TopWPThemes.com called D’Sanctuary, I really love its simple design, it makes finding things clear and easy and is useful when you don’t necessarily want to use WordPress just for blogging.

In fact I love this one so much I’ve actually used it on one of my recent clients sites DTV-8, here I’ve used the blogging system as a news article system, which takes advantage of the WordPress archive and catergory abilities

As with all my Top 5 templates the side bar is fully widigtized!

Official Site: TopWPThemes.com (Demo)

Number 4 – CoolBlue

At Number 4 another TopWPTheme.com theme this time in blue! This one doesn’t seem to have a fancy name its just simply CoolBlue.

Again this is widigitised. I really like the curved edges on this, I have to admit I am really weak with the new curvey Web2.0 styles which you will notice as you go down the list further!

It may not be to everyones taste but I also like the way the dates are done on those funky boxes, and I do like the horizontal navigation bar at the top as well.

Official Site: TopWPThemes.com (Demo)

Number 3 – Shades of Grey

I don’t like dark coloured background at all on the internet, but this one I spotted and quite liked, its nice and simple and has the potential for a greal deal of user tailoring and improvements, the horizontal navigation bar is particular good in my opinion, and the theme has options for fixed width etc.

Official Website: Arcsin (Demo)

Number 2 – TechJunkie

You may now have noticed a curvey pattern! At Number two is Theme Labs conversion of a StyleShout theme. Simplistic and yet beautiful, the only issue I have with this theme is the sort of green coloured background, it can be such a pain ensuring all the images are on a colourless background otherwise they tend to look a bit naff, but if you blog with relatively few images then it may be worth considering!

Its fully widgitised.

Official Site: Theme Lab (Demo)

Number 1 – VectorLover

Its a bit similar to TechJunkie but I like them both, infact I like this one better! Gone is the green background! This template is so great I’ve even used it here on my own blog! What’s great about it is not only does it look good, but it integrates so well with WordPress, everything has been thought of its fully widgitized but I also like the small bar it shows about Permalinks the Date and Comments.

Official Site: Theme Lab (Demo)

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Read more | Comments (1) | Saturday, 9th Aug 2008