Pete Ashton's Weblog

If you're on a MySpace page that you really want to read but just can't stand to look (maybe you can't even read it) because the person has covered it in flashing gifs and bad coloured text and shit, here's a handy tip.

You're using Firefox, right?

Install EditCSS. It's a handy thing if you ever need to, well, edit CSS but if not don't worry, it'll just sit there nice and quiet like.

Go to the MySpace page in question.

Open up the EditCSS sidebar.

Select All.

Delete.

Peace shall reign throughout the kingdom.

(Unless they've got three emedded movies running at once - you'll need AdBlock for that.)

The slow evolution of my Photoshop skillz continues and I feel I must share a new discovery, especially as I figured it out all by myself without using a book or nuffin.

You'll remember back in January I suggested using the Channel Mixer to convert colour photos to black and white because it gives you a fine control over each colour tone. (Or some shit.) The downside of this is it's a bitch of a tool to use.

Since then I've been using Curves pretty much exclusively as a layer, especially the Red Green and Blue colour paths to boost up the red and pull back on the blue without radically screwing with the contrast. Often I'd use this to prep stuff for black and white but having to flatten and desaturate to preview was a bit of a bind.

Then I had a flash of what now seems fucking obvious. Here are the steps.

1. Open your colour image.
2. Create a new Curves Adjustment layer.
3. Create a new Hue / Saturation layer.
4. Make sure the Hue / Saturation layer is above the Curves layer.
5. Pull the Saturation right down to -100 so the image is monocrome.
   (You can record these steps as an Action)
6. Go back to the Curves and start playing with the colours.
7. When you're happy, flatten and save.

Hope that comes in handy to at least someone.

The Short Version

If you want to link to me because you've used one of my my photos, please use one of these pieces of code:

This site:
<a href="http://peteashton.com">Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

MySpace:
<a href="http://www.myspace.com/peteashton">Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

Flickr:
<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/peteashton/">Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

The Long Version

This last year has seen a massive increase in what I'd guess you could call "enfranchisement" within the online sphere. Or in other words, loads of people have gotten an online presence that goes beyond a simple homepage, a presence that they're actually using to communicate rather than just having because it seemed like the thing to do. Be it a blog, a MySpace profile, a Flickr account, whatever, all sorts of folk are publishing online like never before.

And this is great. Except, of course, for one thing.

None of these buggers know how to link.

Let's get the sermon out of the way. The World Wide Web, which most of you know of as "the internet", was originally conceived as a mass of documents, or pages, linked together. So if, in the middle of one page, you wanted to refer your reader to a different page you'd simply insert a link. They'd click on that and, boom, we're hypertextualising our tits off.

Those who came into this game relatively early (ie over two years ago) were forced to learn "a little HTML" which in fact means the vast majority of HTML as there isn't really a lot to it. Those who came in later didn't have to bother because suddenly every service for publishing online came with a row of buttons like this:

There's a nice evolution going on here. Whereas HTML is similar to early word processors like Wordperfect where you'd surround words with "codes" to make them bold or underlined, these buttons emulated the point-and-click environments of Word. Want something in bold? Highlight it and click on the B. Want a link? Highlight it, click the chain icon and paste in the URL.

This is all well and good when you have a toolbar but when that toolbar isn't there, or if it isn't supported by the browser, then a gaping hole in the learning curve is revealed.

So, for those of you who don't ever think to link, or who think linking is really hard, here is the lesson.

Firstly, linking is really important. Without links the internet wouldn't exist. Also, without links your online presence looses a hell of a lot of value. Say you're a band on MySpace and you have a song or photos or something of interest to your fans elsewhere on the web. It's in your interest to get people over there as easily as possible and the easiest way is with a link.

Secondly, linking is really easy. Have a look at this HTML code:

<a href="http://www.more.com">Click here for more</a>

which produces this:

Click here for more

Now, go back and have a proper look. Don't just glance at it, see a load of nonsense and assume you'll never understand it. Try and figure it out. It's really simple. If you can make a cup of tea you can use HTML to link. Trust me.

The bits within the angle brackets are "tags". The first is an opening tag and the second, with the /, is a closing tag. Everything within these two is affected by the tag, in this case turned into a link. Here's what the rest means:

a: anchor, as in "anchor this text to something". The first a says "start anchoring". The second a with the slash means "stop".

href: hypertext reference, or in English, a website address.

http://www.more.com: this is the website address. It must have the http:// bit at the front. The easiest way to make sure you get this right is to load the page in your browser and copy it from there. That way you know it's right.

" quote marks are important. As is the =.

And that's it.

Now get linking.

Photoshop is a great program but it's also an enigma. So many tools and not a clue as to how they might work. Thankfully you don't have to worry about them if all you want to do is crop, resize and save, which means you never actually get around to figuring out what they do until someone points it out to you.

I reckon I can't be alone in my relative cluelessness regarding Photoshop but I have, over the last four years, figured out a few things related to making photos look better and so I'm going to tell you about them.

Just to reiterate, I am not a professional, I'm probably wrong and you should always consult a doctor before embarking on self medication for major illnesses.

The other day I looked down at the increasingly crowded bar at the bottom of Firefox and noticed these spangly new buttons:

At first I thought Foxytunes had updated itself without telling me, but no, there was my favourite browser-based music-control system sitting to the left. This was something new. I cautiously hovered over it and a text-box popped up with the URL of the previous page in the weblog I was reading. Clicking on it took me there. Aha! That'll be that extension I installed a week or so back and forgot all about. I wonder what it was called...

This happens quite a lot. Newly installed Firefox extensions, of which there are many, load when Firefox is restarted, but because I very rarely switch my computer off, preferring to just let it sleep, Firefox very rarely restarts and when it does I'm often greeted with some new functionality that seemed like a good idea at the time. This new toy was the unassumingly titled Link Toolbar and it remains a good idea being, as it is the, first time I've seen a specific piece of HTML being used to add to the user experience.

Slight digression. The default templates for Movable Type blogs come chock full of features, many of which aren't particularly relevant but it's nice to have them there if only so you can figure out what they're for and decide for yourself if they're relevant or not. When building a new set of templates I tend to strip out that which isn't of any use to me but there was one little piece of code I left in even though I didn't really understand what it was for. This is, I think, a "best practice" tip - if you don't understand it, leave it in, especially if it doesn't seem to be doing anything annoying. It might come in handy one day.

You can find this code if you check the source for one of my single-post archive pages. There at the top will be three lines that follow this pattern:

<link rel="start" href="http://peteashton.com/" title="Home" />
<link rel="prev" href="http://peteashton.com/05/05/12/hoodies.html" title="Hoodies" />
<link rel="next" href="http://peteashton.com/05/05/13/luggers_welcome.html" title="Luggers Welcome" />

There are (at least) 15 link types and, amongst other things, they describe how the document relates to other documents, in this case quite simply that there is a page before and a page after this one and that there exists a home page from which they all come. This stuff is obvious when you're looking at the rendered page itself but not so obvious to a computer like Google.

All the Link Toolbar does is looks for these tags and applies them, when available, to it's buttons. Suddenly a piece of code which didn't really make sense because it doesn't have anything to do with the immediate user interface becomes very useful indeed, giving you a way to navigate around websites that is standardised to your browser rather than the somewhat random implementation of Previous and Next buttons that web designers use.

To my surprise this handy code seems to be fairly widespread, at least on those sites that are professionally run or use some kind of content management system with templates designed by an HTML standards fanatic, but it's by no means everywhere. Most hand-coded sites don't have it and to be honest anything I built from scratch wouldn't bother with them.

So, go install the Link Toolbar - it'll improve your browsing in a subtle yet perceptible way - and if you're building a site with a bunch of pages that run in sequential order, be sure and use them link tags. Oh, and thanks to whoever it was who pointed me towards the toolbar in the first place. If I'd known how useful it was I'd have credited you there and then.

I have a small problem which I'm going to attempt to solve in the next few days but before I do I want to share my proposed solution with you lot just in case I'm about to make a blunder. Oh, this is computer related. [Significant proportion of readers switch off.]

When I got my hands on my lovely new-ish Mac it had inside it two hard drives, one of 60GB, which we'll call Drive A, and another of 40GB, which we'll call Drive B. I decided to set it up with A as my boot disk and B housing my mp3 collection. In the scant months that followed I have managed to accumulate 39GB of music. (In the wacky world of byte-counting 37.4GB of music on a 38.34GB capacity drive, but you get the idea.) I can't afford to buy a bigger hard drive at the moment, nor am I able to borrow someone's external one, but I'm fast running out of room for all the music that flows my way and iTunes isn't desperately happy about the library being spread over two drives. I need a quick fix solution.

Drive A usually has 20-30GB free and could have more if I backed up some of the random shit I've grabbed off the net. A quick blast with the excellent Disk Inventory X shows everything that isn't in my Home directory takes up 10.4GB. Here's what I'm thinking of doing.

Back up my personal files onto DVDs and delete from Drive A leaving at least 40GB of space.

Copy my iTunes library over from Drive B to Drive A whilst keeping my ratings and playlists intact. (A quite simple operation - change the iTunes Music folder location in Preferences, then go Advanced > Consolidate Library and everything will copy over.)

Delete everything on Drive B.

Using rsync, backup everything on Drive A to Drive B except the music files, remembering to make B bootable.

Switch off the computer and physically swap A and B over, making B the master and A the slave (Doncha love the SM connotations?) remembering to fiddle with those weird slots on the back of the drives.

Switch on, hopefully booting with Drive B. If everything has worked, delete everything on Drive A except the music files. Copy my personal stuff back into my Home directory and re-consolidate the music files if necessary.

And, um, that should be it, giving me an extra 20GB to fill with mp3s, which should last me until about April. While somewhat longwinded it does seem a little too easy. Have I missed anything?

When I was taking my month off blogging in December I started Podcasting, as you might have noticed if you saw the box on the right hand column suddenly appear. Podcasting is just a fancy name for putting together your own radio show and sticking it on the net and how it's suddenly, well, exploded is probably being generous but let's say "risen in profile" with this fancy new name is a combination of utopian geekery and a lowering in technology barriers. Pretty much anyone can put one together and getting one out there isn't as hard as it might have been.

Though you wouldn't necessarily think so if you read the Endgadget guide to Podcasting. Admittedly Endgadget is aimed at people who like to take the scenic route and there's nothing wrong with that. But here's how I do it with a Mac running Panther using the basic iLife applications that come with it. In other words, very simply and for free.

After a year or so of dealing with its ever growing menace, I seem to have comment spam under control, at least for the time being. I'm still getting hit by the bastards, more and more each week, to the level where a comment is being submitted every five minutes, but none of them are actually reaching the site. That, to me, is victory enough. So, for those of you running Movable Type and suffering, here's how I do it.

Is your Movable Type blog producing crippled feeds? If you don't know then it probably is.

The default setup for Movabe Type blogs is to produce what are known as "crippled feeds". This is where your RSS feed contains a summary of the post with no HTML or images. It would be really handy if your blog didn't do this so that those of us who read your blog in an RSS reader can do just that rather that having to load up each entry that looks like it might be interesting.

Here's how to do it.

Go to the Edit Templates list and edit the template for one of your RSS feeds. Don't worry about all the XML stuff - all you're looking for is the following MT tag:

<$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$>

Replace this with these two tags

<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$><$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$>

Do this for all the different feed templates and you'll make a significant proportion of your readers happy.

Thank you!

This article was written in an attempt to explain RSS feeds to a general readership. It assumes a basic knowledge of how the web works and should leave you knowing what an RSS feed is, how it is different to an HTML web page and what it's for. This is the first draft and probably part one of a series so any comments are very welcome.

I've made some changes to the back end of the link farm. The original setup was that my comments on the link were buried away within the title tag and it occurred to me that when I scroll through other linklogs of this ilk I seldom bother to hover. However, the way the linkfarm is displayed on the sidebar of the main page dictates that they have to be hidden away. At the same time I wanted to make the RSS feed tidier. The obvious solution was to split up the three elements of the link and then stitch them back together depending on how the link is displayed.

While I've been teaching myself web stuff over the last year I've been slightly frustrated by a lack of useful resources for someone of my level. It seems like everything out there is either aimed at absolute beginners or experts with nothing for the more middling student. And so, to go a small way towards rectifying this, I'm going to start detailing some of the things I've been doing. Hopefully they'll be of some use to someone out there. Feedback, as ever, is welcome.