melalouise.net » Software

WordPress wins CMS Awards

pamela — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:36:27 +0000

I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) for about four years now. Back when I began, it was simply a blogging platform but I discovered it was easy to customise, easy for clients to add content and came with lots of useful plugins and an open API, which made it ideal in my eyes for a simple CMS. Indeed, over the years I’ve created some interesting functionality for different sites using a mixture of plugins and custom code. It seems that other people reached the same conclusion over the years and Wordpress took note and began adding useful CMS features.

And this week, the makers of WordPress finally have recognition for their great work – they have won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Congratulations WordPress, I will continue to use and recommend your CMS!

Podcast your blog with Talkr

pamela — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:16:41 +0000

For quite some time now I’ve had an audio version of my RSS feed available but as it didn’t work at first for some reason, I forgot about it. I was cleaning out my feeds recently and found that all of my recent posts were there with audio files ready to download – and they worked! Podcasting your blog is a great idea both for subscribers who wish to download their blogs and listen to them on their iPod (whilst travelling, for example) and also for the visually impaired.

Talkr takes a little bit of setting up but all you need to do then is offer a link to the feed on your blog and it will be updated whenever you publish a post. Talkr also offers many other text-to-speech and chat services. Check them out.

Link Review: Handy sites for web professionals

pamela — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:29:57 +0000

After a year of studying full-time, I’m finally starting to catch up on what new cool tools and sites there are out there for web designers and developers. Here are a few I’ve come across lately, as well as some interesting articles.

Tools and Services

Mail Chimp: For beautiful, easy email campaigns. Alternative to Campaign Monitor.
File Juicer: As mentioned in a previous post – extracts images and text from almost any file
Flock: Web browsing, social networking, RSS feeds, email, searching – all in one Application
Blogo: Great little Mac App for posting to Wordpress – I’m using it now
Veer Marketplace: Move over iStockphoto – Veer is doing stock photography
Billings 3: I assessed Billings 2 a couple of years ago, for managing timesheets and invoices, and found it wanting. Billings 3, however, impressed me and I’ve been using it without much complaint for the last couple of months (it’s on sale right now, as well).
Survey Monkey: simple online surveys
Browser Shots: Free Cross Platform Browser Testing
Jumpcut: Provides “clipboard buffering” - access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else.

Articles

11 Absolutely Necessary Web-Based Tools for a Freelance Web Designer by Chromatic
25 Free Mac Apps for freelancers by Design daily news
Stop Developing for Internet Explorer 6 by Robert Nyman
Bring Down IE6 – is it finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it?
The Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter at Webdesigner Depot
30 Useful Web Design Books for 2009 at Webdesigner Depot
Essential Guide to Creating SEO Friendly Website Design by Chromatic

File Juicer to the rescue

pamela — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:46:40 +0000

I had a client come to me recently wanting a redesign of an existing website. This website included a set of photo galleries. These photo galleries had been made using a Flash template and didn’t really fit in with the new design. She also wanted to add more galleries. Unfortunately, the original Flash files were lost in history and so were the electronic versions of these photos so I could neither extract the photos nor create new galleries like them. I searched for many alternatives but could see only two that were available: use the existing Flash files and add new photos in a different format (a bit ugly), or rescan all of the original photos and create new galleries (time consuming as there are lots of photos). Fortunately, I happened across a site today which solved all of the problems: it lead me to File Juicer.

File Juicer will search just about any file format and extract whatever images (and text in some cases) it can find. It cost me around $AUD26 and within 5 minutes I had extracted all of the photos from 6 Flash photo galleries. That was well worth the money, I think. With a list of capabilities as long as my arm, I won’t insert them here; I’ll just say if you ever need to extract something from something – try File Juicer.

Mac OS + Parallels + Vista = sweetness – IE6

pamela — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:11:29 +0000

Much to my colleagues’ envy I recently took delivery of my brand spanking 17″ MacBook Pro (with a glossy screen) – an End of Financial Year gift to myself (along with an N95, see post below). It was my hope that this upgrade would allow me to simplify and clear some desk space by replacing my need for a PC and my old Powerbook. Being a web designer I design / develop fully on the Mac but I still need to test the sites that I develop in Internet Explorer on a PC.

First of all I found the easiest way to migrate from the Powerbook to the MacBook Pro was copying directories from one to the other via my iPod. Note to people doing this in future: get yourself a firewire cable for this, it will save you much grief! It took me a few experiments via wireless, external HDD and USB disk before the bright idea of using the iPod, so I wasted some time. Especially since I have 20GB of photos and 12GB of music… But it wasn’t too painful.
Luckily my timing was such that I was able to download the recently-released Parallels 3 which includes support for Windows Vista. After a quick trip to the city to purchase Visa (the cheapest Home Basic Edition because I need nothing more than browser installations) I proceeded to put 1 and 1 and 1 together – crossing my fingers that the laptop wouldn’t start smoking as soon as I inserted a Windows install disk .

The results were suprisingly sweet. Parallels allows you to choose between optimising across Mac OS and other installed operating systems or optimise for better Mac OS performance and the other operating systems get what’s left over. I chose the latter, because I’m only using Vista for IE, so Vista is a little slow, but the great thing is I can still use Photoshop and other resource-hungry apps without problem while Vista is running in Parallels. Compliance mode is pretty cool too, you can see icons for the Windows apps that are running in the OSX toolbar.

The one drawback (and it’s a big one for me and my business!!) is that Vista doesn’t run IE6 – not even a standalone version. That’s because it is tied too closely to the XP codebase (apparently!). Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until after I had tried to install and run it. Which means that one third of my reason for installing Windows (the other two were IE7 and Safari for Windows) fell through. Luckily for me my husband has a laptop that runs IE6 and he leaves it at home during the day. I’m hoping that saturation of IE6 will reduce drastically in the near future with the release of IE7 and Safari so then I can stop supporting it.

I’m loving my environment right now – on my desktop I have a good LCD monitor which I bought about a year ago for the PC, an Apple keyboard, mouse and speakers which I plug into my one machine when I’m working in my office. Otherwise, I unplug everything and take the laptop to my lounge or to clients’ sites and still have everything I need.

If you’re thinking of installing Parallels + Vista on your Macbook Pro, I say go for it!!

Vienna – Free Mac OSX RSS Reader

pamela — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:16:49 +0000

Just in case I’m not the last Mac user in the planet to hear about this: Vienna. I’ve installed it and imported my feeds from Bloglines and so far, so good. I’m really liking it.