George’s Wonder Blog

THE WHAT: Say you have a bunch of images or graphics on which you’d like to perform the same actions. Maybe you want to convert your images to grayscale, then make them all 100 pixels wide (or whatever). In “The Simple How” below I’ll go over the basic way to do this. For more advanced information than presented below search Google, go to your Photoshop documentation, or try the Adobe website.

THE SIMPLE HOW:

1. Preparation: First get all of the images/graphics you want to work with into one folder. Then make a copy of that folder in case things don’t turn out the way you expected.

2. Record the Action: In Photoshop make sure your Actions Palette is open. If you don’t see it go to the menu and click Window > Actions, or press Alt+F9.

Next, open one of the images in the folder you created in step 1 above.

On the actions palette click the round button with the black arrow (see figure 1), and from the menu select New Action (see figure 2). and in the New Action window, give the action a name, then click the Record button (see figure 3). Now go to work on your image, performing all of the actions you want applied to all of your images. When you are done click the Stop button on the Action Palette (see figure 1 or 3, its a square button as it would be on a VCR/DVD).

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

3. Run the Automated Batch: Now you can close the image you used to record your actions without saving (as you may reapply actions to the same image again). Go to the menu and click File > Automate > Batch. From the Action dropdown menu, select the action you saved (it may already be selected). Make sure the Source dropdown menu has Folder selected, then click the Choose button below, and navigate to your folder. Once you’ve clicked on the folder, then you can the OK button. Now you will see your images being processed. When the automated process is done simply go back and save your images and you are done. You can automate this portion, but that’s not covered here.

Happy batching!

I’ve been involved in several web projects where we’ve rewritten an html site in asp or php. Your page names will change from whatever.html, whatever.htm, or whatever.shtml to whatever.asp or whatever.php - right? You can opt for this but there are workarounds that may be practical. For example, if your host company allows it you can instruct the server to treat your html, htm or shtml pages as if they are asp or php pages. Here’s a quick example from an asp site was rewritten in with php. The decision was made not to rename the pages with the php extension but instead to leave page names unchanged (like whatever.asp) but have the server treat the pages as if they were php pages. The following was added to the site’s .htaccess file:

## Make all .asp file act like .php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .asp

## Make sure the server knows which pages are index pages
DirectoryIndex index.asp default.asp index.html index.htm index.shtml index.shtm

The first line is a comment and the second line tells the server to run the php code in asp pages. Skipping the empty line, the third line of code is another comment, and the fourth line of code tells the server which files are index files. [For more on DirectoryIndex read about Apache mod_dir or try googling the term apache mod_dir.]

Good planning can save you time, money and your audience.  Check out these thoughts from W3C’s Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change page into consideration when you are deciding how and if you should change your page names:

QUOTE 1:

In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it. Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name. And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like. Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought.

QUOTE 2:
We have so much material that we can’t keep track of what is out of date and what is confidential and what is valid and so we thought we’d better just turn the whole lot off.

That I can sympathize with - the W3C went through a period like that, when we had to carefully sift archival material for confidentiality before making the archives public. The solution is forethought - make sure you capture with every document its acceptable distribution, its creation date and ideally its expiry date. Keep this metadata.

About December 2006 or January 2007 I was very happy to buy a ILO model IWT3206 32 inch SDTV which replaced a 25 inch Magnavox I’d had for about 10 years. The warranty is 90 days parts and labor and 1 year labor (I think that’s what my wife said - but definitely 90 days and 1 year).

Today my wife sits down and tries to turn on the TV - no such luck! I tried different plugs in the power surge strip its powered by, directly into the wall, and even another wall outlet. Nothing.

I get warranties, but when I buy a TV I expect 5 or more years out of it, and over the past 20+ years that’s what I’ve gotten. When I go to Walmart tomorrow with my very heavy TV set to see if a store supervisor can help me out I have no guarantees, she’s going to see if she can do anything or not. Here’s what I’ve found during my brief searches today about Walmart’s ILO (IWT3206) 32 inch SDT:

• Yahoo Answers - ILO TV Owners?
• Consumer Electronics Q&A - ILO Televisions and problems…Junk TVs?
• Walmart - Don’t buy this unless you have lots of money and can afford to replace it if (when). Oh, and if you do just buy something better

I bought this TV because It was only about $300. I wish I’d paid the extra $100 for a real brand name.