Richard Hinchcliffe | Freelance Motion Graphics, 3D & Web Design in Leeds & Harrogate » General

Skype + Dropbox = Free Collaborative Toolkit

RichH — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 16:25:40 +0000

From what was looking like a nice steady run up to Christmas holidays the last few weeks have been pretty busy, and it looks like I’ll probably only get a week’s break before I have to start up again in January. And let’s be honest, a Christmas break is never that relaxing anyway.

I thought I’d have a nice easy time of it, find some time to record some of the After Effects and 3DSMax tutorials I keep meaning to get around to and put my feet up while playing on the Xbox and playing in the snow with my girls. Not so. But never mind, I’ve had some fun projects to work on so really, it’s all good.

Most of the work I’ve been doing has been with Andy Shillito, and thanks to Skype and Dropbox it’s been a seamless process, almost like we’re in the same room, but without the need to make each other cups of tea.

I know I’m a late-comer to the Skype party, it’s been around for ages, but I’ve never really had a need to use it before because good old MSN messenger did the trick, but Skype really is a fantastic piece of kit if you want to work remotely with someone. Plus, it’s free to talk to someone for as long as you like, and who doesn’t like free?

I’ve been giving Dropbox a good workout too. I’ve been using it for ages for personal stuff, syncing fonts and resources between my desktop and my laptop etc but it’s turned out to be another pretty good tool for working remotely on the same projects. Share a folder with someone, and you’ve got access to all the files the other person saves into that folder and visa-versa. It’d be a bit of a pain if you were to create a 500Mb Photoshop document which needs to upload then download again before the other person can work on it, but that’s not been an issue yet.

Does anyone know of any other useful bits of software that would make working with someone in a remote location easier? If you do just let me know, I like anything that makes my life easier.

Anyway, I’m hoping 2011 (Really? Already?) will be a much more organised year and I’ll be able to knock out the tutorials I want to and find time for some of personal projects I want to try get started. A holiday would be nice too.

A Good Spam Squisher

RichH — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:14:23 +0000

In this case the spam squisher in question is called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress, and so far it’s been more effective at eliminating cerain types of spam to my blog than any other plugin.

Having any sort of comment functionality on your blog means you’re going to get spam at some point or another. Even a little site like mine with virtually no traffic compared to a lot of other blogs out there can get plenty.

As this is a WordPress based site I’ve got the Askimet plugin running on it by default, and it does catch it’s fair share of rubbish comments, but I was still getting a good 10 or more spam comments in my comment queue to moderate every day. Again, not a lot, but enough to get on your wick after a while – especially seen as 99% of them were just big, long lists of spammy links. In the WordPress admin you can already set up a filter to say… “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 5 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)”… but that still meant I had to manually delete all those dud comments.

So, after a bit of googling I found an awesome little plugin called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress (download it here). This little wonder, like WordPress, can be set up to “Block comments with 15 or more links to external sites “ – but by block it mean delete/kill/exterminate – i.e. it the crappy comment never even appears in your spam queue and it’s automatically squashed.

I personally think this is a feature that should be added to WordPress by deafult, but until that day, TanTan’s plugin will do just fine.

So if anyone’s genuinely trying to post a comment on my blog with more than 15 url’s in it – sorry, but I can’t hear you, you’ll have to try shouting a little louder. But, I’m pretty confident any comment with that many links if guaranteed to be one of the bad guys, and TanTan’s plugin dealing with it so I don’t have to can only be a good thing.

FreshBooks adds Google Checkout support

RichH — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:16:11 +0000

After much deliberation about whether or not to use one of the many fancy online invoicing apps available to make my life that little bit easier, I ended up giving FreshBooks a go…

…and so far I’ve been very impressed, as have the people on the other end of my invoices. But that’s a whole other post I need to write. This one’s just a little one to big-up the boys and girls who work at FreshBooks who listen to what their customers want and act on it – a rare thing indeed.

I was one of the many folks who asked for Google Checkout (the search giant’s answer to the seemingly ubiquitous PayPal) to be supported as an online payment option for the invoices I send via FreshBooks – and the powers that be made it happen.

There were already plenty of other options in there – big names like authorize.net and PayPal etc – but they take a much much larger commission per transaction than Google do, were therefore much less attractive and I never bothered looking into them. Google Checkout still takes a cut, but it’s tiny in comparison and I’m more than happy to sacrifice a few quid in exchange for the convenience of not having to cash as many cheques.

Picasa Photo Viewer

RichH — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:41:41 +0000

What is Picasa Photo Viewer? Well, like it says on the screen shot down below it’s a fast, powerful image viewer for viewing image and photos directly from Windows Explorer*

* I’m not sure about OSX, but Picasa 3 is now available for the Mac so chances are it’s part of the OSX version too – someone let me know will ya?)

It comes as part of the new and improved Picasa 3 which was recently released, and since I discovered it it’s become my default image viewer – which for a graphics designer a reasonably important thing to have in the tool kit.

Up until now I’ve just been happy with looking at images in Windows Explorer, but it’s slow and clunky and doesn’t support the majority of file types I work with on a daily bases – namely Photoshop PSD files and TGA’s etc.

I could use Adobe Bridge to view those files, and I sometimes do, but in 99% of situations Bridge is overkill if all I’m wanting to do is scroll through a few images and try find the right file I’m working on. I’ve used a few other apps in the past, but they’ve always been way over-complicated for just looking through a few PSD files.

So far Picasa Photo Viewer seems like the perfect alternative for viewing image files in Explorer. It’s fast, doesn’t struggle with big layered PSD files or large images and shows everything in a tidy LightBox style overlay above everything else on your desktop…

Plus, if you’ve got a Google Account and have Picasa Web Albums set up, you can easily upload an image to your account with the click of a button. By default they get put in a “Drop Box” album, but you can sort them out and organise them online however you like.

All in all it’s a great little free tool that comes as part of the equally fantastic Picasa. If you’re fed up with Windows Explorer’s very limited image viewing options it can’t hurt to give it a try, can it?

Alternatives to Lorem Ipsum

RichH — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:50:26 +0000

If you’ve been designing web or print work for any amount of time, chances are you’ve copied and pasted your fair share of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet dummy text to fill in otherwise blank pages while you mock up designs or wait for the client to send you some real content.

Chances are you’re also probably getting a little bored of it too, and who doesn’t like a little choice these days anyway.

The Alternatives

These aren’t in any particular order, so just dig in and see if there’s any you like…

Malevole’s text generator Paragraphs of text from TV show intro’s or theme tunes etc. If you’re younger than 20, you might want to skip this one
BlindTextGenerator Lots of options and variations to play with
Corporate Ipsum A widget for OSX generating some cliched, buzz-word filled business jabber
sfco.uld.be As far as I can tell it’s text generated by the Corporate Ipsum widget above, but for the benefit of us people without a Mac -you can just copy and paste.
Leon’s random essay generator Not strictly for this purpose, but it seems some folk do use it to create their dummy text
adhesiontext™ Lots of options and different langauges/character stes to play with
Generator3 Yes it has Lipsum in there but there’s plenty options to play with for other languages etc.
HintPlus Very Lipsummy style output, but with much less old Latin style words.
Gangsta Lorem ippzle If you’re a fan od words beginning with, including and ending with ‘izzle‘, this one’s for you.
HTML Ipsum Lipsum ready to copy and paste, but pre-formatted with various HTML tags
Lorem2 Some dummy text just waiting for you to copy and paste. Basically Lipsum.com without the need to click the ‘generate’ button

If you know of any others that are work a mention just let me know!

The Original

http://www.lipsum.com/

As far as I know this is the original Lorem Ipsum generator – at least it’s the only one I’ve ever used in the past. Genuine Lorem’s good in that it simulates ‘real’ text content with a readable combination of long and short words that are inoffensive and can be used in just about any old place.

I’m not promising the list of alternatives below are all suitable for use in your work – that ultimately depends on the sense of humor of your client. So if you’re doing something for a big corporate gig, probably best sticking to good old Lipsum.

PageRank goes up, search results go down

RichH — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:41:40 +0000

I’ve had the google toolbar installed for a while now. It’s a very useful add-on to FireFox for me as I use google Notebook and Bookmarks and the toolbar provides nice easy access to both, so it’s a winner.

As a little bonus for me it has the ability to show the PageRank of whatever page you’re looking at. PageRank is the importance google assigns to a web page (0/10 been the lowest PR, 10/10 being the highest) based on how many other sites link to or reference that page. It gets a lot more complex than that and you can read about it and look at a horrible-and-not-very-helpful diagram here.

Anyway, I noticed the PageRank of the home page of this site, tmrw.co.uk, has gone up from 2/10 to 3/10. I know, not that significant at all, but it shows that I’m doing something right with all the little SEO bits and pieces I’m trying. As far as I can tell the better your PageRank the better your chances are of turning up on the front page of the google search results.

I put it down mainly to the fact that I’ve started leaving comments on other peoples blog posts. In the past I just read something then skipped onto something else, but now if I read something useful or interesting or download something off someones site, I usually leave a comment which in turn leaves a little hyperlink back to my site.

It looks like this site needs all the PR it can get at the moment too. I don’t know what I did or exactly when it happened, but despite my little PageRank boost Google doesn’t seem to like me any more.

It used to be that you searched for Freelance Design Leeds or Freelance Web Design Leeds and I came up on the first page for each one – not at the top by any means but I did OK.

Now (Jan 2009) I’m currently back on page 10! Not good for generating new business, and the one thing a freelancer like me really needs to do is generate new business.

Ah well. I put this HUGE drop down the results table down to the fact I’ve been re-jigging the content and categorisation of this site/blog, and it’s confused google into thinking I’ve got a lot of duplicate content or something like that. I guess it’s just a case of waiting again and hoping I creep back up, page by page until I’m back up near the top again.

It’s not all bad though, have a search for freelance 3d design Leeds and I come second which is great. But to be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a term people search for a lot anyway.

An exercise in SEO

RichH — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:58:24 +0000

I’m a freelance graphic designer, so it’s all about getting work any way I can, and while doing work for design agency’s in and around Leeds is great, I’d ultimately like to get more work directly and establish my own client base, turning me and my little freelance operation into something larger.

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

To make it easier to keep up-to-date
Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) – To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

The Task

Currently if I search for something like web design in Leeds, web design Leeds, or 3D visualisation Yorkshire, I’m not coming anywhere near the top of the list – and that’s a bad thing.

Typically a prospective client will search for something and go for the top few links, then maybe scan the first page of results to see if anything else catches their eye.

So, now that I have a decent up-datable site, the goal is to get my site ranked highly for search terms that I think people who need freelance design services like the ones I provide will actually type into Google.

Things I’m trying…

From been a web designer for the last 7 years I (hopefully) know enough to make a start on getting my site ranked much higher than it currently is. The main things to concentrate on are…

Work out what search terms you actually want to appear for at the top of the list.
Relevant good content is key to it all – write good content to the subject you’d like to rank highly for and the visitors will, in time, start coming.
So, if I want want my site to start ranking highly for terms like freelance web design Leeds or freelance photography Leeds then I need to actually use those phrases or variations on them (it’s almost as if this whole article is just part of my plan) on my site – although not excessively else you’ll get ranked down for trying to spam your way to the top of the list.
Write good content in this blog section of my site so that people link to it (don’t worry, I’m not under any illusions this is good content just yet – I can design and take photos but I tend to waffle on a bit instead of getting to the point when writing – maybe I’ll write a novel one day, can’t be that hard can it?) and just generally try to get people linking to me site. The more people Google sees linking to me, the higher the ‘authority’ it’ll give my site, and will therefore hopefully show my site above someone elses, who has for example exactly the same content but a lower authority according to their ranking system. This, and it’s a dark art in it’s self, is called Page Rank.
Make sure the Titles of my pages contain some useful keywords and phrases (but not a list of keywords like the Meta tag – see below), but still remain descriptive and readable for the user.
Meta keywords, as far as I can tell, are pretty much ignored by Google and a lot of other search engines these days. While it’s still good to have them the engines these days take a much closer look at the actual content of the pages to index them and, not the Meta tags. Instead of making sure you’ve got a nice list of Meta Keywords, make sure you use all the key-words and key-phrases you want to get indexed for in the content of your site instead, like 3D design in Leeds. See, easy. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
Be patient, wait for the major search engines to get a good index of your site, and don’t be afraid to change content if the old stuff’s not working

I’ll be keeping this post updated with whatever genuinely useful information I find on this subject but for now I’m just going keep on updating my site, tweaking the keyword content here and there for each of the work pages etc, and keep an eye on my ranking. I’ll let you know if anything starts shifting.

A good laptop for a graphic designer

RichH — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:49:18 +0000

Before you shout ‘MacBook Pro!’ – that was way out of the budget I’d set myself (less than £800 if I could manage it), so out of the question from the start. It was, unfortunately, the one that I really really wanted to get. It’s powerful and looks nice, and OSX is a joy to work on, but you have to pay a lot of cash to get it. Sorry Apple, maybe next time.

I don’t buy anything without doing a lot of research and I ended getting myself a top spec 2.2 GHz 17″ Dell Vostro 1700, which as far as specs go is the same (less 0.2 GHz, which I can live without) as 17″ MacBook Pro. Yep, it’s not as pretty and it’s heavier but it’s literally less than half the price (£740 for the Dell vs £1860 for the Apple).

There’s a few minor differences in the number of USB ports and Firewire ports etc, 2.2 GHz vs 2.4 GHz, and the Vostro 1700 NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card uses slightly slower DDR2 memory and not DDR3 like the MacBook Pro, but all things considered it’s just about the same (at least on paper – I wish I had 17″ MacBook Pro to do a side by side comparison with but alas, I don’t)

The Vostro 1700 is more than powerful enough to runs all the creative apps I need it to without a problem, renders heavy 3D scenes quickly (faster than my year old Desktop PC), and importantly to me has a nice big hi-res screen. It’s not up to the standards of a good quality Desktop LCD monitor, but it’s plenty good enough for me. The one I got has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA) which costs extra but is worth it for the extra screen-res you get to play with, and one of the main reasons I got this model. It’s a shiny/reflective screen which some people won’t like, but I don’t mind, and it’s a bright crisp screen to work with.

If you don’t need a 17″ laptop but still want a powerful graphics machine take a look at the Dell Vostro 1500 – smaller, cheaper and lighter but just as powerful, you just loose some screen resolution.

I could have got it off dell.co.uk for around £1000 I think if I’d configured it right, but if you look on Dell’s Outlet store you can probably find the same pc/laptop that you were just about to get but save a few £100 off the main site’s price.

I ended up getting mine new off eBay, for £740 including delivery, which for the spec of the machine is amazing.

I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and I can’t really fault it either as a dedicated graphic design machine or as an entertainment laptop.

As with all technology though it’ll be out of date within a year and I’ll be looking for something bigger and better – but with the £1120 pounds I saved by not getting a MacBook Pro of near enough the same spec, I can quite happily justify the upgrade. Or go on holiday for a month. Or buy a second car.

Some Dell Vostro 1700 reviews I found – if you still need convincing…

FFFFOUND!

RichH — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:20:22 +0000

FFFFOUND! is one of those sites that you just, well, find – then wonder why no one else though of it before.

UPDATE: Sorry folks, I’m all out of invites. Try do what I did and send a nice email to the admin at FFFFOUND! asking for an invite – chances are they’ll send you one themselves!

The idea is really simple, it’s an image bookmarking site. You find an image on the Internet that you like – be it an illustration, an amazing photo, some inspiration for something you’re working on or just a piece of art – then you click on a link in your browsers favourites (that you add via the ffffound.com website) called ‘POST TO FFFFOUND! and said image is sent to your FFFFOUND! account, so you can keep them all in one handy place. Mine are here for example.

That’s not all though. They look and see what images you’ve added to your account, see what other users like the same images as you, then recommend other images to you based on the other users similar tastes.

At the moment it’s in a Beta testing stage, so you can’t sign up without an invite. After looking unsuccessfully on Google for one I just emailed them and asked for one. They sent one back the next day.

If you can get your hands on an invite it’s worth checking out and trying it for yourself. It’ll waste a good few hours of your time just browsing the growing collection of nice looking stuff.