Brian's bedroom up

If you get some time, go and check out Brian's bedroom. He's going be posting a whole bunch of articles on getting running with Ubuntu Studio.

Web 2.0 gradients for GIMP

Thanks to BitBox for this one. Some sweet preset gradients for making sleek looking logos.

Get them from here:
http://gimp-tutorials.net/30-Ultimate-Web-20+Layer-Styles-for+-Gimp

Creating a Web 2.0 logo in GIMP

Instead of working today, I decided to revamp the iChurch logo using the GIMP. It came out alright so I decided to create a short tutorial on how I did it. That didn't work so I made a really long one.

Here's what it looked like originally:



and here's the final product:

Setting up the text path

First start with a same size as the original image. I use the FreeType filter (found under Filters>Text>FreeType...) rather than the standard Text tool. The FreeType filter gives you much more control over the spacing and size of your text.

Firstly, we'll create the word "Church". I used Verdana for its clean look, and moved the letter spacing to -160 in order to bring the letters closer together. Spacing can make a world of difference. Play around to get what you need.



Make sure that you tick the "Create Bezier Outline" checkbox so that we can use the selection over and over.

Click OK and you'll see the newly created path (if you can't see it, go to the Paths tab on the Layer, Channels & Paths dock and make it visible.)

Filling the church

Create a new layer (Layer > New Layer ... ).



Create a selection from the path.



Select the gradient tool and choose a dark colour and a light colour. I chose dark blue to light blue. Create a linear gradient from top to bottom, with the lighter colour at the bottom.



Next, we'll create an inner shadow. First create a new layer. Select the PaintBrush tool and choose the Circle Fuzzy (03) brush. Choose black as the foreground colour.

Making sure that you still have the selection, go to the paths tab on the Layers, Channels and Paths dock and right-click on the Church path. Select Stroke Path from the menu.

Choose "Stoke path with a paint tool" and make sure that the PaintBrush is selected.



The result should look like this:



Now, add a new layer and get the selection from the path again. Create a white-to-transparent linear gradient from the bottom of the text that just covers the lighter blue shade.



Set the Mode on the new layer to Overlay and move it below the Inner shadow layer.

Bringing in the bling

Now we'll add the token glass finish that everyone loves so much. First select the Paths tool from the toolbox:



Create yourself a wavey path over the text by clicking and dragging the Path tool. Make sure that you leave space above the text. When you're done, hold CTRL and click on the first point to close the path.



Now comes the super sneaky bit. In the Path tab of the Layers, Channels and Paths dialog, select the first text path and create a selection from it (right-click and select Path to Selection. Then right-click the new wavey path and select Intersect with Selection.



It should look like this:



Create a new layer and select a White-to-transparent linear gradient. Apply the gradient to the selection with the white at the top. Make sure that you end the gradient a fair distance below the selection so that the edge of the selection is sharp. Set the Opacity of the layer to 75%.



Create another layer and create another White-to-transparent gradient inside the selection. This time end the gradient a third of the way down the selection.



Deselect everything (Select > None) and create yet another layer. Select the dark blue colour again and go to the Paths dialog. Right-click the 'Church' path and choose Stroke Path....

In the Stroke Path dialog, choose Stroke Line, 1.0 px and Solid.





Using the same technique I created the 'i' in red. I used orange for the lighter part of the red gradient because a lighter reddish pink looks far less vibrant.

Finishing touches

Soft shadow

Hide the white background layer by clicking the eye in the Layer dialog. Select Copy Visible from the Edit menu, and then Paste (also in the Edit).



In the Layers dialog, there'll be a new layer called 'Floating Selection'. Right-click on it and select new Layer. (This creates the pasted layer as a new layer. If you select Anchor Layer, it pastes the copied layer into the current layer. This frustrated me to no end when I started using GIMP).


Go to Script-Fu > Shadow > Drop-shadow. Set the Blur radius to 9 and the Opacity to 37. Click OK and wait for your shadow to be cast.



If you want, you can select the Move tool and move the shadow layer around until you are happy with how it looks. You can also adjust the Opacity of the shadow by adjusting the layer's Opacity.

Reflection

Select the Layer that you pasted to create the soft shadow from. Flip it vertically by going to Layer > Transform > Flip Vertically.



Select the Move tool and move the layer to a couple of pixels below the original text.



Right-click on the layer and select "Add Layer Mask...".



Choose the default "White (full opacity)" option when asked what you want to initialize the mask to. Right-click on the Layer and select "Show Layer Mask". Make sure that "Edit Layer Mask" is still selected.

Select the gradient tool and make a White-to-Black linear gradient over the layer mask with the white at the top.



Right-click the layer and unselect "Show Layer Mask" and "Edit Layer Mask"

And that's it.

Gavin Hood to direct Wolverine

Wow, couldn't believe this when I saw it. According to Ain't It Cool News, South African director Gavin Hood (yes, the one who directed Tsotsi) will be directing the new Wolverine movie. Man, that's just fantastic. I've always been a fan of Gavin, even from way back when he was still acting in South African TV series. The film's set to come out in late 2008 and will have Hugh Jackman in his (and only his) role as Wolverine (shink). I can't wait.

Here's the AICN link:
WOLVERINE gets an interesting director...

What makes a great (RSS) feed?

Hi guys, my name's Mike and I am mildly addicted to RSS. OK, OK, I am HUGELY addicted to RSS. I'll agree that I was slow on the uptake, but lately I can't get away from it. The number of feeds I subscribe to is truly staggering.

Not all feeds are equal, however. Some are great, some are down-right frustrating.While I was contemplating an RSS-direct-brain interface, I came up with a list of tips to make up that fantastic feed.

Empty items are right out

The same goes for only having the title in the feed. The main reason I subscribe to a site's feeds is so that I don't have to visit the site. If I felt like to go to the site everyday I wouldn't have subscribed in the first place.

Include the full article if its not too big. Generally, if its not split into multiple pages on the site (or should be), you can include the whole thing. Otherwise have a good summary: enough to tell the reader what its about. They can decide whether to read more or not. Ain't It Cool's feed is a great example of this. One-liners are completely unacceptable.

If you're doing it just to get hits on your site counter - don't. Channel your feed through feedburner.com and keep track of your subscribers that way. Feedburner has a fantastic set of tools for tracking your subscribers (which has just gotten better) and will even allow your readers to subscribe via email

One item is just not on

Multiple items or nothing. There's nothing more irritating than knowing that you missed a couple of feeds. Especially with comic feeds. The best part of my Mondays is reading the feeds I missed on the weekend. You never know how often your subscribers are checking so always include the last few feeds for them to catch up on.

Bad dates

Check that your feed only pops up as new when they've changed. Feed readers use the date fields on each item to determine whether its new or not so check that you're creating them properly. Some feeds are particularly bad and show up as new or unread every time you reload them. Continually marking them read is about as fun as continually biting a rhino. Eventually your readers will get irritated and ditch your feed altogether.

Authenticate only as a last resort

Most feed readers don't support the HTTP authentication that some sites use to protect their feeds. Basecamp is one such site. Unless your feed is really secret then stay away from this authentication method.

Head's up

Put your feeds in your page's HTML block. Doing this makes browsers aware of feeds on your page. For each feed place this line between the and tags on your page.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="FeedTitle" href="URLtoFeed" />

Here's an example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmashingMagazine" />

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Running Windows XP apps seamlessly in Ubuntu

Now this is interesting, although its probably not the first attempt at doing this. VentureCake's article shows you how to run a Windows XP Professional virtual machine in Ubuntu, and run the applications seamlessly on your Gnome desktop. Look I haven't tried it, but it looks pretty impressive.

A bigger screenshot would have really helped, but it was enough to see that Internet Exploiter 7 was now polluting their Gnome desktop. I'll have to test it to see what the performance is like, but I'm not holding thumbs. It is virtualisation after all.

VentureCake » Blog Archive » 10 minutes to run every Windows app on your Ubuntu desktop

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60+ Web page designs

Here's another great article from SmashingMagazine.com. You'll find a lot of great looking websites to get some design ideas from. I've already got some ideas for my new Mike's pick. Some of them are just beautiful.

Inspiration Package: 60+ Usable & Elegant Designs

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Dvolver MovieMaker

Here's a nice little flash app to make your own movies. Look - the plots aren't the greatest, but you can easy make a fun project in seconds. Afterwards you can include the link in your own webpage as well as email it to a friend (although I'm still waiting for it to arrive).

Here's my next box office hit:


and here's the link:
http://www.dvolver.com/live/moviemaker.html

Mike's Pic: Storms River Mouth

Another honeymoon photo. This one was taken on a boat trip into Storms river mouth, South Africa.

35 Designers x 5 Questions

I'm always on the look out for great web design and CSS tips. There's no lack of either on the web. I usually stumble over dozens of them - all claiming to be the best thing since sliced images - and they soon become very bland. Here's one that stuck out for me.

Smashing Magazine (which does look like a rather smashing magazine) asked 35 web designers five design related questions. The answers are a wealth of knowledge. The amount of knowledge in the invisible college of web design is staggering, and quite disconcerting to new web designers. The best shortcuts, tips and of course IE bug workarounds are divulged openly. It's a great place to touch up your design skills and add a couple tricks to your toolbox.

Great Icon Tutorial

Ah, the anatomy of an icon. Luckily this sneaky little webpage squirmed through the web filter at work. Yes - that's right in this tutorial you get to see naked icons, built from the canvas up. There are no holds barred - its a great tutorial for all front end developers, graphic designers and all sorts of icon admirers. Great stuff. Great tut.

http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/08/23/anatomy.html

Photosynth - Unbelievable

Wow. It looks like Microsoft have some serious surprises coming up. Photosynth is one of them. By means of some dude's (although we're sure he's been outsourced from a foreign planet) absolutely brilliant research, Photosynth stitches together public domain photo's to build 3D models of real life places. The results are incredible and only a real demonstration can do the software justice. Check out the TED video here

20 bananas. Definitely.

Mike's Pic: The Nice Side of Knysna

Well, here it is: the first of the honeymoon photo's. This one I took using the panorama feature on my W800. Its situated in Knysna, South Africa. We were sitting on the pier on the eastern Head. The sunset enhances the beauty of the area and it makes you wonder how beautiful the area was before the town exploded into an overcrowded, overpriced vacation spot. Knysna may have been this beautiful once, but those days are long gone and it'll only get worse. Building is going on all over the show. I really like how the picture came out, but Knysna's not getting any of my bananas anytime soon.

A Walk Inside the Creation Museum

I found this interesting link on my Digg RSS feed. There has been a lot of talk about the Creation Museum going on in all sorts of places on the 'net. Some are fiercely against it - there was quite a stir to protest against it. On the other hand its backed extensively by the Young Earth Creationists, especially by AnswersInGenesis.org - who I am not very fond of at all.

Whatever your stance, here is a walkthrough the unfinished museum. Take a look around and make up your own mind. I find it quite fascinating, even if it does use a bit of a "we're right and you're hopelessly wrong" tactic in its teaching.

The link again if you missed it:
http://studentweb.eku.edu/zachary_lynn/museum/index.html

Calvinist/Arminian debate

I can't actually think of a more tired, more pointless debate than this. I've been looking in to both sides quite heavily and what a struggle its been. I have never felt more demoralized in my entire Christian walk.

In my opinion, its just another doctrine war for theologists - the difference is minimal in your Christian everyday life. No matter which side of the fence you're standing on, you'll still go out and try to help others to find God.

Here are Mike's one point of Calvinism and Arminianism. Sticking to tradition, I've given them the easy-to-remember acronyms H and S (sorry, I couldn't find any 1 letter flowers).

Mike's 1 point of Calvinism:

Hit or Miss
You're either born going to Heaven or Hell. God decides who does and who doesn't.

Mike's 1 point of Arminianism:

Sick
Everyone is sick (and going to Hell). However, if you go to the doctor (God), in his mercy he can decide to make you better and allow you into Heaven.

I'm a Married Man

For those of you who don't know me personally and have been wondering where I've been - I got married on the 27 April and have been away on honeymoon. To the event I've set up a web album that had the original presentation that I was suppose to show at the reception... plus a few new ones from the wedding and the honeymoon. The (full-size) web-album can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/stringhandler.
Enjoy it.

Mike's Pic: Down on De Korte

Location: De Korte street, JHB

More Online Writing Tips ...

I posted a note about writing for online content a while back. At the time I couldn't find any articles specifically for Web and online writing. Here's a nice site that I found stumbling.

http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

Hovind's updated timeline

'Tis a dark night out tonight

This dark and gloomy site met me on my way home yesterday. I think the colours were what caught my eyes, brightly set against the ominous clouds. There was something surreal about the scene.

How it should have ended ...

I've got to thank the crazy for this one. The guys from How it should have ended just seem to have the same sense of humour that we do. They've taken all of the best movies (and Borat) and changed the endings, just like the title says. For honesty like that I'm going to have to add an extra banana.

My favourite has to be the Superman ending. Maybe that's because I'm a big Batman fan from back in the day.

This one is a 9 banana-er for sure.

Just another nice pic

Its been hard to blog lately. I haven't been surfing as much lately. Probably the main reason is that I've moved out into my own place - and alas, I had to leave behind the ADSL line. In addition, web filters at work put a huge obstacle in the way of my StumbleUpon addiction. Hopefully I'll get back into it soon, but for now here's another pic I took on the way home. I'm really starting to enjoy this photography thing ...

Sunset over Mandela Bridge

I took this photo on the way home from work the other day. Its just using the built in camera on my W800 . Another great view of the beautiful South Africa.

Erik Mongrain

Every now and then you find a guitarist that is pretty damn fancy pants. Erik Mongrain will make your jaw drop. I was stumbling around the web the other night and before I was stopped by drop dead boring animation, I discovered this fantastic musician.

Check out his two videos on Google Video:

Airtap
Percusienfa

10 fancy pants bananas.

My favourite Portable Apps

Sometimes you love a program so much you just have to take it with you. Thank goodness for Portable Apps. Now you can run many of your favourite apps right off of your USB stick. Here are some of my favourites:

• Thunderbird Portable/Gmail Combo - 10 bananas

  
  Gmail is fantastic. More space than you'll ever need. Great interface. Best of all its portable - you can get your mail from any computer with an internet connection. But there is something great about having a smart mail client.
  Using Thunderbird Portable you can store your mail on your flash drive for retrieval at any time - whether or not you can get to an internet connection. Plus you get a great portable mail client from the guys that brought you Firefox.
  Here's how you set it up...
  
  
  
  • Get a Gmail account (or any other web account that supports POP3 download).
  
  
  • Go to the Forwarding and POP tab under the Settings page and enable POP Download.
  
  
  • Set up Thunderbird Portable with your Gmail account with the settings found here.
  
  
  • Smile at your achievement.
  
  
  • Take your email anywhere.
    

  Tip from the Smoothie:
  

  This combo can make a great present for someone who doesn't have their own email address.
  Buy a USB stick.
  Get a Gmail address for the presentee.
  Set it up.
  Deliver the present.
  Collect 10 smoothie points.
  



• GIMP Portable - 8 bananas

  
  GIMP is an image editing program - a free alternative to Photoshop, Corel Draw etc. I often have to edit icons, GIFs and simple pictures at work and MS paint just doesn't cut it. All graphics on this site have been done with GIMP and I would say that 90% of it was done with GIMP Portable.



• Mozilla Firefox Portable - 7 bananas

  
  I'm afraid its come to a point where I can no longer tolerate having to use Internet Exploiter. Now I can take the 'fox with me no matter where I go. Granted - most of the computers I use already have Firefox installed, so I don't really get to use it much(hence the rating). Get it here.



• SciTE - Scientilla Text Editor - 7 bananas

  
  Great text editor with syntax highlighting, folding and other arb features that only a software developer could love. Really, it is just a text editor after all. I use SciTE extensively for editing HTML, XML and especially web.config files on remote servers. If you can handle using Notepad, then you're a better man than me.



• XAMPP - 6 nerd bananas

  
  A complete Apache/MySQL/Php/Perl development server that you can carry with you. Easy setup - just copy the folder to your USB and go.



• VLC - Video Lan Client - 8 bananas

  
  VLC is my favourite media player anyway. I hardly ever find a video file it can't play. Ok, maybe I could try harder but even if there was some hypothetical file that it couldn't, it still plays better than Media Player and Real player. The portable version is here.

Setting Up The Arsenal

Make sure you get a program to launch your portables. I use PStart, but the Portable Apps Suite has a great little launcher of its own. Oh yes ... I also usually keep all my apps in one folder so that they don't fight with my other documents on my USB. Portable Apps are mean, I once saw some having a bucketOf.tar eating contest.

More

PortableApps.com
Wikipedia List of Portable Apps

Writing Better Web Content - From One Turkey to Another.

I haven't made any new posts for a while. I was online, but just in a very lazy mood. On top of that I had stuff to do at work. It always sucks when work gets in the way of pretending to work. To make it up here's a long post that I managed to make look well researched.

Now I'm not the best writer at the best of times. I'm not Charles Dickens at the worst of times and I'm not funny any of the time. But man I wish I was - well except for Charles Dickens. Writing a fantastic article is extremely satisfying. Reading a fantastic article is even more so. Here's a statistic that I made up - 9 in 10 internet browsers will favour an easy to read article over a more factual one. If you're looking to build a steady readership - up your writing skills.

I did quite a bit of research here and here is my list of writing essentials (taken and summarised from various pages):

1. Write often.

Post regularly. If you're looking to get more readers, make sure there's something new for them when they come back. No one likes going to a site and finding nothing's changed. No one even visits a site they know hasn't changed. Great content intrigues readers. New content keeps them.

2. Learn to use the language.

Wield it like a sword. Waaaaarrh!! If you want to improve your running, you get good shoes. If you're playing squash, you get the best squisher you can. If you want to write good content, make sure you're using the best that the language has to offer. Get whatever help you can. The web is full of articles on writing, here's a great site full of solid advice by Roy Peter Clark. There's 30 tips there but he later extended it to 50 in more detailed series found here. Take it slowly though. Improve one thing at a time.

3. Use links extensively.

A link is worth a thousand words. Link to whatever reference the reader might need. Link to other sites the reader might enjoy. If the information is out there - and it probably is - take the time to find it and link to it. That way you can keep your articles shorter and more direct. Any interested reader is a click away from the information, but your article stays on topic at all times.

4. Add you own content.

Especially if you're a blogger, don't just link to a cool site. Add your own opinion. If you're just linking to other pages, then you're just an obstacle. Readers will just pass right through, grumbling as they trip over you. Add something that adds value to the web. More content will increase your ranking on search engines, thus increasing your visits from Googlers and other searchers. Invite them in for tea. Give 'em something to read.

5. Format your articles.

Use headings, block quotes and paragraphs. Use colours, bold text and different font sizes. Do whatever you can to get away from the drab.

Most web readers don't read continuously. They skip whole sections and paragraphs. Break up your articles into sections so they can find what they're looking for easily - and skip the stuff that they don't need. Learning some basic HTML will help you understand what you can and can't do on the web. Don't overdo the formatting though. Clean is what you are going for here, not fancy. Take note of what other sites do.

6. Always review

Read your work before you publish it. Check that the links work. Preview the formatting. This is always easier for shorter articles but longer articles are usually the ones to benefit from a good review. One page I read suggested that you should be able to hear someone speaking the article back to you. It should be real. Real smooth:)

7. Write anyway.

Finally, don't stop writing. Don't let your perfectionism stop you from writing your content. If you're struggling to get that perfect first line, relax your constraints. Rather get the idea down and rework it later. I can spend hours with nothing, blocked up looking for the killer article. Let it go. It will come. You don't get better at writing by not writing. Anything is better than nothing.

Here are the pages I worked from. They're all great, but I put them in order of what I got out. Enjoy.

Ten Tips For A Better Weblog
10 Tips on Writing the Living Web
Thirty Tools for Writers
How to write for the Web
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing