If you’re a visual person, you’ll love Pinterest. But more than that, it’s a place to gather ideas, network with other people with similar interests and even generate publicity for a website/blog/eCommerce store.
Off the Pinterest website:
“Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.
Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started, request an invite.”
This past week we’ve had car troubles, or as I got fond of saying “mechanic troubles”. To make a long and painful story short, we had one car in the shop 3 times and the other one one time in the space of two weeks. This wasn’t including the 3 tows to get the car to the mechanic.
So, how does this relate to your website?
We felt vulnerable.
I’m not totally stupid about cars – I know enough to usually know when it’s electrical or cooling or when I need new tires. However, cars have gotten more complicated and I’ve gotten so I just want mine to run.
If you’re new to Twitter, you may have NO idea how to approach it, but one of the best ways to focus and find a “home” on Twitter is by using and searching for hastags. Hashtags make sense of the “cocktail party” that is Twitter!
Imagine being at a cocktail party where everyone is talking at once (sounds like a typical party, eh?) – it’s confusing and overwhelming.
However, if you could zone in on all of the people talking about a subject that interests you it might be more interesting and you would meet and connect with interesting people. Make sense? That’s a hashtag! Your way of organizing the chaos!
Since the Internet first went public in the early 1990’s the growth has been incredible. Recent statistics estimate that there are over two billion Internet users or 30 percent of the world’s population. One report suggests that there are around 156 million websites. The recent boom in smartphone technology and sales further demonstrates that the Internet is not going to go away soon.
So when I say that 90 percent of the potential of the Internet has not been realized it doesn’t seem to make sense. But think about it. The Internet didn’t exist for the public twenty years ago (it was still in development and limited to universities and governments). The smartphone has only been available for eight years and has only really taken off in popularity in the last four or so.
The advent of ASP.NET has made a whole new world open up. Over the last ten years we, the programmers – particularly us “old school” programmers – can now look at the World Wide Web not in design terms, as we used to when the the Internet first went public, but in terms of developing an application. And the term “web application” came into being.
But the particular advantage of ASP.NET is the clear and definitive separation of presentation and code. Developers who used Delphi, Visual Basic (yes, the old Visual Basic) and other visual languages for applications development can appreciate this. A form is a form and is never confused with the code that affects the form’s behavior. Perhaps this was because the form was developed “visually” – one painted a form (remember Powerbuilder? It actually called its different components “painters”) and it would be inconceivable to confuse this in any way, shape or form, with the code.
Until just recently, unhappy customers had two options to complain formally: send a written letter/email, or ask to speak to a manager. Of course, this was in addition to personally telling all their friends about their experience.
Along comes social media and now unhappy customers can now announce their complaints to a much larger audience: not only to their friends, but to anyone who’s listening. One statistic says that more than 93% of people shop via the internet, and online reviews are big factors in decision making.
Again, I’m writing this down so that I don’t forget it. The question is this: how can you easily get the coordinates for a complex polygon image map area? The way I used to to it was to take the image and, painstakingly, copy down coordinate after coordinate. There must be a better way – and there is.
If you have the full version of the Adobe Creative Suite then it comes with a program called “Fireworks” which is helpful in situations like this. All you need to do is select the part of the image that you want to map (by whatever means you care to do so – this is only for getting coordinates so erasing parts of the image and doing a magic wand selection works nicely. Then, right-click the selected area and choose, from the popup menu:
Modify Marqee -> Convert to Path
And then, right-click on the vectored object that is created and select:
Insert Hotspot
From the main menu, select:
File -> Export
And choose from the Export drop-down “HTML and Images”. Give your exported file(s) a name (just like saving anything else) and you’re done. When you open the HTML file that is created (with the name you gave it) you will find and image map defined with the area you selected.
I’m writing this down so that I don’t forget it – I’ve been through this learning curve a couple of times and keep forgetting how to do it.
If you google “drawing an outline of a bitmap in Flash” you’ll come across lots of posts that simply say “trace your bitmap and then …”
Well it’s the tracing the bitmap bit that is the problem – using “modify->bitmap->trace bitmap” gets you part of the way, but isn’t the whole story. I’ve seen people describe the problem as have an outline draw on the screen and then a picture fill in. The response: “trace your bitmap and then …” but “trace bitmap” gives you a vector image with each color as a separate object. So putting a stroke around it will put a stroke around each color, not the whole image.
Instead, try this:
1 – Copy your bitmap. Put it on a different layer using “paste in place” (hide the layer to keep it out of the way if you do it this way) or keep a copy on the clipboard – we’ll use this later).
2 – Trace your bitmap. Hey, I’m not trying to be funny, here. Seriously, use (for CS4) “modify->bitmap->trace bitmap” – set the options to a high color threshold (the default 100 works – doesn’t really matter, this is just a template) but set the minimum area to 1 pixel so that the edges match up (I may be wrong on this, but it worked for me). Leave Curve Fit and Corner Threshold to normal – this is close enough.
If you’re a visual person, you’ll love Pinterest. But more than that, it’s a place to gather ideas, network with other people with similar interests and even generate publicity for a website/blog/eCommerce store.
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