Mindtracks

Kyle Meyer has published The Elements of Design Applied to the Web which is an excellent summery of the basics of design. Kyle Meyer applies the elements of balance, proportion, rhythm, emphasis, and unity to web page layout and illustrates these key elements with screen shots of good examples where these principals are applied expertly.

This was found with thanks via CSS Drive

Photoshop is a wonderfully deep software package. No matter how much you use it there is always something new to learn. It is easy to fall into habitual ways of doing a particular task and often there are better ways of doing it. Seeing how some else tackles the same process often leads to solving a problem differently. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Adobe Photoshop is a prime example of this.

Also the Wired How To’s Wiki has published a tutorial on Batch Process Images in Photoshop

Charley Parker over on Lines and colours is publishing a series on How to Display Your Art on the Web

Currently there are 5 parts to the series that is aimed at illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present online in a professional manner. The coverage is thorough, well written, easily understood and well worth reading.

Simple Spark allows users to both find and share Web2.0 applications. No matter if you are looking for an online calendar, a to do list app, wanting to organise a holiday, a way to write and store documents, catalogue your library, find an accounting tool, store, edit or publish your photos online, or save and share your bookmarks there is plenty to choose from as their list of browser-based applications recently crossed the 5,000 mark. You can search by terms or category and subscribe to their daily feed.

Mind maps and brainstorming sessions are two techniques used to generate ideas and develop projects as they allow you to categorise and visualise concepts quickly and easily. They can be used for all sorts of things but if you are designing a website, trying to sort out ideas for a project, planning a business, or writing an essay mind maps help clarify what is what.

Bubbl.us is a free browser based mind mapping tool. You can create an account and be mind mapping out an idea within minutes as the interface is intuitive and easily understood if you are familiar with the concept of mind mapping. Even so Tech-bites has produced a tutorial on Bubbl.us Basics or they have a small video online

Once a mindmap is built you can save them for access later, share them so you can collaborate with someone on a project or export them as a jpeg graphic file.

If you are interested in mind maps How to make a mind map in 8 steps is a quick step by step article that covers the basics. Basic introduction to mindmapping fills out the topic a little more and is an excellent resource and from the same site Mindmapping helps you be creative AND get things done shows you how to take it a step further.

Tony Buzan is the a writer who developed and promoted the use of mind maps. His books are well worth reading but as an introduction to the topic you can also find him on YouTube

Jason Kaneshiro offers some excellent advice in Navigating The Five Stages Of Blogging Fatigue Jason states that comments left by readers, responding to pieces written on blogs in his own blog, setting internal goals, pre-writing and writing a series of posts, reading and commenting on other blogs, writing honestly about the issue are all methods he suggests to beat blogging fatigue which can eventually lead to abandonment.

One technique I have learnt from my experience on my other blog In a Minute Ago would fall under his category of giving something back.

I have found that issuing a challenge will lift my spirits and I will shift from being lethargic about blogging to energised in the space of about 48 hours. For instance currently on my other blog I run a weekly challenge for stitchers. It keeps my energy levels up as I watch people week in and week out take up the challenge. My cure for the blogging blues is to become more active on all fronts. I comment more – respond more to the community and give more because I have discovered that if I do that I get the sort of positive feedback I need to prevent me from chucking it in.

I was shaping this piece when I encountered Lorelle VanFossen’s piece Is Your Blog Reactive or Proactive? Lorelle describes two types of bloggers one who reacts to news and the other who is proactive and shapes a conversation. My two blogs could be seen as examples of both. In a Minute Ago is proactive, highly satisfying to work on and has a regular readership.

This blog on the other hand is often reactive not in the sense that I rush to get some newsy tit bit out but often I am simply highlighting resources for students. To put this in context, I fall into the blogging blues at times when I have a routine of too many posts that simply link to resources or news.

As a teacher I am always digging out resources and links that I hope students will find of interest this blog particularly falls into that trap. It’s easily done particularly when pushed for time but the habit can lead to little investment in building a blog. I have found if I do this too much there is little room to be proactive and move the process to next level. That said I would say finding a proactive way to contribute to the community other than my students is the way to ditch the blogging blues particularly with this blog.
Anybody out there that has a few tips on avoiding the blogging blues? Leave a comment I would love your thoughts

I have been thoroughly enjoying the 31 days to better blogging series that Problogger has been running but What Everybody Ought to Know About Blogging - 97 Blog Tips has reached some sort of strange peak for me as I spent hours moving from one article to next. Check out both the series and the and the articles as there is many useful tips and advice to be had.

On the topic of blogging as you can see I have moved this blog. I have the reasoning and the full story posted on my other blog In a Minute Ago which has also moved to here so please change your RSS feeds and bookmarks

Seishido offers some really lovely Photoshop brushes for download. There are 645 sets on this site 100 of which are freeware, so if you are a brush addict you will have fun browsing. Brushes are made primarily for personal use but commercial use is possible but requires her permission.

Bittbox has produced another great Illustrator tutorial this time on Improve Your Illustrator Workflow with Layer Masking .

Using Layer Masks will save you time by avoiding tedious un-grouping, grouping, releasing, and applying clipping masks with the ease of a simple toggle button. Attention the hierarchy of your layers and sub/shape layers is essential in order to get the most out of this feature, but once you get the hang of it, it should definitely speed up your work flow!

While there check out and download the Free Hi-Res Floral Photoshop Brushes and for Illustrator the Free Vectors - Part 7: Flowers

This week in class I will be talking about tags and tagging and the implications of Folksonomy

What are tags?

Tags are short keyword descriptions of chunks of information online. In short they are a type of label. You can tag not only blog posts photos and bookmarks, but media files like podcasts, and etc and are a way to organise lots of information and a popular way to categorize web content.

How is Tagging different from creating a traditional browser bookmark? Tagging is social. By searching under a tag you can find websites others have discovered and considered good enough to bookmark. For instance take a look at Rashmi Sinha A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)

Our Media describe tags as “a new grassroots, bottom-up social phenomenon to create organization around social media” In other words tagging is an example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories. Tagging lets us organize the web our way. Folksonomies are a cooperative classification system built by people using the information rather than how expert cataloguers think the public might access the information. In other words just a ordinary people are creating, publishing and sharing their own media tags allow them to organise it.

A survey done in December 2006 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online. [ The PDF file can be found
here ]

Examples for students:

Flickr and flickr tags

For any one who is just coming to flickr or does not understand things like tags and tapping into the flickr community Josh Lowensohn’s Newbie’s Guide to Flickr is a useful introduction to this popular free photo hosting service.

At You Tube a video-sharing site, and their YouTube tags

del.icio.us a social book marking site
Note: in the teaching labs you can not install the browser buttons to bookmark a site. Students will have to log in to their account and use the posting page

Technorati and Technorati tags

Keotag allows searching across over different websites for keywords and topics that have been tagged. Keotag then presents you with a number of blog search engines you can use. Since pages are loaded by AJAX you are not forever clicking through pages of results. It’s a good way to search by tag!

The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools is a list of tools

Articles and posts

Joshua Porter has written a thoughtful piece on The Del.icio.us Lesson

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata is an academic article by Adam Mathes

Other links this week
These are some odd links I turned up through the week which I think people will find interesting or of use.
Hack Attack: Getting good with Google Reader

Pageflakes is a personalized online start page with an RSS feed. You can also check your email, search the web and access a variety of services like Del.icio.us or Flickr. Basically it’s all your daily information and needs in one place