Technology Tales

Turning off WordPress’ visual editor

27^th March 2007

When I was doing something that required custom XHTML and got sick of the way in which the Visual Editor was mangling my code, I went and turned it off. It's not in the obvious place where I would expect it. Apparently, it's a per-user setting, so you find the relevant tick box (check box in the U.S.) on the Your Profile page in the Users section on your administration dashboard. I would have expected it under Options > Writing, but I suppose that they wanted to leave the choice to users without having some jobsworth administrator getting carried away with their limited authority. Speaking of Options > Writing, that's where you can make the editing box bigger. Now, that might be another user setting... It's hardly consistent, is it?

Exploring Photoshop two versions ago reveals how far Adobe has come

26^th March 2007

With all the focus that there is on the current version of a long-established piece of software, it is often intriguing to see what it was like a few versions back. And it was with that curiosity that I had a look at Photoshop 7. Needless to say, a lot of the functionality of the current version is there: adjustment layers, saving for the web and so on. That said, I did spot some absences, as one would expect. For instance, the file browser, dropped by a tab on the main interface, had yet to morph into the standalone Adobe Bridge. Another change has been the resampling choices for resizing; there is no sign of the now prevalent bicubic smoothing and bicubic sharpening. On the Filters menu, there is no sign of Smart Sharpening, the now recommended sharpening technique that upstages the one-time favourite Unsharp Mask. These may appear little things, but little things are often the very items that persuade you that an upgrade is an excellent idea.

FCKeditor and Drupal

24^th March 2007

My Drupal investigation is currently in hiatus, but I did get to exploring the world of modules and adding to the standard ones supplied. Drupal doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor supplied in the standard package, so I went and added one that I have used elsewhere: FCKEditor. Setting wasn't much of a problem until I encountered the following error: Unknown element of UniversalKey panel. The solution to the problem is to remove the reference to UniversalKey from the configuration file fckeditor.config.js. Since it took a spot of finding, here it is for posterity and so that I'll find again...

A selection of useful tools and technologies for contemporary web development

23^rd March 2007

Having been on a web-building journey from Geocities to having a website with my own domain hosted by Fasthosts, it should come as no surprise that I have encountered a number of tools and technologies over this time and that my choices and knowledge have evolved too. I’ll muse over the technologies first before going on to the tools that I use.

Technologies

XHTML

When I started building websites, it was not after HTML 4 got released, and I devoured most if not all of Elizabeth Castro’s Peachpit Visual Quickstart guide to the language within a weekend. Having previously used fairly primitive WYSIWYG tools like Netscape Composer and Claris Home Page, it was an empowering experience and the first edition (it is now on its third) of Jennifer Niederst Robbins’ Web Design in a Nutshell took things much further, becoming something of a bible for a number of years.

When it first appeared, XHTML 1.0 wasn’t a major change from HTML 4, but its stricter more XML-compliant syntax was meant to point the way to the future and semantic markup was at its heart at least as much as it was for HTML 4. XHTML 2.0 is on the horizon and after the modular approach of XHTML 1.1 (which I have never used), it will be interesting to see how it develops. Nevertheless, there is a surprising development in that some people are musing over the idea of having an HTML 5. Let’s hope that the (X)HTML apple cart doesn’t get completely overturned after some years of relative stability. I still bear scars from the browser wars raging in the 1990’s and don’t want to see standards wars supplanting the relative peace that we have now. That said, I don’t mind peaceful progression.

CSS

Only seems to be coming into its own in the last few years and is truly a remarkable technology despite the hobbles that MSIE places on our ambitions. CSS Zen Garden has been a major source of ideas; I wouldn’t have been able to customise this blog as much as I have without them. I was an early adopter of the technology and got burnt by inconsistent browser support; Netscape 4 was the proverbial bête noir back then, fulfilling the role that MSIE plays today. In those days, it was the idea of controlling text display and element backgrounds from a single place that appealed. Since then, I have progressed to using CSS to replace table-based layouts and to control element positioning. It can do more…

JavaScript

Having had a JavaScript-powered photo gallery before my current Perl-driven one, I can say that I have definitely sampled this ever-pervasive scripting language. Being a client-side language rather than a server-side one, it does place you rather at the mercy of the browser purveyors, and it never ceases to amaze me that there is a buzz around AJAX because of this. In fact, the abundance of AJAX cross-browser function libraries is testimony to the need for browser-specific code. Despite my preferences for server-side scripting, I still find a use for JavaScript, and its main use for me these days is to dynamically control CSS elements to do such things as control the height of a page element or whether it is shown or not. Apparently, CSS may get some dynamic capabilities in the future and reduce my dependence on JavaScript. Meanwhile, Jeremy Keith’s DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed) will prove as much of an asset as it has done.

XML

These days, a lot of the raw data underlying my personal website is stored in XML. I did try to dynamically transform the display of the XML into something meaningful with CSS and XSLT when I first scaled its dizzy heights, but I soon resorted to other techniques. Browser support and the complexity of what I required were the major contributors to this. The new strategy involved two different approaches. The first was to create PHP/XHTML pages from the precursor XML offline, and this is how I generate the website’s directory pages. The other one is to process the XML as text to dynamically supply an XHTML page as the user visits it; this is the way that the photo gallery works.

Perl

This still powers all of my photo gallery. While thoughts of changing it all to PHP linger, there is a certain something about the Perl language that keeps it there. I suppose it is that PHP is entangled in the HTML while Perl encases the whole business, and I am reasonably familiar with its syntax these days, which is why it still does a lot of the data processing grunt work that I need.

PHP

PHP is everywhere these days, though it doesn’t attract quite the level of hype that used to be the case. It still appears with its sidekick MySQL in many website applications. Blogging software such as WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Mambo and Joomla! wouldn’t exist without the pair. It appears on my website as the glue that holds my visitor directories together and is the processing engine of my WordPress blog. And if I ever get to a Drupal element to the site, by no means a foregone conclusion though I am spending a lot of time with it at this time, PHP will continue its presence in my website scripting as it powers that too.

Applications

Macromedia HomeSite

I have a liking for hand coding, so this does most of what I need. When Macromedia (itself since taken over by Adobe, of course) took over Allaire, HomeSite sadly lost its WYSIWYG capability, but the application still soldiers on even though Dreamweaver offers a lot to code cutters these days. Nevertheless, it does have certain advantages over Dreamweaver: it is a fleeter beast to start up and colour codes Perl syntax.

Macromedia Dreamweaver

There was a time when Dreamweaver was solely a tool for visual web page development, but the advent of Dreamweaver UltraDev added server-side development capabilities to the Dreamweaver family. These days, there is only one Dreamweaver version, but UltraDev’s capabilities still live on in the latest version and I would not be surprised if they were taken further in these database-driven times.

Nowadays, Dreamweaver isn’t an application where I spend a great deal of time. In former times, when my site was made up of static HTML pages, I used Dreamweaver a lot, even if its rendering capabilities were a step behind the then-current browser versions. I suppose that it didn’t fit the way in which I worked, but its template-driven workflow would have been a boon back then.

However, my move from a static site to a dynamic one, starting with my photo gallery, has meant that I haven’t used it as much since then. However, with my use of PHP/MySQL components on my site. Its server-side abilities could get the level of investigation that its PHP/MySQL capabilities allow.

Altova XMLSpy Professional

Adding MySQL databases to my web hosting costs money, not a lot, but it could be spent on other (more important?) things. Hence, I use XML as the data store for my photo gallery and XML files are pre-processed into XHTML/PHP pages for my visitor directories before uploading onto the server.

I use XMLSpy to edit and manage the XML files that I use: its ability to view XML in grid format is a killer feature as far as I am concerned and XML validation also proves very useful; particularly when it comes to ensuring that DTD’s and XML files are in step and for the correct coding of XSLT files. There are other features that I need to explore and that would also take my knowledge of the XML further to boot, not at all a bad thing.

Saxon

For processing XML into another file format such as XHTML, you need a parser and I use the free version of Saxon to do the needful, Saxonica offers commercial versions of it. There is, I believe, a parser in XMLSpy, but I don’t use it because Saxon’s command line interface fits better into my workflow. This is a Perl-driven process where XML files are read and XSLT files, one per XML file, are built before both are fed to Saxon for transforming into XHTML/PHP files. It all works smoothly and updating the XML inputs is all that is required.

AceFTP

If I were looking for an FTP client now, it would be FileZilla, but AceFTP has served me well over the last few years, and it looks as if that will continue. It does have some extra features over FileZilla: transfers between remote sites, and scheduling, for example. I have yet to use either, but they look valuable.

Hutmil

In bygone days when I had loads of static HTML files, making changes was a bit of a chore if they affected every single file. An example is changing the year on the copyright message on the page footers. Hutmil, which I found on a magazine cover-mounted disc, was a great time saver in those days. Today, I achieve this by putting this information into a single file and getting Perl or PHP to import that when building the page. The same “define once, use anywhere” approach underlies CSS as well, and scripting very usefully allows you to take that into the XHTML domain.

Apache

Apache is ubiquitous these days, and both the online and offline versions of my site are powered by it. It does require some configuration, but it is a powerful piece of kit. The introduction of 2.2.x meant a big change in the way that configuration files were modularised and while most things were contained in a single file for 2.0.x, the settings are broken up into different files in 2.2.x, and it can take a while to find things again. Without having it on my home PC, I would not be able to use Perl, PHP or MySQL. Apart from this, I especially like its virtual site capability; very useful for offline development.

WordPress

My hosting supplier offers blogs on Blogware, but that didn’t offer the level of configuration that I would have liked. It is true that this is probably true of any host of blogs. I can’t speak for Blogger, but WordPress.com does have its restrictions too. To make my hillwalking blog fit in with the appearance of my photo gallery, I went popped over to WordPress.org to download WordPress so that I could host a blog myself and have maximum control over its appearance. WordPress supports themes, so I created my own and got my blog pages looking as if they are part of my website, rather than looking like something that was bolted on. Now that I think of it, what about WordPress supporting user-created themes? I support that there is the worry of insecure PHP code but what about it?

MySQL

I am between minds on whether this is a technology or a tool. SQL certainly would be a technology standard, but I am not so clear on what MySQL would be. In any case, I have classed it as a tool, and a very useful one at that. It is the linchpin for my WordPress blogs and, if I go for a content management system like Drupal, its role would surely grow. While I do have a lot of experience with using SAS SQL and this helps me to deal with other varieties, there is still a learning curve with MySQL that gets me heading for a good book and Kofler’s The Definitive Guide to MySQL5 (Apress) seems to perform more than adequately in this endeavour.

Paint Shop Pro

As someone who hosts an online photo gallery, it won’t come as a surprise that I have had exposure to image editors. Despite various other flirtations, Paint Shop Pro has been my tool of choice over the years, but it is now set to be usurped by a member of Adobe’s Photoshop family. Paint Shop Pro does have books devoted to it, but it appears that Photoshop gets better coverage and I feel that my image processing needs to be taken up a gear, hence the potential move to Photoshop

HTML Tidy for Windows

22^nd March 2007

Drupal has modules (Import HTML and its helper Static HTML together make up one option) for importing static (X)HTML pages into its database, and it needs HTML Tidy to work. Since I am playing with the thing on Windows, I went out and snagged the version for that OS. Being either lazy or bloody-minded, I tried an XHTML page with PHP code embedded in it and, needless to say, the thing choked. I must try it with plain XHTML instead.

Open source CMS options

18^th March 2007

After reading an article in the latest issue of PC Plus, I got curious about the world of content management systems again. I went over to OpenSourceCMS to sample the CMS demos that they have got on there. Mambo and Joomla! (I wish they dropped that exclamation mark; it messes up automated grammar checking) are fully fledged CMS’s and look impressive too, though how they would fit into my online presence is something of an open question. Since I spied that PHP-Nuke uses themes, that is an attraction; I am already used to that mindset thanks to WordPress. While Drupal is seemingly less slick than the others, that could be an attraction in itself; it does offer themes but no rich text editing is available.

Though all of the above are built on top of PHP/MySQL, I ignored them for some reason when I last looked at open-source content management systems. That does seem a strange thing to do, but this was a while ago and the moderate cost of adding database functionality to my website was not something that I was willing to pay, though I have done so since for HennessyBlog.

Therefore, I ended up seeing what Plone (built on Zope and using the Python programming language) could do. What I was had in mind at the time was a replacement for Perl-powered photo gallery, and a CMS was never going to fit the bill; it still doesn’t. In any case, Plone left me with the impression that it was an all or nothing affair when I like coexistence of website components on a single server. Things may have changed since then, so giving it another go remains an option.

Now that I have decided to have a look at Drupal, the emphasis this time is not on using it as a photo gallery platform; if I wanted that, I’d go with the API for something like Flickr or Zooomr. This time, the emphasis on using a CMS to manage the visitor information directories on my website. It does coexist with the other website components, including WordPress and the aforementioned bespoke built photo gallery. Interestingly, Drupal does offer blogging functionality if I wanted it.

Set up involved a spot of work with MySQL before moving onto other things:

mysql -u adminuserid -p /* logging in*/ create database drupal; /*creating new database*/ grant ALL on drupal.* to adminuser identified by “**********”; /* granting access to new database */ quit; /* exiting */

Because it is easier to see what’s going on (not wrong, hopefully), I prefer command line working with MySQL. For some reason, Drupal comes only in tar.gz archives, so I extracted this into the web server directory and opened up the site in Firefox. Installation only requires the set-up of database access and is soon completed. A few things turned up in the status report that needed attention: cron, this can be run manually; activation of PHP Unicode and GD library (PHP’s gd_info function is a real help in testing this) extensions, editing of php.ini to remove commenting semicolons activated them and restarting Apache made them available; having a place to store uploads, the directory called files got created.

Since then, I have set about bending it to my will, not always an easy thing to do with software. The first thing to do was to give it a static home page. By default, Drupal places tasters for any nominated pages and stories on its home page and shows configuration instructions until you allow some content to filter through. However, adding the Front Page module allows you to override this behaviour and have something more static. It was an entry on Kehan’s Blog that set me heading in the right direction.

The next steps were to persuade the thing to allow external links to exist in menus (though patches exist, I have yet to learn how to apply them other than finding the nefarious piece of code and replacing, a considerable challenge that makes me wonder if there is not a better way to do it: with a module, perhaps?) and carry on the theme editing until it ties in with the rest of my site. Then, I’ll make the decision whether to replace my current workflow (Perl-powered pre-processing of XML into PHP/XHTML using XSLT and the Saxon parser followed by FTP upload to the web server) with this one. The automation of the former argues in its favour. We’ll see how things pan out…

Is Photoshop CS3 imminent?

16^th March 2007

We have seen the beta come out, an unprecedented move for Adobe, and now we are hearing about the new professional editions of Photoshop: Photoshop CS3 for digital imaging and Photoshop CS3 Extended with tools for processing digital video. Together with Photoshop Lightroom for digital photography and Photoshop Elements for the consumer market, it appears that Photoshop is moving from a single application to becoming a big family of them. Adobe is hosting an online launch for the CS3 suite on March 27th so the appearance on the market of the new Photoshop must be very imminent. In the light of this, I think I’ll hold off on a decision to purchase either Elements 5 or its CS2 until I have tried out the latter’s successor.

Update: I’ve just perused both .Net’s and Advanced Photoshop’s initial appraisals of Photoshop CS3. Since they seemed impressed, it should be worth a look then. Another tempting idea is to have a taste of Lightroom, so I went and downloaded the 30-day trial version. I may well have a go with it in my own time; I’m not wanting to install it and let the 30 days run out before I get to use it in anger.

Why are there no savings on buying software using electronic distribution, Adobe?

15^th March 2007

If you ever potter over to Adobe's online software store, a curious anomaly awaits you: electronic download editions of their software are never cheaper than the equivalent boxed versions. In fact, there are cases where the electronic version costs more than the boxed one. One would have thought that ditching the box, the disc(s) and whatever accompanies them would save Adobe money, and they would pass this onto you, yet it does not seem to make its way into the pricing for some reason. Another thing is that selling direct should allow Adobe to undercut retailers and make more money from their software, but it is the likes of Amazon that have the better prices. Whatever way you look at it, you have to admit that this pricing model doesn't make a lot of sense.

How publishing trends can shape which photo editing software we actually learn

14^th March 2007

If you ever go into a bricks and mortar newsagent and peruse its shelves with an eye out for references to data imaging software, you might find Adobe’s Photoshop as predominant there as it is in the digital imaging world. And the same trend seems to continue in to the bricks and mortar bookshops as well. Online, especially within the vaults of Amazon, it is not as much a matter of what gets stocked as what gets published, and my impression is that the bias, if that’s the right word, continues there. That said, I didn’t realise until recently that Elsevier’s Focal Press has been covering Paint Shop Pro, once branded the poor man’s Photoshop, from at least version 7. That discovery, if it had come earlier, may have made a big difference to how I have been using PSP. Saying that, I have seen some opinions that PSP is easy to use and that may explain the lack of attention from publishers. While Future Publishing did put out a monthly guide to PSP, that seems to have disappeared from the shelves, which it does lend weight to that argument. Or it could have been Corel’s purchase of JASC that changed things…

Of course, without books and magazines, it is not as easy to see the possibilities, and it is here where Photoshop really scores. The digital photography revolution has ensured the software’s escape from the world of computing and the digital arts into photography magazines and beyond. These days, even conventional photography titles feature Photoshop how-to articles. In fact, such is the level of digital content in titles such as Photography Monthly, Practical Photography and Outdoor Photography that you hardly need to pursue the specialist digital photography titles at all.

Speaking of photography, this is and has been my main use of digital imaging technology, be it the scanner that I use for digitising the output of my efforts in film photography or processing RAW files from my digital SLR. I have been using scanners since 1998 and am on my second, a CanoScan 5000F. The colour rendition in the output from its predecessor, a UMAX 1212U, deteriorated to the point where a replacement needed to be sought. As it happened, the Canon turned out to be light years ahead of the UMAX, even with the latter operating properly. Incidentally, my first scanning outing was in the then current version of Photoshop (I booked some time on a scanner at the graphics centre of the university I was attending at the time and sneaked in the scanning of a photo with the journal graphic that I needed to do) - a limited affair, it has to be said - but I then reverted to things like Corel PhotoPaint and Paint Shop Pro. And PSP was what I was using in the main, even after encountering the copy of Photoshop Elements 2 bundled with my EOS 10D. Though Elements’ cloning capabilities did tempt me though, and I did acquire a Focal Press volume on the application, I somehow never took it further.

At the end of last year, Corel and Adobe launch new versions of PSP and Elements, respectively. That got me tempted by the idea of giving the whole business another look, this time in detail. My look at PSP XI regrettably suffered from the lack of time that I could devote to it and seeing what a book on it might have to say. I had more of a chance with Photoshop Elements and came away impressed with the way that it worked. Since then, I have been making my way through Scott Kelby’s latest Elements book and the ideas are building up. At the same time, I have been making good use of a Photoshop CS2 try-out, and I am on the horns of a dilemma: do I splash out on CS2, do I get Elements 5 or do I await the now imminent CS3? You’ll notice that PSP doesn’t feature here; the amount of literature pertaining to Photoshop simply is too much to ignore, and I have loads more to learn.

Putting Photoshop CS2 through its paces with some real photo editing work

8^th March 2007

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Currently, I am in the process of adding new photos to my online photo gallery, and the exercise is giving my Photoshop CS2 trial version a good amount of use. And the experience also adding a few strings to my bow in graphics editing terms, something that is being helped along by the useful volume that is The Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2.

The most significant change that has happened is that to my workflow. Previously, it took the following form:

Acquire image from scanner/camera
For a camera image, do some exposure compensation
Create copy of image in software’s own native file format (PSPIMAGE/PSP for Paint Shop Pro and PSD/PSB for Photoshop)
Clean up image with clone stamp tool: removes scanner artefacts or sensor dust from camera images; I really must get my EOS 10D cleaned (the forecast for the coming weekend is hardly brilliant, so I might try sending it away).
Save a new version of the image following clean-up.
Reduce the size of the digital camera image to 600×400 and create a new file.
Boost colours of original image with hue/saturation/lightness control; save new version of file.
Sharpen the image and save another version.
For web images, save a new file with a descriptive name
Create JPEG version
Copy JPEG to Apache web server folders
Create thumbnail from original JPEG

The new workflow is based upon this:

Acquire image from scanner/camera
For a camera image, do some exposure compensation; there is a lot of pre-processing that you can do in Camera Raw
Create a copy of image in software’s own native file format
Clean up the image with the clone stamp tool and create a new file with _cleaned as its filename suffix. I tried the spot healing brush but didn’t seem to have that much success with it. Maybe I need to try again…
Add adjustment layer for level correction and save file with _level suffix in its name.
Add adjustment layer for curves correction
Add adjustment layer for boosting colours with hue/saturation/lightness control
Flatten layers and save new image with _flatten suffix in its name
Sharpen flattened image and create a new version with _sharpened suffix in its name
For web images, save a new file with a descriptive name
Create JPEG versions in Apache web server folders; carry out any resizing using bi-cubic sharpening at this point.

Some improvements remain. For instance, separation of raw, intermediate and final photos by storing them in different directories is perhaps one possibility that I should consider. But there are other editing tricks that I have yet to use as well: merged and blended layers. Bi-cubic smoothing for expanding images is another possibility, but it is one that requires a certain amount of caution. And I am certain that I will encounter others as I make my way through my reading.

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