Since I’m on the Automator trip lately, I thought I’d see if I could find a way to easily scale images before I upload them to the website. Often, I need to scale an image or change it’s filetype before I upload it. In the past, I’ve been opening up Photoshop to do this, but I feel doing so takes too long. After a little poking around, of course, I found there is an Automator action to do just what I need.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
So, in case you didn’t notice, I updated the theme on the page. Let me rephrase that, I didn’t update the theme, I updated the “style.” Specifically, K2 supports styles and I created my own. In the past, I had used one of the pre-packaged styles, slightly modified. So, as for the things I added:
- Reworked header, header background, and footer images
- New page background
- Non-gray color scheme for links
- Dotted underlining of links
- Replaced search icon
- Added new Contact page using the Secure and accessible PHP contact form for WORDPRESS1
Originally I wanted to go with something more “Web 2.0,” but realistically, I decided I didn’t really have the required CSS knowledge in my toolbox and didn’t want to spend too much time learning more CSS. I’m also thinking about taking the layout to 1024 pixels rather than the 800 it is currently formatted for. Who uses 800×600 anymore anyway? All in all, it didn’t take me too long, just shy of three hours, but I’m pleased with the new look. What do you think?
References:
1Secure and accessible PHP contact form for WORDPRESS ↩
One of the Tiger features I have yet to use much is Automator. I’m sure if I dug into it a bit, I would find a lot I could do with it, but I have yet to do so. However, today as I was working on the previously mentioned personal page updates, I had a brief moment of clarity: I realized I was tired of having to open an FTP application just to send a file (or files) to the /images directory on my web-server. Then it hit me: “I’m sure there must be an Automator action for this.” As good fortune would have it, there is.
Enter the Upload to FTP Automator Action1. This little ditty does one thing VERY well. It allows you to Control+Click on an item or items in the Finder and send it/them to a predefined FTP server. Additionally, after the file uploads, the action copies the new item’s URI to the clipboard so you can make quick use of it. Wonderful. Try that with a Windows machine.
I spent a little time today putting together a few updates to our personal pages. It’d been a while since I’d written about Mason (I’m still working on new writings about Milaena) and I added pictures to each section.
I took this shot on Digg the other day, and I just get a kick out of it.
