Megabytes

You are surfing the web one evening, catching up on your blog reading perhaps, when you come across a beautiful image. And you think to yourself, “This image would be perfect to demonstrate my new marketing plan on my company website.” Then you do a simple control-click on the image to save it to your hard drive. So far, no harm done.
But once you take that image and insert it onto a page of your company’s website; if you haven’t gotten permission from the creator of the image; you have broken the law.

This happens more than you may realize, primarily because it is so easy to do. Technology allows us to “grab” imagery and other content from web pages. There is no harm in taking an image from someone’s web page and playing with it in a program like Photoshop – on your own computer.

Copyright protects creative work such as writing, music, photographs, and paintings. If you want to use that beautiful image to visually denote your new marketing plan, obtain permission from the image creator. Even if you attribute the image to its creator, if you publish work on your site without the creator’s permission, you may be held liable for copyright infringement.

Using an email program, technology also allows us to communicate easily and quickly with another person, whether they live on the next street over, or the next continent over. So, protect yourself and ask permission.

Webvisions bills itself as a conference that explores the future of the Web. And certainly most of the scheduled sessions have been about appropriately technological themes like CSS, RSS, Javascript, social media, Drupal, memetics, and more such topics.
This year’s event, held May 22-23, 2008 at Portland Convention Center, was true to form with at least one exception; the presentation by Jensine Larsen, A River Runs Through The Digital Divide: Women Using Global Communications Technology to Shift the Balance of Power.
With images of women from countries around the world playing in a slideshow behind her, Ms. Larsen told the story of how she came to create World Pulse magazine, and its website, PulseWire.net. WorldPulse asks women activists these questions: What is your vision? What do you see? What do you need? The answers are always immediate and well-thought out including 7-page plans for village support programs and 10-page business plans.

Ms. Larsen shared with us the struggles of Malalai Joya, Afghanistan leader who was elected to Parliament in 2003 and later silenced by her own government. Ms. Joya refuses to be silenced. She continues to speak out and organize. Some Malalai Joya links: Women in Media and News Blog; Defend Malalai Joya; Speech on YouTube; World Pulse Magazine article.
PulseWire is an interactive website where women worldwide, including those using internet cafes in rural areas, can speak to the world and collaborate to solve global problems. Ms. Larsen mentioned a statistic that 80% of women have cell phones compared to only 4% having a computer or access to one. Given the large number of cells phones, PulseWire makes posting from a cell phone a priority in its interface. They also provide lots of training for new users, sometimes registering the new user to get her started. The site uses a Google translator to facilitate translations in 12 languages for visitors.

Excerpt from Malalai Joya speech:

I will continue to speak out because I have no fear in my soul anymore. I have seen too many sorrows. Maybe it will be me they kill, but there will be others whose voices will be louder than mine.

I know life is so beautiful. But a life without freedom, democracy, and peace is meaningless for me. I have many small hopes and dreams, but as an Afghan and as an open-minded and conscious young woman, my only dream is to see my country free.

I have heard lots of beautiful things about my country from people across the world who had visited it before the war. I was born in war and have seen nothing or heard nothing about my people and country except war, killing, violence, the kidnapping and raping of young girls, terrorism, and fundamentalism.

I believe a day will come when there will be peace, security, and democracy and all the people, the girls, the children will sing the song of freedom and have smiles lingering on their lips.

Yet Another Dreamweaver CS3 Tome

O’Reilly Dynamic Learning series: Dreamweaver CS3, pub Sept 2007, by Fred Gerantabee & AGI Creative Team, $44.99

(This review was previously published in PMUG’s March 2008 issue of Mouse Tracks)

O’Reilly Media has one of the most comprehensive collection of computer software books. Within their roster of titles are 14 different series, many of which will include a title on a particular subject in more than one series. Such is the case for books on Dreamweaver CS3. I already own Portland author Dave McFarland’s Dreamweaver CS3 The Missing Manual. When Dreamweaver CS3 Dynamic Learning came to PMUG’s office, I was curious to know how it was different from The Missing Manual book.
Dynamic Leaning on a DVD
Each Dynamic Learning book comes with a DVD; the Dreamweaver CS3 DVD contains video tutorials, a few promotional PDFs for AGI Training, and lesson files. I was looking forward to the video tutorials, eager to know if viewing them would feel as if I had my own personal instructor. I copied all the files to my hard drive and read the instructions in the book for playing the video tutorials.
I think it is fair to expect that playing videos on my Mac is a simple double-click-the-file experience. Unfortunately, O’Reilly chose to format the tutorials as Flash video. Unfortunate because now it is not so simple to view video. It quickly became apparent why the book includes instructions for viewing the videos at all!
When I am surfing the internet in my Firefox or Safari browser and their built-in Flash player, I don’t have to do anything special to view videos on YouTube and other sites that employ Flash video. So why did the tutorials folder contain an index.swf file and not a index.html file? If I double-clicked on an HTML file, my browser would have opened and the resulting web page would begin playing the first video. Instead, instructions ask you to Control-Click the index.swf file and choose Open > Open With > Flash Player. Followed by what to do if you don’t have Flash Player.
Once I got the videos playing, they were quite informative and well worth viewing. There is one video for each chapter, intended as a supplement to the written lesson, not a replacement. These are good quality videos of the computer desktop (sometimes Mac, other times Windows) running Dreamweaver with a voiceover describing the activity. Table of Contents
Before going to a specific chapter, I read through the table of contents. As a long-time Dreamweaver user, I wanted to know what topics were covered and if there was anything new I could learn. The 13 chapters ranged from ‘Jumpstart’ which explains about web servers, browsers, file transfer protocol (FTP), among other items; to ‘Managing Your Web Site: Reports, Optimization & Maintenance’ which includes how to test your site, running site reports, and some good information about search engine optimization.
What surprised me in the TOC was Chapter 8, Working with Frames. In the very beginning of that chapter, the author lists the advantages and disadvantages of frames. Now, if you have to make a pros and cons list about a topic, and the lists come out against the topic 6-to-3; then why are you still including it? I would have preferred a chapter on Spry Widgets (not included) or the XML tools (not included.)On the plus side, the book expands upon the subjects of Flash, using CSS for layout, and making your workflow efficient. The Flash chapter not only demonstrates inserting Flash content, but other media content as well. Dreamweaver creates its own SWF (media player) files, so inserting some Flash Video on a web page means you only need the FLV (Flash Video) file. Learning New Tricks
Scanning through the book, I learned a few things that I was able to put to use right away.
1) The Insert Toolbar has a Text tab that has a drop-down menu making the insertion of special characters easy-peasy.
2) Using the Insert Image command (or drag-and-drop), you can place a PSD (Photoshop) file directly onto a web page and optimize it from within Dreamweaver.
3) Similarly, you can open text files in Dreamweaver and copy and paste content, thereby avoid having another app open for the text files.
Real Dynamic Learning
At the close of each chapter, there is a review section, with questions and answers pertaining to that chapter’s subject matter. If you really want to test yourself, be prepared to place your hand over the answers as they are on the same page as the questions.
Just before the Q&A is a section called Self Study. Here, the student is given some optional, extra-credit homework. Mostly, these short assignments are suggestions about exploring further in one particular area of Dreamweaver. Occasionally, the reader is advised to explore other programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, like Fireworks, Flash, and Photoshop.
Heavy use of screen grabs makes it easy to understand an article in a glance. This increases the likelihood that this book can serve as a reference even after you have done the tutorials.
Throughout the book important tips are denoted by the use of a push pin icon. These are valuable, pertinent tidbits, not to be missed. Sidebar information appears contained in a light gray box with a green background headline. In the CSS chapter for example, a sidebar appears explaining a bit about the naming of classes and IDs.Bottom Line
Overall, this is a fair book containing worthwhile information, rating 3.5 out of 5 stars. People who learn better visually will appreciate the video tutorials but may wish for more video material. I found the Dynamic Learning book lacking detail by just touching the tip of the iceberg on many topics.

Have you ever wanted to put a © mark on a page in Dreamweaver, but couldn’t remember the HTML character code? For example, the HTML code for the © symbol is

& copy ; (without the spaces)

or you can use the keyboard shortcut option-g on a Mac.

That one is a simple, almost logical code to remember. The special character codes always begin with an ampersand, followed by the letters or numbers associated with the character, and close with a semi-colon. Remembering copyright as ‘ampersand’ ‘copy’ ’semi-colon’ isn’t too hard of a stretch. It becomes a little challenging to remember that

& rsaquo ; (without the spaces)

is the code for a right side close angle bracket.
Dreamweaver has two ways to help you with these special characters.
1) using code hints in code view
2) using the Text Insert bar

When in code view, type an ampersand and the code hints menu appears with a list of characters and their associated codes. You can scroll to the one you want and select. Typing the next letter in the code if you know it is a quick way to go to a specific part of the list. It IS a long list.

Using the Text Insert bar is much simpler. On the Insert Toolbar, select ‘Text’. On the Text Insert toolbar, select the character symbol, the last item on the right. There is a drop-down menu with the more commonly-used special characters and an option to see more characters.

I learned about this toolbar in the book, Dynamic Learning Dreamweaver CS3. I am reviewing it for the March issue of Mouse Tracks, the Portland Macintosh Users Group monthly newsletter.

Favicons are those tiny little (16×16) graphics in the address bar of browsers, just to the left of the URL itself. Used to be you would crank open Photoshop and create your own piece of tiny web art there.

Now, you can simply go to favikon to create your favicon in seconds. Yes. It IS that fast. And easy, too.
Try it. Upload a graphic file under 5MB, position the capture region, create!