Picturesque Releases 2.0 Version
As a web developer, I love cutting as many corners while guaranteeing the best product possible. When it comes to photo editing, however great and fast I may be at Photoshop (and I’ll humbly admit – I’m pretty quick)…it’s great to have a tool that makes the tedious but tasteful work – a snap.
I’ve been using Picturesque for awhile now and it’s been a great and easy way to keep give my web images a little extra “flair” in a short amount of time. It’s also great for a quick resizing…
Now, with the release of the 2.0 version, they’re definitely taking their success to the next level by offering even more photo editing tools while keeping the software itself simple and easy to use – a PLUS with this type of application that is meant to speed things up…not bog things down.
Need a reflection on your photo? Bang! Picturesque does its magic in seconds rather than the “minutes” it would take to do the same thing in Photoshop. Their new feature is entitled “Perspective” and is really nice.
Again – all these photo editing tricks are nothing new. I’ve been doing these in Photoshop for a long time. The beauty of this app is that for QUICK work with low-res images, this is a snap.
Company: Acqualia
Price: $34.95 (worth every cent if you are a web developer)
Check it out at www.acqualia.com
| 3.2 |
Wordpress and Permalinks
If you are a Wordpress user as I am, I wanted to offer a tip to help you maximize your search engine results. Make sure you set your “Permalinks” to the Custom option with the following as the custom field.
/%postname%/
The reason? When you enter new entries, the default settings sets all the pages to a numerical schema such as
http://www.webshoptalk.com/?p=2
Search engines that find your pages and especially links to your content cannot give much weight to a URL with something as ambiguous as “?p=2″. However, with this customized Permlink structure, your pages and links will now be the title of your entry which, in this entry’s case would be:
http://www.webshoptalk.com/wordpress-and-permalinks
That provides two great search engine friendly words and will greatly bolster your sites search engine effectiveness over time.
| 2.5 |
Further Thoughts on Flock
I gave Flock, which is a web browser I mentioned in some previous posts, a good run and have finally ditched it in favor of Firefox 3 (beta 5 as of this writing) and Safari. I finally came to a point where speed was the ONLY thing and I found Flock to be considerably slow overall. The ideas are good – but for someone like myself who dabbles but does not immerse himself into the social network realm, I still have to rely on what web browsers actually are for me – web browsers.
| 2.5 |
