Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Ctrl-click layer in GIMP

Published
by
jefke
on June 16, 2008
in Graphics, Software and Technology
. 0 Comments

Just the way I like buying cheap music, I like cheap software. But just the way I don’t like pirating music, I don’t like using cracked versions of expensive programs either. And the good news is: there’s no need to!

I’m pretty sure everybody with some graphical experience has seen a cracked version of Adobe Photoshop at least once in his life. And rumour has it that Photoshop condones this, because there’s no way that young kids, for example, are going to pay $500+ for a legal version. By using cracked versions, the kids learn to work with Photoshop, so that once these talented kids start working for real, they are hooked. Free promotion.

While obviously, Adobe won’t admit this, I guess there are some good reasons for them to try and hook as many people as possible. And one of them is the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). At least at amateur level, there’s not much one can do with Photoshop that you can’t do with GIMP. The main problem for GIMP is: it’s different from Photoshop. I think nobody will baldly claim that Photoshop is easy to learn. Everybody who hasn’t had much graphical experience before, will need a couple of hours to find out what the basic principles and possibilities of PS are. That’s because there’s an awfull lot that Photoshop can do.

If a Photoshop user starts using GIMP, he can be assured that what he wants to achieve is possible. The only problem is that when he starts looking in the menu for a certain function, chances are he can’t find it: a lot of functions are called differently, and sometimes placed in a totally different menu. GIMP is different.

The thing I missed the most, when I started using the GIMP, was ctrl-clicking a layer, for selecting all non-transparent items. I couldn’t find it, and for a while, I really thought that this was a Photoshop-only killer feature. And then, the day of relief dawned: I found it. While it’s not a shortcut, the function is easily accessible by right-clicking on a layer, and selecting “Alpha to Selection”. You can find it as well under Layers>>Transparancy>>Alpha to Selection.

By now, I’ve forgotten most Photoshopisms, and I feel using GIMP like I felt using Photoshop before. (That is: I’m sure somebody can do it, but I’ve no idea where to start myself… ;)

So if you have a crackedl version of Photoshop on your pc, and it gives you a quirky feeling, just give GIMP a try. And make sure not to give up too easily, because I can promise you: there will be times that you curse GIMP for making you feel like a beginner, looking for half an hour for something you could easily do in 2 minutes in PS. But trust me: it’s worth it…

ps: For the curious-but-conservative people: there’s a GIMP plugin that tries to mimic Photoshop behaviour and menu structures in GIMP: GIMPshop. Haven’t tried it myself, so feel free to chip in your comments.

Google Adsense ad language

Published
by
jefke
on May 22, 2008
in Internet, Technology, WordPress and adsense
. 1 Comment

When I started using Google Adsense, my ads were set in the wrong language: in stead of displaying ads in English, Google sent me ads in French. Even more: in stead of calling the whole thing “Ads by Google“, it was called “Google Annonces“. And all this happened on a site with not a single non-English word. It took me some time to find out how to change this, even though in the end it was pretty trivial. That’s why I decided to list some items you’ll want to check when the language of your ads are not the language you expected.

Google is pretty good in keeping secrets,  so I expect there are not a lot of people outside Google that know its recipe for selecting the language of ads they send you. We do know, however, that it is based on a range of different factors, and changing only one might not yield the result you were hoping for.

  • First of all, there are the -very- obvious ones: your personal settings in your Adsense account. Even though this site is hosted on a server in Seattle and  fully written in English, it still received French advertising. I think this is due to the fact that that is the closest they could get to my mother country. Mind you, the language in my account was set to English. You can’t move to another country, in order to have your ads displayed in another country, of course (or if you do, you must have a great website, can I join?) but keep it in mind anyway.
  • Then we go to the - for the less web savvy users - less obvious ones: the meta information in your sites headers. Every webpage starts with a bit of information about itself. This information is formatted in tags, that are called the meta tags. One piece of information you can share with the world, is the language used on the page. I found that my WordPress header didn’t include this information by default. You can change this by adding it to your header.php file. You can find this file in the directory of the theme you’re using (e.g. wp-content->themes->default->header.php). You can open it with any text editor, and then you want to change the line that looks like this:
    <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php language_attributes(); ?>>

    into this:

    <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php language_attributes(); ?> xml:lang=”en” lang=”en” >

    Now you let the browsers of your visitors and Google or any other robot know that the language of your webpage is English (If you want another language, you’ll have to change the “en” of course). That’s what did it for me.

  • And now we go into the really obscure parts: the things you display on your page. It seems to make sense that Google looks at the words you use, and tries to link them to a certain language. So if your website is in Spanish, then it makes sense that the ads are in Spanish, right? But if that’s what they do, then that’s only a part of the story. Apparently, the  use of non-English characters can upset the Great Googly Moogly language detector as well. So if tweaking of all the above setting doesn’t help, you might want to check on what exactly you’re displaying.
  • There’s another factor influencing the language of the ads shown on your site, but there’s not much you can do about it yourself: the locality of the visitor. A visitor’s location is obviously a strong indication of his language. So if you’re located in a Spanish speaking region, and visit an English website, you can still receive adds in Spanish. If you want to check what people in another region will see, you might try to use some kind of a proxy service. (The last time I checked www.webproxy.pro for example, its IP address returned an address in the States.)
  • If after all these great tips, you’re still receiving ads in click language, then alas, I don’t know what to do. If you do have other tips, though, do not hesitate to put them in a comment!

Cheers

Thumbs up for DrupalValueHosting!

Published
by
jefke
on May 11, 2008
in Technology and hosting
. 3 Comments

Not too long ago, I signed up with DrupalValueHosting for a BlowoutPackage2008. So far, I have been very pleased with the services they provide, and I have yet to have performance issues on my websites (though, admittedly, these sites are of the very-small-homebrew type that normally don’t attract millions of unique visitors each day).

A first issue I had was that on the temporary IP address they provided for accessing files I uploaded to the public html directory, it was not possible to run php scripts (due to safety reasons). Clearly, I had no clue about what was going on, so I opened a service ticket. Not only did they respond quickly - on a Sunday morning - but moreover, they assigned me a private IP address so I could test my sites before changing the DNS servers. Great service.

The second issue I had was with the free domain name that comes with the blowoutpackage. After a couple of days, I noticed that my domain name still hadn’t been registered. As I had gone back and forth a couple of times during the sign-up, and even changed the domain name once, I thought I messed up the registration. Opened another service ticket, and an hour later, the domain was registered and online…

As I haven’t been using DVH for long, I can only speak for this short period, but I really wanted to share how well they treated me up till know. (And as you can see, I haven’t signed up for the referral program, so you can really trust me, I make no money by telling you this. I might sign up though, as additional users mean an additional load on the server I am using myself. At least, I get something in return that way…)

Edit: I did sign up for the program, so this review is no longer unbiased :-)

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