by on July 9, 2010
Using ImageWell for Blogging
If you’ve got a Mac, you’re in for a treat. I’m going to share with you the best tool in my arsenal for adjusting images from a camera or from iStockphoto (they have a free image of the week that is usually 5-12MB in size): ImageWell. For only $20, you get every basic feature for editing an image for your blog that you could possibly need, plus a bunch of easy-access and easy-save features that will knock your socks off if you live in a climate that wears socks.
Starting With the Basics
Your blog obviously has a width set for the content area, and for most sites, this is between 450 and 650 pixels (px) wide. This site, as it is at this moment is using a 640px content area, so I have several WordPress media settings set to create appropriate thumbnail and full-width sizes of my images based on that width. Many of us use a lightbox plugin that enlarges the image when it’s clicked, so the maximum size you want that to go is the size of a laptop screen for those on the go, limiting the largest image you need to be 900px wide or 600px high, whichever is comes first. It does you no good to have a 100px tall image that is 1800px wide on a 13″ laptop. So, what are you supposed to do if you have an image that is too big?
Enter, ImageWell
I discovered this about a week after I got my first Mac: a 6 yr-old, 12″ MacBook running OS X 10.4, rather poorly. I got it used and it clearly needed a lightweight program for image editing rather than trying to run Photoshop Elements on it. Looking at the capture above, you can see how simple the window is, and that’s about it, but it’s so powerful in little ways.
You can open images nearly too many ways. There is the drag and drop method of dragging a file from Finder to either the ImageWell icon in the Dock or to the image area of the program itself. You can also Control-click the image area to bring up a dialog box with even more options that make Windows users jealous.- You can change the image dimensions, compression, file name, file type, save location, watermarks, and orientation all from the main window. This makes for very rapid image processing, especially when you’re creating a gallery. The screenshot of a gallery of our vacation photos here were all later re-sized (and watermarked) using the method described below in just a couple of minutes.
Steps for Resizing
- Get the image into ImageWell. I usually drag and drop them because I have Finder open at the bottom of my screen.
- Enter a new height or width based on the orientation of the image. Since this is landscape, I choose 900px wide.
- Rename the file up at the top and select a location to save it to just below the image. I chose my blog folder on Dropbox. I’ll explain how to set those up in a bit.
- Sometimes with camera images, you need to rotate the image and re-save it, which is done on the More tab, and you can see Watermark is just to the left of that with watermark options.
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- Every now and then, you’ll want to crop an image or adjust the brightness or contrast, right? Then click Edit at the bottom left for a new screen with those abilities. See the crop tool in the upper right? Click the ImageWell icon on the far left to return to the normal view.
- Click the Send button to save the image to the location you have selected from the pull-down list (explained below).
If you click Locations on the main screen, you can add all sorts of save-to spots for one-click saving to a folder, FTP, Flickr, ImageShack, or SmugMug, to name a few. While it can be handy to upload straight to FTP for certain blogging platforms, I choose not to for WordPress because it generates thumbnails when uploaded directly into a post, which also associates the files with the post for creating a gallery, as I’ve done with the four trashcan images in a row. You’ll notice that sometimes I create a folder just for a particular time of editing (p2-June is a folder in my blog folder for my vacation photos) because I can easily remove them with the minus button at any time the list gets too long to be easily functional. Click the plus button to create a new entry, select the location type on the right, and then the Location Properties area will take on the new format for the fields required for the location selected. If you selected Folder, click the little ellipses button to bring up a folder selector.
That’s all I can think of to get you started on the road to quicker, easier image re-sizing and saving on your Mac. If there is a better program out there for the money, or even more money, I haven’t seen it. I use ImageWell even when Photoshop Elements is already open because saving the image to one of my preset locations with an easy-access file name change field is faster than what I can do in Photoshop. Admittedly, cropping is faster in Photoshop, but if you’re combining a re-size, re-name, and a crop, go with ImageWell. You’ll be faster every time.
by on July 6, 2010
Making a Living, Breathing Budget Is Hard
After about 13 months of listening to Dave Ramsey’s podcasts on my iPhone telling people that their first, very first, problem is that they don’t have a written budget, we’ve finally done it. Every morning when I’m making Kristin’s sandwich and making my eggs, I hear him tell people to sit down at the beginning of the month and “give every dollar a name” until you are left with zero for the month.
It’s seemed impossible all this time. It would take me 5 pages to describe how our monthly expenses are out of control unpredictable because of medical expenses, primarily. In any given month, we could have $75 in co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses and then the next month it could be approaching $1,000.
Here’s what we did yesterday on our dreary, rainy 5th of July:
- We sat at the PC with Excel open and wrote down our estimated income for the month. Since Kristin has 2 paychecks and we try to take out the exact same amount from my business account every month as my “paycheck,” we used those numbers.
- Then we wrote down our fixed expenses for July. Here is where it got really weird and we ended up having at least a 45 minute discussion on whether this needs to be July or August expenses: 90% of the fixed bills were due on the first and were paid for with my June paycheck at the end of the month. In the end, we decided July was July for everything.
- Then we wrote down all of our adjustable, but potential expenses and filled in what we expected to spend this month until we hit “0.”
- We got out the coupon book and put an index card with each adjustable expense in each slot with how much we are starting with this month. Next month, we will add the same amount to what is left or use the adjusted amount in accordance to August’s needs.
I need to head over to Barnes and Noble and sit with his book The Total Money Makeover
Things that surprised us (well, sometimes me, because Kristin is so darn smart with money):
- Our fixed expenses are more than we used to make when we got married (ouch!).
- We really can’t cut anything out except doing what Ramsey says, “live on rice and beans and beans and rice.” If you cancel one part of the cable/phone/Internet, it ends up costing more. I can’t eat any less food and we already buy sale items.
- The biggest movable force in our table is my income, which is both awesome and scary at the same time. It’s time to go for it and see where we can be in December.
- Dang! This is going to be a lot of work, but I’ve heard that at least 500 times on the podcast, so it’s time for me to man-up and do it anyway.
In the end, we were glad to have gotten through hours of what is (to me) very stressful and tedious work without having a fight or any semi-major blowup. In hindsight, I distinctly remember being quite calm in my most frustrated moments because I honestly didn’t know what the right answer was, so there was no reason to get mad at Kristin. Now we know we have enough for her to go buy a purse and me get a new wallet this month…
… and that brings financial peace. One. Step. At. A. Time.
by on July 1, 2010
Not One to Get One’s Hope Up
I was walking a fine line most of the afternoon and all evening with Kristin today. She put in a “work order” for her site, kris·tin·ol·o·gy, via e-mail for a blogroll that shows up like so many of those crappy Blogger designs that are out there.
I am fundamentally opposed to Blogger because it’s not as customizable as I need to do what I want. I want fully-customizable or quick and dirty. That’s why I work in WordPress or Posterous. Posterous has a decent amount of control, but I use it because I can post from anywhere with anything quickly and easily without thinking about style. I don’t mind the lack of design control because I don’t want design control in this case. It’s for writing and publishing to Facebook and Twitter.
So, you can imagine my horror as I see that she wants a Blogger blogroll, just because it’s like Blogger. It’s actually a good idea to display what she wanted: the latest blog post title and when it was last updated. Who wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated all week or month, right?
Then she said it after dinner: “then I want a Blogger site.” I knew she was both joking and serious at the same time. “Nooooo!!!! You’re not getting a Blogger site after all of this WordPress work. You can’t ditch the best blogging platform available just because you want links to show a certain way!”
I tried to explain how much code is involved in getting the RSS information to get the title and the publishing date and said I’d have to hire someone to do that programming for me. Partially true. Well, if I was going to do it myself, it was totally true, but I was holding out hope that there was a plugin that would do exactly what she wanted. There has to be, but it would likely be a matter of whether or not it’s still being updated for WordPress 3.0.
I’ve learned my lesson to not say I will do something and then not do it, but I also knew she had strong suspicions that I can do anything I set out to do. I tell her those stories of my coding conquests almost daily, so it’s possible that there is some slight undue over-confidence in my abilities. She went to bed thinking it wasn’t going to happen…
It took me two tries and to wait about 15 minutes of frustrating testing before Google’s AJAX feed API went through their system before the plugin started working correctly. It was just showing it like before no matter what I did until the API started working. Amazingly, the plugin even has a “Bloggger (TM)” display setting. LOL!
All said and done, I’ve once again proven why I’m the “WordPress go-to guy for WordPress people” and gotten the job done for my most important client. She said she’d pay me for any work I do, but I don’t think she’s got anything I don’t already own. 
