Great collection of tutorials

I saw this amazing collection of tutorials for Illustrator, Photoshop, Wordpress, and more, and just had to pass it along here. Tutorials for web and graphic design. Thanks to BeMooved on Twitter for alerting me to this great resource.

At the same time, if you just want to look at some interesting typography portraits, BeMooved also passed this link along. Typography Portraits. Have you ever tried creating a digital portrait using only letters or words? Check it out.

Dreamweaver templates and CSS

I like to use templates in Dreamweaver when I'm designing a site from scratch or doing an entire site redesign. I am currently working on a redesign and my master plan for long term maintenance was to base all files on a template and use a library item for the footer. Whenever the main navigation changes, it's also easy to update because it's an externally located set of javascript files.

As far as the style sheet goes, I like to use external css files, but was having trouble rendering pages using a certain method to link to the file.

I was using the import method < style type="text/css" media="all" >
@import "css/styles.css" ;

But with this method I could only see the page in design view when I look at the template file, not when I viewed pages based on that template within Dreamweaver. I went back and forth with different variations of link paths, accounting for the extra folder where the template resides, with no luck. If I used the "put" function to ftp the file based on a template to the server and look at it in a browser, it looked fine, with all style sheet elements in place. But the team who will maintain the site will need to be able to see what they are doing in design view.

Finally I searched through my CSS book CSS: The Missing Manual and found the answer. First I tried hand typing "url" after the word import, but that didn't work. Chapter two spelled it out so clearly. I followed directions, but it told me to type:
@ import url( css/styles.css);

with no quotes. Again, I could see design view just fine when looking at the template file, but when I looked at a page based on that template, it was plain white with only text, no colors or images. So, I found the answer on page 437, a special chapter for Dreamweaver. It told me to use the "attach style sheet button" on the CSS Styles panel.

I think what was different when I used Dreamweaver's attach command from the CSS Styles panel was the comment marks, indicated by the exclamation point and dashes, as well as the quote marks inside the parentheses.

< style type="text/css" media="all" >
< ! - -
@ import url("css/styles.css");
- - >
< /style>

Now I had a web site that the entire team could edit using design view in Dreamweaver.

Mercury Mariner Hybrid Review

A social media company contacted me to see if I would test drive a car and write about it on my blogs. I happily agreed to a week with a hybrid, and they had a Mercury Mariner Hybrid delivered to my house on the dates I specified. How cool is that?

I normally drive a Suzuki Grand Vitara, shown to the right (not my actual car!). About a week before I was to get the hybrid, I drove the Suzuki to empty and then filled up the tank, twice. I had driven 280 miles, and filled the tank with 15 gallons of gas. That works out to 18.7 miles per gallon.

I can fit seven people in the Suzuki, but the two in the very back seats have to be small people--there's not much room. I can fold the very back seats down and carry a lot of cargo while I still have the carseat for the baby in the first row of back seats. I like the Suzuki because it's not a giant gas-guzzling SUV but it still looks and acts like an SUV.

Here is the Mercury Mariner Hybrid that was delivered to me. I can fit five people in the car with room for luggage or groceries. I never got a chance to use that luggage rack on top. It's got a battery for the electric motor, the electric motor, and a gas engine. I took it for a week and drove 2533.2 miles in it. The first two days I did city driving in Denver, then I took the family to Los Angeles, CA for two days and returned to Denver. It averaged 28.5 miles per gallon. I never had any mechanical problems. No accidents, tickets, or scratches, either. Overall, the car made me feel cosmopolitan and classy.

Check out the review I found on YouTube about this exact car. It's five minutes long.



One small glitch to note that I experienced in the car happened during a drive in a sudden rainstorm. It was a warm day, the windows were up and we had not tested the air conditioner yet and didn't know how it worked. The rain suddenly began and the front windsheild started fogging up. I hit the defrost button but the windshield instantly fogged completely over! We couldn't see a thing. Luckily, we were in a residential area where there was no traffic. We opened the windows and fiddled with the temperature controls to try to get hot air while we wiped the driver's area of the windsheild with our shirt sleeves. Then the glass cleared up and everything was back to normal.

I couldn't tell while driving when the car was shifting from electric to gas modes. The return trip from Los Angeles was when we started noticing strange noises in the car that the owners manual had warned us about as being completely normal. There are ticking and clicking sounds during highway driving. However, now I wonder if I should have added more oil because we did go a looong way with no fluid checks.

Here is a photo comparison from the dashboard when the car was delivered at 5167 miles to when I returned the car at 7700 miles. I didn't see those check engine lights and check oil lights until I inspected this photo. While we were driving, those lights never came on. I think they only appear when the key is in a certain position? Anyway, sorry Mercury dealer, I would have added oil if I'd noticed the light!

Guess what? The entire time I drove the car I was confused by that statement on the dash, "345 miles to E". I thought it was a trip odometer and it was counting the miles to a prespecified destination to the East! No, I'm no longer blonde but that was my blonde moment. Only when preparing these photos to post did I figure out it was counting how many miles until Empty.

Here is a quick video I took with my digital camera right before I was going to return the car. In another blonde moment, I said "miles per hour" when I was supposed to say "miles per gallon."



The Mariner Hybrid is a step up from my current car, the Grand Vitara, in regards to fuel economy. I wouldn't have to sacrifice cargo space to get better miles per gallon. However, there are more fuel-efficient cars on the market in the hybrid category. I did notice many of them are uber-small, and may not fit in with everyone's lifestyle. The Mariner Hybrid fits in with city drivers with children or city drivers who carry lots of things in their car.

Dreamweaver templates

When working on building or revising a site in Dreamweaver, there are a couple of options available to make editing and maintaining the site easier. Currently, I'm helping with a redesign of an existing site, so I don't want to change any file names because they are already indexed in the search engines. But I also want to help the crew who will eventually maintain the site by making the ftp process easier for site-wide changes to navigation or bottom nav/copyright sections.

Of course, for any site, no matter the software you use to build it, you could use the .inc (for include) file. Say you know the bottom navigation will change every year and you don't know how big the site will grow. If you design the site from the beginning to use the .shtml extension and your hosting provider allows for that extension, you can have include files make up different elements of a page. That means on January 1, you take the include file that houses the bottom nav, change the copyright date, and ftp the include file to the server. That way you don't have to "put" the entire site to update every html page.

For my particular situation, I don't want to rename the file extensions, so I'll consider putting a Dreamweaver "library item" inside a template. I'll make a template file, .tmpl, to house the banner, link to an external CSS/javascript navigation, the container for text, and the library item for the bottom nav. When you make changes to the template file, Dreamweaver asks if you want to change every page based on that template. You click yes, then you "put" or ftp all the pages that were locally changed. You can see that once your site grows to over fifty pages, this process will take more time.

So, the library item acts as a kind of include file, wherein I can change the copyright year, "put" the library file, and every page that uses that item is automatically updated on the server.

With the entire site being based on a template, the webmaster does not have to worry about another team member accidentally dragging an element off the page and breaking the site. Each contributer to the site can only change the area of the template specifically designated for text changes.

I would recommend limiting library items or include files called within a page to two. If a server has to render a page based on calls to many different files with lots of information in them, it could slow down the page loading time.

Google Street View

I use Google street view every day. I have never taken the time to research how all those images of our houses are taken. I was vaguely guessing that there must be cameras mounted in our street lights or traffic lights, or speed trap camera stations. But that wouldn't produce the amount of street level detail as what I see online.

Today I found the actual car the camera is mounted on, while IN Google street view and the light bulb turned on. Oh, yes! A Google car must be driving around our neighborhoods with a roof-mounted camera. Then a quick search on Google proved me right.

My son in middle school has access to Google Earth in his computer lab. There are "street view bubbles or orbs" that indicate when you can zoom in even further. We found our house and could see it from the angle of a car driving on the street. The photo was taken this summer, before my husband's pickup got totaled; it was right there in the driveway.

Wikipedia: Google Street View See if your neighborhood has been added yet. Kinda fun, kinda creepy.