A screen shot of w3school's Try It feature in Safari

Links of Interest — Sept 19, 2014

Welcome to another edition of Links of Interest. Sadly this was a long time in coming due to my preoccupation with stuff like work, projects, etc. But I do have some good stuff on tap.

Getting Sketchy

Spanish Dancer at the Moulin Rouge by Giovanni Boldini
Spanish Dancer at the Moulin Rouge by Giovanni Boldini, oil on canvas, 49 x 40, 1905. All works by Giovanni Boldini.

Giovanni Boldini is featured at Artist Daily. Boldini was a tremendous artist during the 1900’s. He worked in a variety of mediums, and demonstrated his level of skill while woking in a great deal of expressiveness with abstract, sometimes chaotic strokes. Learn more about Giovanni Boldini via the link below.

http://bit.ly/1u7xdb6 (Sorry, original link it was ridiculously huge.)

 

Automated Mockups In PhotoShop

A sample cover from PSD Covers

If you caught my tweet(and if you didn’t, you should follow me on Twitter, like right now) you would had known my reaction to this discovery. I had stumbled across this gem of a website while searching for a tutorial on how to create a mockup book in PhotoShop. Never mind! PSD Covers provides PhotoShop Actions (which are micros that automate actions, events, etc in PhotoShop) for creating mockup of all sorts of items in practically every conceivable position. I couldn’t even believe such a website exists. Check it out!

http://www.psdcovers.com

 

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Going Back to W3school

w3schools.com logo

Anywho, I was crazy enough to try and create an opt-in page for a client. I was even crazier to try and create it using Adobe Illustrator, but that’s another story for another time. To be frank, it’s been a while since I’ve done any coding HTML or CSS. I thought I could rely on either KompoZer or Dreamweaver, but I was a fool. So I had to resort to tweaking and manipulating my code by hand. I’m pretty sure there were easier ways of achieving the same result, but for whatever reason, I have a habit of torchering myself.  That’s precisely what I did.

None the less, I had to fall back on some references (one of the most useful was my old copy of [amazon text=HTML Visual QuickStart Guide&chan=amazon default&asin=B00ECYZ7SU]) and Google. One of my references was the w3schools. I used their HTML and CSS tag reference sections to help me wrap my mind around certain tidbits. Often times I found those tag reference sections lacking due to the fact that often times they weren’t in-depth enough for me and my purposes.

A screen shot of w3school's Try It feature in Safari
The “Try It” feature in Safari. (Click to enlarge.)

On the bright-side, the w3schools include step-by-step tutorials, quizzes, certifications, and a nifty Try It feature that lets you try out and test code within your web browser.

http://www.w3schools.com