Archive for Miscellaneous
Keystroke Heart Art
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One of the top searches on this site is for keystroke art – also known as ascii art – for creating pictures using combinations of keyboard characters. It amazes me how elaborate some of these keystroke art designs really are. Since Valentines’ Day is later this week, here are some links for ascii hearts to let you express your inner geek.
I’m Still Here
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I have seriously been slacking when it comes to putting up good articles on a regular basis here, but truth be told I have been swamped with design work (not a bad problem to have), have been nuturing a few of my other sites, and we have had an unexpected bathroom renovation to tackle at the house.
With that said, I do have quite a few things planned, like sharing with you some of the projects I have recently completed, more tutorials, some CSS explained posts, reviews of products I love and more. If you have a topic you specifically want me to address or have a question you want answered, let me know.
Images: Generate Ideas and Attract Attention
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Image details: 2008 CMT Music Awards – Red Carpet served by picapp.com
Guest Post by David Peralty
Something often overlooked by bloggers are images for their content, but with recent reports that most readers skim content equal to around one quarter of what is actually written, an image can sometimes be your only opportunity to hook a reader into really reading all that you have to say.
Just like with all other content, the images you can get for your posts can come from legal or illegal sources. Most people don’t pay attention to this fact, but with companies seeing decreasing revenue, protecting intellectual property is on the rise, so taking images you found from a Google Image search isn’t the best idea.
There are many free and legal sources for images, but you have to be willing to look around.
Currently, I work for PicApp, a company that provides access to high quality images from companies like Corbis and Getty. PicApp allows you to easily embed images in your posts.
Some others worth mentioning that I have used before include Flickr’s Creative Commons images that users have uploaded and given open access to, as well as stock.xchng.
The only issues with these sites are that they don’t always have the highest quality images, nor the latest editorial images.
Some other reasons you might want to make adding an image to your posts a regular endeavor is to break up the content, which can allow it to flow better, or helping convey thoughts, ideas, opinions, or even the overall mood of the text around it.
It allows you to differentiate from your competitors as many bloggers aren’t spending the time and energy finding images worth posting, and this opens up an opportunity for each and every one of you to make the most out of your content and how it is displayed.
One last thing I wanted to note that is special about PicApp, and incredibly useful for me as a blogger is the ability to subscribe to my searches via RSS. If you are a celebrity blogger talking about Miley Cyrus, it can be hard to keep up with everything that is happening with regards to her and her brand, but by subscribing to an RSS feed of your image search, PicApp will let you know when there are new photographs that you can use, and I have already been told that it has helped inspire posts, and I can see it helping some bloggers beat their competition in releasing an article.
About our Guest Blogger:Â David Peralty has been a full time blogger for the last three years, and now works as Community Manager for PicApp while also building his own blogs like eXtra for Every Publisher.
