Dayn W Creative

Personally, I find it’s really not too complicated of a process.  When writing an email or blog post, I try to think of a subject line or heading that would instantly make me click a story, or open an email.  I can look through emails and stories that I have clicked, and re-engineer a headline based on the same principals.  For me, those principals are usually relevance to projects I’m working on, and time investment to process the article or email.  Off the top of my head, I’d be hooked by “Top 5 Wordpress plugins for designers” or “How to build an events engine in PHP”, or “Quick, professional masking techniques for After Effects”,  etc.

For more info on the science of subject lines and headlines, check out these articles:

15 Tips for Improved Subject Lines

The Subject Line Dead Zone

Email Marketing Subject Line Comparison (ironically a non-compelling headine IMHO)

Popularity: 32% [?]

In Wordpress 2.x under Settings > Reading, you can set a number for “Blog pages show at most”.  This applies globally, however.  I discovered a method to make your home page to show only the latest post, while allowing all other blog pages to respect the “at most” number.

In index.php, just before the loop, I added the following line:

<?php query_posts('showposts=1'); ?>

Basically, that sets up a preemptive query and grabs only the latest post, rather than allowing the loop to query the latest “at most” number of posts.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Most of the online video content you’re going to see online these days has been encoded by Adobe Flash.  These are called FLV’s in the biz because of their .flv file extension.  A common request I’ve heard is for a method to download the FLV for later playback, offline or otherwise, say for a presentation or to edit into  another video.  Or dare I say mashup.

Safari users, congrats.  This method is for you:

1. Navigate to the page where the video is embedded.
2. Open your Activity window. (Window > Activity)
3. Find the path to the .flv file in the Activity window and select it.  If you don’t find anything named .flv, select the path with the largest file size.  That’s probably the video.
4. Choose Edit > Copy
5. Now, open your Downloads window (Window > Downloads), and choose Edit > Paste to begin downloading the video file.

The video will be saved to your downloads folder, wherever you have that set. (Safari > Preferences… > General)  Sometimes, as with YouTube, it won’t be named (something).flv, so you might have to add the .flv part to the end.

Good work.  Now we you downloaded the Flash video file.  How do you play it or use it in another app?  We have to convert it to a different format, probably Quicktime for most of you.  To do this, I use Visual Hub’s little brother, iSquint.  iSquint is free, and will spit out a Quicktime movie, or even an H.264 encoded video, for all you video geeks.  The converted video can be played by Quicktime Player, included in your presentation, even edited in your favorite video editing suite.

Okay, so it’s not one-click easy, but it’s also not that tough to save your favorite videos from nearly any video sharing site.  See also keepvid.com if you want an online solution, or the Mac only app, Videobox.

Popularity: 42% [?]

I’m kind of a podcast fiend.  So, as a web designer, it should be no surprise that I listen to the Boagworld podcast.  Recently, Paul and Marcus highlighted 5 key tips to designing accessible websites.  Here they are in my words.

1. Utilize alt tags on images.
   The only way a screen reader (a device used to aid sight impaired internet users) will “see” your image is to describe exactly what the image is in words.  **Savvy designers will realize added benefit here, as search engines will pick up keywords in the alt tags.  Just make sure your alt tag copy is descriptive of the image, not loaded with keyword phrases that won’t aid the sight impaired.
2. Utilize title tags on links.
   Imagine a web page being read aloud to you.  Now imagine the person reading the page to you encounters a link.  Instead of telling you where clicking that link will take you, they begin to read out the destination URL.  Yikes.  With a proper title tag, you can tell your sight impaired users exactly what clicking the link does.  ie “click here to login”, or “click to visit my portfolio.”
3. Make sure you have fallback content for rich media.
   Most of us including rich media content will use Flash to do so.  If so, provide content that will be seen if the video or Flash cannot be loaded.  Usually, this can be taken care of with the SWFObject implementation method.  Don’t leave a hole where the media would be, fill it with a backup image or copy.  **Here’s another plus for you cheeky designers.  (more…)

   Popularity: 60% [?]