My Web Presence

Here is a summary of my presence on the Internet, as of Oct 2009.

www.davebartrum.plus.com
My default web space at my PlusNet ISP account.  Nothing here but an almost blank index.html

www.bartrum.me.uk
My domain hosted at PlusNet, with these subsections:
    Bookmarks - PHP to maintain useful links for Dave, Maureen, Tim and Emma.
    PhotoGallery – First attempt at a photo gallery, using XML, XSLT and CSS.  If nothing else, this is pretty neat use of the technology.  Very simple XML data (containing no formatting information) is sent to the Browser, which then retrieves a separate XSLT stylesheet to translate the XML into standard XHTML, which itself references a CSS sytlesheet.
    PhotoMagDatabase - Partial built MySQL database of Digital Photo magazines.
    PhotoBlog – Some useful info about digital photography, in an editable page.
    Photos – More recent attempt at photo gallery using the powerful WordPress Blog software (based on PHP and MySQL).

www.upaheight.com
Website for Joe Embleton’s window cleaning business.  I built it with mostly HTML and some PHP.  It is also hosted at my ISP account on PlusNet.

davebartrum.wordpress.com
My most recent WordPress Blog at WordPress.com.
This contains various techy articles of mine.  You’re looking at it now!

www.davebartrum.co.uk
My most recent domain, hosted at FreeVirtualServers.com.
I plan to try out a Wiki at this site.  Perhaps DocuWiki.

www.flickr.com
Selection of my photos under Dave Bartrum at Flickr.

Full image after Photoshop

Posts To Do

Here are some topics I’d like to cover:

1. My experience of using C# for my photo uploader
2. CoolIris rant
3. My new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet

Good SingStar

Rocks – Some good ones
Singstar – Mix of good and tacky
Rock Ballads – Lots of classics here, good for mum and dad
Legends – Mostly cheesy, couple of good ones
Queen – Brilliant of course
80’s – All the classics, bit cheesy
90’s – Not bad, lots of well known songs
Anthems – looks too tacky
Party – well cheesy, naff
Pop Hits – Just what it says, good for Emma

Links to try

www.measurementlab.net – google’s broadband monitoring tool.
www.thegamehomepage.com/play/scriball – line drawing game
tinyurl.com/illusion207 – optical illusions
tinyurl.com/patrese1 – F1 driver takes wife for spin
www.ibood.co.uk – e-tailer sells just one type of product per day.
www.101holidays.co.uk – Inspirational holidays
www.myvouchercodes.co.uk – Vouchers
www.topgear.com/uk – good clips.
www.whatdigitalcamera.com – many reviews of cameras
www.leapfish.com – new way to search?

Sites showing how much of your personal info is avail online:
www.yasni.co.uk
www.pipl.com – best?
wink.com/uk-people-search
www.yoname.com

tinyurl.com/dolphin207 – nice backdrop for Emma

tinyurl.com/pyr207 – nice backdrop for Tim

www.fotosketcher.com – Nice utility for producing artwork (pencil, pen and ink) from photos.

www.gmx.com – Award winning email

www.moonfruit.com – Good website builder.

www.extensoft.com/?p=free_video_converter – simple editing of home videos.

Photo manipulation
www.debugmode.com/winmorph
www.popims.fr/en
www.vicman.net
www.gimp.org

www.teamviewer.com – simple no-install remote control

Video Links

The Time Machine – Short interactive video story about some blokes and an unusual time machine. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

Lucky Escape – Short story. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

The Formorian – Short story. Web User Magazine Feb 2009.

Tyne at dawn

Tyne at dawn, originally uploaded by Dave Bartrum.

Created this blog entry from flickr.com

Using Picasa and Flickr

This post covers how I’ve been using Photoshop, Picasa, Google Web Albums and Flickr.

Multi-panel Canvas Print

Exploring options for printing an image on multi-panel canvas. Looked at TESCO, PhotoBox, printitoncanvas.com

image IPTC fields

If I look back at old images and do further work, then I should save them in current folder. This allows old pictures to be archived off, without affecting later work.

General

Lets you enter title, author, caption, copyright information, and the owner’s URL. To display a copyright symbol in the title bar of the image window, choose Copyrighted Work in the Copyright Status menu. If Photoshop detects a Digimarc watermark in the image, the Copyright Notice section is automatically updated.

Note: To print the caption under an Adobe Photoshop image, choose File > Print with Preview, and select Caption. Then print as usual. (See Setting output options for more information.)

Keywords

Provides a way for some image browsers to categorize and search for an image. To add an entry to the keywords list, type in the text box, and click Add. To replace a keyword, select the word in the list, type its replacement, and click Replace. To delete a keyword, select the word, and click Delete.

Categories

Lets you enter a three-letter Associated Press code. (Where available, the Associated Press regional registry maintains a list of categories.) To include the image in supplemental categories, type the code, and click Add. To replace a category, select the code, type its replacement, and click Replace. To delete a category, select the code, and click Delete.

Origin

Provides information on the history of the image. To enter the current date in a short text format, click Today. For Credit, enter the information needed in the credit line for a copyrighted image. Transmission Reference provides the Associated Press with information on the original transmission location of the image. For Urgency, specify the editorial urgency of the image–not its handling priority.

EXIF

Displays information imported from a digital camera, such as the date and time the picture was taken, resolution, ISO speed rating, f/stop, compression, and exposure time. For more information about EXIF annotations, see your digital camera documentation.

The following link provides some definitions for IPTC fields

Printing on Matt

This article describes my experience of printing a nice photo on matt paper.

First, I prepared a nice Aira Force picture in Photoshop:

Full image after Photoshop

Thumbnails of Web Pages

I wanted to create a diagram showing a site map of a Wiki site. I came across this…
ThumbPage

Quick and easy to install, and it does what it says on the tin. My only gripe was that the thumbnails for my Twiki wiki were not recognisable unless I increased the thumbnail size to about 30% (307×230 pixels). Since all the thumbnails are from the same website, they are all the same layout/style and as such you need to see more detail to identify which is which.

See this thumbnail at 205×154:

ThumbPage thumbnail at 205x154 resolution

And this at 307×230:

ThumbPage thumbnail at 207x230 resolution

I also looked at Web Page Snapshot 1.7, but the FREE version had no settings to change the resolution of the image, so they are produced full screen. Also its much simpler than ThumbPage, but that means more tedious to use for lots of pages.

Oops, looked at the other executable, called “Spider for VB 6.0″. This seems to automate the disection of the web page and produce a thumbnail, with options for image size. It looks like it should be able to disect an entire web site, but I couldn’t get that to work.

Water Feature for Garden

waterfeatures2u.co.uk
Manthorpe Slate
Manthorpe Slate 2
Honister Slate
Curled Leaf
Water Features online
Tills 2ft 6inch
Blencathran Stone