Archive for: images
Social sharing applications are starting to get more intriguing as new startups formulate novel ways of letting people interact and display their interests. While Facebook and Twitter are terrific ways for bachelor’s or masters degree students to keep in touch with their friends and family, they’re not as interactive as other services when it comes to sharing. Many people are interested in what their peers are looking at, which is why social bookmarking platforms like Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit have become so popular. However the makers of Pinterest have taken this idea a step further by creating a visual bookmarking site that allows users to categorize web content by image.
What is Pinterest?
In a nutshell, Pinterest is a digital mind map that allows users to submit photos of products and places they find and like online. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you can edit your profile to include interests and other information about yourself. Currently an invite-only service, those interested in signing up can request an invite either directly from Pinterest or from a Pinterest member. At present Pinterest is run by a seven person team, so resources are limited. However they are to refine the service before opening it up to the public.
How Pinterest is Different
Pinterest is fairly underground at the moment, but it’s attracted a lot of interest already from tech-savvy users and critics alike. Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest gives you a number of options when it comes to discovering new content. A user can create collections of different items that they like, and other users can choose to either follow that collection or follow the likes of the person that posted them. Items posted on Pinterest can also be commented on by users, giving each collection a forum or community feel that’s lacking in Twitter.
Design and Layout
The design of Pinterest is similar to Google+ in many respects. The layout of the site strips away decorative elements and lets content speak for itself. It’s clean, simple and attractive, and is extremely fast and responsive in everyday usage. Every image post supports comment threads which you can expand by clicking on its tab. Likewise, the manner in which Pinterest is designed makes planning for events or compiling shopping lists easy and intuitive. Basically, Pinterest is a digital cork board that can be rearranged by using the built-in search capabilities to bring up new images.
Final Thoughts
Pinterest is a highly visual way of allowing users to find things that interest them in the quickest manner possible. These days, the web is moving away from search and opting for discovery instead. Thus, expect services like Pinterest to garner more interest from casual web surfers as they learn what such visual discovery tools can bring to the table. While Pinterest attracted an overwhelmingly female following at the outset, it’s catching on with techies and other demographics as well thanks to its innovative concept and design. You’ll no doubt be hearing more about Pinterest in the coming months.
p.s. Follow us on Pinterest
As a web developer I want to build each website to be as stable as possible so as it looks the same across all browsers while remaining accessible and validating to W3C requirements. There are a lot of hoops to jump through and with a large build some of the finer details can slip through the net if you’re not careful. Images are used extensively on many websites with some contributing to design and some contributing to content. When it comes to optimising images for SEO purposes it’s the images in the content you need to concentrate on. Google image search has the potential to bring in a fair amount of traffic to your website, and as such optimising your images can have a positive affect on your visitor numbers. In this article we will explore some best practices for SEO image optimisation.
File Type
File type can be a subjective matter. Site speed has become one of the many ranking factors in the Google algorithm. As such, the larger file types should be avoided. Gifs will offer you a small file size but at reduced quality. They are perfect for background images, gradients, shadows, etc. However, for larger images such as logos and images that accompany the main content they are not ideal, in these cases a jpeg is the better option. If your designer is a little fussy then he or she may want images to be in PNG format to support vector images. Compromise is the key in this instance.
Image Size
Once again, with site speed being one of the many ranking factors, image size can play a huge part in reducing your websites load times. Avoid using unnecessarily large pictures and use the appropriate file type for the images. Using the ‘Save For Web’ feature in Photoshop can also help toward reducing file size. From a user experience perspective, unnecessarily large images may contribute to a bad user experience. If a larger image is needed, consider linking from a smaller image or employing a JavaScript / jQuery light box plugin.
Image Location
Avoid placing images in the root folder of your site. It’s always appropriate to have a folder called ‘images’ in the root of your website and to locate all of your images there. You may also find it useful to have category folders within the image folder for organisational means. Avoid saving your images to an eternal location, this will increase the load time for your site.
Image Naming
It is good practice to name your images appropriately. You can use your targeted keywords to name images to give an accurate reference to what’s in the image. Avoid using generic names such as ‘photo1.jpg’ or a non-relevant structure ‘catpic22356.jpg’. As an example, if you are naming a photo of a car, a naming structure of ‘manufacturer-type’ is appropriate. E.g. ‘volvo-saloon.jpg’
Alt Tags
The alt attribute is a key element to accessibility and is there to give end users who have images turned off or who use screen readers an accurate description of what that images depicts. As such the alt attribute should be used correctly. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t include a couple of keywords to the description.
Content Placement
Once you have your image in place on your page, placing relevant text before and after the images is essential. This can be a perfect opportunity to target long tail key phrases, the traffic obtained from long tail phrases will be much lower than a glamour term but you will find that the conversion rate from long tail traffic will be much higher.
Robots.txt
Finally, insure that your robots.txt file it not excluding access to your image folders.
Guest post by: Alex is a dolphin trainer and swimming pool owner who loves swimming pools and replacing swimming pool filters. You can find him on Twitter here @harvey1dash8.
Mac OS X Lion is here and Apple have started to release it to developers. Here are some screen shots of the upcoming version of Apple’s desktop operating system.
Remember that these images from the February release and there is a good chance things will change before its official release.
Easy Image Zoom is a jQuery plugin that allows users to zoom in on an image. Easy Image Zoom is a lightweight script that is fully customisable with several options and simple CSS definitions. It is great for projects required product image magnification.
Raju Paliwal, 21 years-old blogger, created some interesting WTF art. 11 images which totally explain the WTF expression, one of the most used in Twitter.
Take a look to the complete work in this site.
Rovio, the company in charge of the development of the famous iPhone game “Angry Birds”, created a few wallpapers to use them in your iPhone or desktop.
With over 6.5M downloads, we cannot say this game did not make a mark; and now, all of the fans can enjoy some of nice quality images as wallpapers:
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is not all that common and applications rarely include this service included, FreeOCR is a free web app which will allow us to easily extract text from images and even PDF files.
Not only free, FreeOCR is really simple to use: Access the site, click browse for selecting the image you would like to extract the text and just wait for a few seconds. No registration required.
FreeOCR has some limitations about the service: We can upload files up to 2MB, only 10 images per hour, and for PDF files, the text extracted will be only for the first page.
MP32Tube it’s another YouTube web app which we can use to upload MP3, WAV or M4V files to YouTube using the images we select to create a video.
Most applications we can use related to YouTube are mostly for downloading videos, downloading only the audio file, etc.; but just a few are focused on the uploading process. MP32Tube fits perfectly for users who want to share music or some audio files using the YouTube engine.
Using this application is also very simple: Upload images (jpg, jpeg, gif and png supported); upload the audio file; edit the video info and create the video.
MP32Tube also offers a secure method for using your YouTube account: All the connections to the account are done through Google’s AuthSub API. Meaning they never have access to your password.
Facebook is introducing, just for a few users, a new and outstanding feature: Face recognition. In the process of uploading photos, Facebook will automatically recognize the faces on each photo and you can start tagging from there.
This new feature appears right after Facebook acquired Divyshot, and the main idea (at least for now) is reducing the amount of clicking users have to execute whenever they are uploading pictures. But wait, if you don’t see this option available in your account, don’t worry; Facebook is kind of beta-testing this feature in 1% of the entire Facebook population.
The face recognition does simplify the uploading process, but it does not automatically tags any of the photos. That automation sounds like the next step, though.
Did you ever wonder why people like us usually have tons of spare time? Drinking coffee, wandering around the office, etc.? Take a look:
No, seriously, we do not have any spare time, at all… well, maybe I did use the “It’s your problem now” once or twice.
Via eviljaymz.com
