Saturday, March 05, 2011

GIMP vs. Photoshop / Dreamweaver vs. KompoZer

Those of us who have money to burn should definitely purchase Photoshop from Adobe for $800 and then spend $200 each year on the updates because most of the business world uses Photoshop and the interface is said to be more intuitive and user friendly (except I may never know because I never seem to have any money to purchase Photoshop which is why I use free GIMP.) Photoshop is PROPRIETARY software and one proprietary thing which Photoshop has which GIMP can never have is PANTONE colors which is a proprietary system for using PANTONE numbers to exactly match various multitudinous shades of color. GIMP cannot include Pantone colors or it would cease to be open source (and free.) On the other hand if you do work for people who DEMAND Pantone then you MUST use Photoshop. It is true that GIMP always seems to remain several releases behind Photoshop in functionality, but then Photoshop is always forcing you to spend that $200 per year to stay current. Now many photographers DO NOT need all the infinite features of full Photoshop so they purchase PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS for something like $100.

NO, this is not a horror Sci-Fi thriller, it is how some people make their living.


Right now it is Saturday, March 5th, at 10:14 p.m. and I have just spent the past solid 12 hours teaching myself to use KompoZer (which is a free open source alternative to $300 Adobe Dreamweaver) GIMP (which is a free open source alternative to $1000 Photoshop) and Filezilla (client) which is a free FTP (file transfer program) which does the job (and there are FTP's which COST MONEY (perish the thought.)


I should add that I used free pspad.com text editor to edit some of the HTML.

I should ALSO add that I used a screen capture/image editor PICPICK to

insert the actor's NAMES into their thumbnails.


You may examine what I have done so far by clicking on THIS link


http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test.html


Go to the bottom of that page and click on the link which says 

SOME RECENT ADDITIONS TO OUR FAMILY

which will bring you to THIS link


http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test3.html


which has the THUMBNAILS of 18 randomly selected actors who are in Dorothy's database.


When I started at 10 a.m. I didn't have the foggiest idea what I was doing. All I knew was that whatever I did, it must not in any way disturb the present functionality of Dorothy's website


http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/


I would ask you to pay particular attention to THIS one actor's profile:


http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/testdir/testheadshots/male/Actor_Pages/adammichael.html


because I began to experiment with certain features of KompoZer such as TABLES and various fonts of which, curiously enough, I chose BROADWAY. Now, I realize some people

may find certain fonts tiresome after a while so do feel free to make suggestions. Nothing is written in stone (except, well, of course, Moses's Ten Commandments, but then he smashed them and had to go back and get them all over again, but that was before the days of carbon paper... but most of you are too young to even remember carbon paper.)


Anway, I spent the first several hours experimenting and failing until I stumbled upon something that worked which is why I am wise to pause and document it all before I fall asleep and forget everything. And I shall post this now before I write another word, so that the computer does not crash......


(to be continued)


CONTINUED AFTER FILING...



One of the things about Dorothy's current site which bothers me is that when you look at the thumbnails, you can barely make out the performers's names which makes it difficult to search for a certain performer when asked (and I was asked to do such a thing.)


I do not know very much about HTML.  I decided to use GIMP to RESIZE each photo once as a tiny thumbnail and again as a larger image for the profile/resume.  The thumbnail has the performer's name as TEXT. Each thumbnail is also a link so when you click on one it opens up the resume and since the performer's name is in the resume there is no need for text in the larger photo.  I do not understand how IMG height and width work and so I used the resizing of GIMP to achieve the image size and this eliminates the distortion which comes from wrongly using img height and width parameters.


The other thing I don't care for is the way the resume shows as an image. I realize it is faster to just plunk a scanned image but I want to see if it makes sense to key in the curriculum vitae. One advantage is more control over the appearance using table. A second advantage is that POSSIBLY the search engines can index on the text of the page and bring more traffic to the site. A third advantage is that anyone viewing the resume may copy and paste details.


This entire effort is an act of desparation for several reasons.

1.) My wife is in Las Vegas with her sister for 2 weeks so I can stay up all night long and be as sloppy as I please. Once I learn all these new things then I will be able to do them more easily during spare hours but the initial learning phase requires long hours of total immersion.


2.) I have jury duty starting TUESDAY so Lord only knows how that will go, but I will feel better if I have these skills under my belt.


3.) It is good if more than one person is able to update Dorothy's website on the remote chance that the one person who CURRENTLY does it may become preoccupied with something else (possibly a newborn.)


4.) As new interns fall into Dorothy's WEB, they may ALSO learn some of these useful and tedious things.


ALWAYS REMEMBER that no matter how complex a piece of software is, you usually wind up using only 10 or 20 commands over and over and over.


I am fortunate to have 4 computers in my livingroom. One is Ubuntu Linux and the other 3 are Windows XP.


Last week I installed KompoZer on my Ubuntu machine but could not figure out how to connect the FTP aspect to Dorothy's HOST. 


This morning I installed the free Window's version of KompoZer and after about an hour figured out how to get it to connect to the website host.


Two weeks ago I was desperately searching for an FTP that would connect to the HOST and I chose a 30 day free trial of CuteFTP (which I had used in 1999) but then I figured out how to get Filezilla FTP. My huge mistake was that I installed the SERVER version of Filezilla, when what I really need is a CLIENT version.


Three weeks ago I was able to use CuteFTP to DOWNLOAD all the HTML for Dorothy's site.


I also made backups of the Actor and Actress files which contain a folder for each performer. In each folder is a scan of the head shot and a scan of the resume.  I decided to start my experiment with Actors and save the Actresses for dessert. (One does have to start SOMEWHERE.)


I created a folder called DPThumbs which contained a folder called tActors, and another folder called Larger and a third folder called Smaller.


tActors contains all of the actors folders which includes head shot and resume scanns.



As I created each THUMBNAIL I stored it in "Smaller" folder, and as I created each large profile photo I stored it in the "Larger" folder. My naming convention, arbitrarily chosen, is that the thumb nail for an actor named John Smith is called tjohnsmith.jpg while the larger photo for the profile is called ljohnsmith.jpg  (notice the lower case L) and the actual page which contains the HTML for the photo and resume is johnsmith.html  


On the actual SERVER for the website I created a folder called testdir

and within testdir is a folder called testheadshots

and within testheadshots is a folder called male

and within the folder "male" are THREE folders: Actor_Pages (which has the johnsmith.html), a second folder called "fullsizepics" which contains the ljohnsmith.jpg and a folder called "thumbs" which contains the small thumb nail pics.


A page called TEST3.HTML


http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test3.html


contains the code for all the links to the profiles as thumb nails pics with the performers's names embedded.  You will notice that each thumbnail is a different size which is the result of not knowing exactly what I am doing with GIMP when I resize. BUT, the human eye ENJOYS variety, so this may actually be a nice touch.


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