Monday’s tragic sawmill explosion in Prince George, BC has taken the life of two workers and seriously injured many others. It’s a sad and timely reminder that no one can take workplace safety for granted.

In fact, one in every 65 employed workers is injured or harmed on the job, according to Statistics Canada 2009 data. Construction and mining are the most dangerous, at 24 injuries per 1,000 workers, but Health and Social Work are not far behind at 19 per thousand.

Once again, Working Design was involved in designing materials for BC’s Day of Mourning. This year we created a poster for the BC Federation of Labour, based on a concept by Mike Konopacki. The quote is from Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, a dedicated labour activist and organizer in the late 1900s, and it’s just as powerful more than a century later: “Mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

The BC Fed is involved in two ceremonies in the Lower Mainland: On Friday, April 27 at 10:30 am at the New Vancouver Convention Centre, and on Saturday April 28 at 11 am at the New Westminster Quay. Find locations of other ceremonies throughout BC.

Last week I saw an article in the Globe and Mail about using natural dyes to colour eggs. Red beets, red cabbage, red wine and turmeric were featured. I tried various experiments with those dyes as well as a variety of resists: elastic bands, hair ties, wax. The results were very interesting and I’m sharing some here.

When I posted about this on my Facebook page I received a lot of comments and a few more suggestions. As a result, I wrapped some eggs in onion skins, tucked them into nylon stockings and boiled in water for about 20 minutes. Worth trying.

I’ve done quite a few additional experiments and I’ll be posting results on Facebook and to my Pinterest page (under Kris Klaasen) in the next few days.

BTW, I always thought the easter egg and bunny tradition had to do with fertility and the emergence of new life. Not so according to Wikipedia.

Happy Easter to you all!

Most of us signed on because we don’t want to miss out on a useful online, social media opportunity. But, what exactly is the opportunity?

To find out I took a seminar at UBC Continuing Ed last week on the benefits of Linked In. The session was led by Njeri Watkins, an entertainment industry consultant and Linked In enthusiast. She uses the platform to network with the more than 400 professionals she counts as “connections”. She  keeps up with various user groups, reads news customized to her interests and follow companies related to her work.

I wanted to know what Linked In offers in the way of marketing and networking opportunities. Is it something I could use personally and for Working Design? Should I recommend it to you  – my clients and friends?

Here’s a brief overview of what I learned. There’s a lot to know and I’ll share more in future posts.

Who’s Linked In?

Who will you find in Linked In’s virtual bar?  Your clients and colleagues, businesses small and large, job seekers, fellow net workers and recruiters fill much of the space. However, the site’s research capacity, groups, third party applications, reporting procedures, and news updates make it more than a regular meet-up-happy-hour-multi-office-party get together.

1) Networking. This is it. The main reason you and your business want to link in and up. Linked In urges all users to connect only with people we know and trust. This means the virtual bar is filled with people you’re connected to and stand behind.

2) Looking for a service or supplier. For instance, if you’re looking for a pest control specialist or a book editor we can search for them through your network of primary connections. If they’re on your list you can be pretty confident that these leads are valuable and trustworthy.

3) Job and opportunity searching. Linked In will warm up what would have been a cold call. If you want to market your business or personal services to a particular niche – research institutes or sport equipment suppliers for example – you can search for them and see how many of your connections have connections with individuals or businesses in the field. When you make your pitch, you can say that you have people in common and who they are.

Or, if you have connections in those sectors and you are looking to broaden your presence, you can see who your connections are connected with, see where they hang out and who with.

You could also be direct and ask your connections to introduce and recommend you to companies and individuals they know.

4) Groups. Most of us are looking for like-minded people and businesses whether it’s online or in our regular lives. We welcome conversations with other people and professionals about things that interest us and help us do our jobs. Linked In has a feature that lets you search for, find and join any number of groups. If the group doesn’t exist, you can start it

Using the groups, you can simply get information or you can subtly pitch your business and yourself by joining in the conversation or starting one.

Say you’re a freelance editor trying to tap into a larger market. You can explore the numerous Linked In writer and editor groups. Find a few that seem to have networking and employment potential, join and get involved.

5) Following companies. Linked In has researched and lists thousands of companies world wide and provides a range of information about them: number of employees, categories of work (sales, management, IT etc.) the movement of individuals and availability of specific positions. For instance, if you’re looking for a research position with the CBC, you can follow the company and receive related news, see what positions are being offered, who’s been hired and who has left.

6) Contact Information Management. A couple of weeks ago Linked In sent me an email saying that 50 of my contacts had changed jobs in the last year. It had their thumbnail photos connected to the Linked In site and their new contact information.

Those of us who manage and use contact info databases know how useful it is to have access to up to date information. While some of our contacts blast out group emails with change of address info, many don’t.  It’s useful that Linked In acts as a central, third party source for this information.

7) News. Linked In has a customized news section that collects information from hundreds of mostly mainstream sources such as nytimes.com or npr.org. Your news page content is based on information you provided in your profile. If you indicated that you’re interested in information technology, sports and glassblowing, your Linked In news page will reflect that and present you with articles about those areas.

Your personal website.  Linked In can double as your personal website if you are a job seeker or freelancer. It allows you to showcase your main skills, post a cv or your work experience, write about yourself, and show the community what you look like and who you are connected with. And, it’s free.

While there are paid upgrades that increase your scope and ability to use Linked In, relatively few members do so.

One interesting note is that users in the US and UK are much more likely to join and use Linked In than those of us in Canada. Employers and job seekers in both those countries are using the online forum as their primary method of locating each other.

The first thing you’re going to need is a Google-ID. If you have a gmail address, you already have one. If not, go and get one. This is your single sign-on to all of Google’s services. If you are setting something up for an organization, you probably want to get a Google-ID specifically for that organization so that you can share it with others. Here are instructions on how to sign up for your Google-ID.

Now that you have your new Google-ID go log into Google Calendars. The first thing you’ll have to do is create a new calendar. This will be the calendar that you embed on your website, so give it a meaningful name like “My Organization’s Events”. Make sure you set the visibility of the calendar to public. If you skip this step, nobody else will be able to see it. Finally you are ready to embed the calendar into your website by pasting the embed code into (for example) a page in WordPress.

If  you need to you can create more than one calendar and include them all in one calendar view. Just check off each of the calendars you want included in the list on the Google Calendars embedding page. If you find there are too many events in your combined calendars for the Month view, try changing to the Week or Agenda views. They are better able to display more entries in each day.

I’ve completed all of these steps in order to embed a calendar into this post that displays three Google Calendars. If you click on the little down arrow in the top right corner, you can choose which of the three calendars you’d like to see.

Kinds of image data

The first concept is the identification of the kind of image data you are dealing with.

There are generally two different kinds of image data. The first type of data we can identify is what I’ll call very complex image data. This is the kind of data that comes from a camera. Photographs, paintings, sketches and any other data which are organic in nature have a great variety of tone, color, rich texture, and look like real things.

The second kind of image data we’ll discuss is what I’ll term less complex image data. These kinds of images have strong lines and edges, high contrasts, simplified color palettes, and smooth textures. Cartoons, computer generated images, rasterized vector drawings, technical drawings, icons, and rendered type all fall into this category.

Data compression

Now that we understand the two major types of image data we are dealing with, we should understand why we bother with this differentiation to begin with. The answer lies in data compression.

Data compression is the technique of taking a set of data, and representing it in a way that is smaller than before. If we didn’t do any data compression, we could handle any kind of image in the same way and it would always look great. The problem is image files are very large, and our pages would take forever to load up if there were no compression applied to them.

Since we must apply data compression to images for the web, we need to understand the two major kinds of data compression we’re interested in. There is one kind of compression for each of the two kinds of image data we are dealing with.

Lossy compression

The first is called lossy compression. This kind of data compression works by representing the raw image data in a way that is mathematically analogous to a waveform. Mathematical techniques which simplify that waveform are then applied. The simpler the waveform data are, the smaller they are to store in a computer. In this way images can be compressed to very small fractions of their original size.

The downside of lossy compression is that once the original data are simplified in this way, that complexity is lost forever. There is no way of getting it back. This is why this kind of compression is called lossy. When it comes time to de-compress the data to re-create the image, the image will not look exactly the same as it did before. The more the data are simplified, the smaller the image file gets, and the more different the image looks after de-compression.

This sounds bad, but when applied to the right kind of image, lossy compression is by far the best choice. We apply this kind of data compression to our complex image data. Images with more natural textures and greater complexity are more forgiving of lossy compression because they are so complex, that our eyes have a much harder time detecting the difference between the original and compressed images.

Lossless compression

The second kind of image compression relevant to us is called lossless compression. This kind of data compression works by searching the image for repeating identical sets of data, and reducing them. For example, if an image has a pure white background and large patches of one color, these areas of the image will be identified. These identical repeated sets are then mapped and indexed so that the data are only stored once, thus making the resulting image file smaller than the original data.

The downside of lossless compression is that it cannot compress very complex image data as well as lossy compression can. If we were to compress a photograph using lossless compression, the compressed file would still be relatively large.

The good thing is that when applied to less complex data, Lossless compression yields very small files, and the de-compressed image is exactly the same as the original. This is important with less complex image data because with images of this kind it is much easier for us to notice when there are changes in the data.

Choosing an image format

So now we know that when we are compressing very complex image data, like a photograph, we should use a lossy compression algorithm, and when we are compressing less complex image data, like a line drawing, we should use a lossless compression algorithm. The question remains, what kind of image format should we be using for each.

These days there are three major compressed image formats being used on the web. I’ll explain each of them.

JPEG, which is an acronym for Joint Photographic Expert Group, is an image format which is best used for photographs and other kinds of complex image data. It is the kind of image format used in all digital cameras (unless you are shooting in raw mode, which applies no compression). It will compress your photographs, paintings, and other very complex images down to a reasonable size, and you will hardly notice any difference in the de-compressed image.

PNG, which is as acronym for Portable Network Graphic, is quickly becoming the most common of the lossless image formats used on the web. It should be used for all of your less complex images such as cartoons, computer generated imagery, rendered type, and technical drawings. It will apply enough compression to get your less complex data down to a reasonable size, and the de-compressed image will look exactly the same as the original.

PNG also comes with the added bonus of being able to store alpha channel image data. This allows you to store images with variable transparency.

GIF, which is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, is an older lossless image format which is still in common use on the web. While it can compress less complex data reasonably well, it only works with 256 color, or 8bit image data. If your original image contains more than 256 colors, using GIF compression becomes a lossy compression format since it must simplify the color data of the image. For this reason, it’s probably best to never use the GIF image format.

Optimization tips

Now that we understand which image formats we should use for which kinds of images, and understand why, we should be able to create websites with great looking images that load quickly. There are still a few little points which can help us squeeze just a little bit more performance out of our images.

Color palette optimization

The main recurring theme of this post has been simplification of image data. Simplified images compress better, and so become faster to load. With this in mind, it is a good idea to simplify the color pallette of your images as much as possible before compressing.

In the case of very complex image data such as a photograph, there is very little that can be done with regards to palette optimization, with the exception of black and white images. If you are dealing with a black and white image, you may want to convert the image to “greyscale”.

With regards to less complex image data, such as rendered type, palette optimization is almost always possible. Try reducing the color depth of your image from 24bit, or RGB, down to indexed color. Do you notice any image degradation? If not, great! The use of indexed color palettes will dramatically reduce an image’s file size.

Compression level, or “Image Quality”

The level of compression used is most relevant when you are creating JPEG image files. The compression level controls the amount of data simplification that occurs when compressing an image. This setting is usually called “Image Quality” in image manipulation software and is represented as a percentage value. When you compress a JPEG with 100% image quality, a very low compression level is implied, and very little data simplification occurs. When you compress a JPEG with 50% image quality, a very high compression level is implied and a lot of data simplification occurs.

It’s probably best to try and keep your image quality somewhere between 65% and 85%. Below 65% image quality the amount of data degradation starts to become distracting from the image. Anything above 85% image quality generally looks exactly the same to the human eye, and will only result in a larger file size.

Image size

This last point may seem obvious, but it remains a very common error on the web. When creating your final image, make sure you size it to exactly the size you want to display it at on the web. By size, I mean the area the image takes up on the screen, measured in the number of pixels from left to right (the X axis), and the number of pixels from top to bottom (the Y axis).

If you render your final image bigger than the size at which you intend to display it on your website, you are just making a larger file, making your website take longer to load.

Also, forget about DPI, and inches or centimeters when sizing your images for the web. The web is measured in pixels, and the size of a pixel varies from screen to screen, making DPI an irrelevant concept.

What RSS is

The Wiki article puts it very succintly.

RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process.

Once subscribed to the feed in the RSS reader, the visitor no longer needs to visit your website in order to read your updates. The former visitor now becomes a reader of your content as it is syndicated to their RSS reader. This makes reading the content of her favorite websites more convenient by bringing just the relevant content from those websites into once place, the RSS reader.

Whether this is a good thing for your website is up for debate. Do you really want people reading your website’s content without actually visiting your website? Anyways…

The RSS icon

The RSS icon was probably the first “social media icon”. It’s that small orange icon with the concentric semi-circles found in the footer of a website, inviting the visitor to “click to subscribe”. Over time, more social media icons appeared in this space inviting clicks to things like twitter feeds and facebook pages.

This is probably why the confusion about RSS began.

People used to clicking the twitter and facebook icons in the footers of websites started clicking the RSS icon out of curiosity, and were probably disappointed by what they got.

Wikipedia mentions clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates a subscribe process. In order for the subscribe process to occur, the visitor clicking the rss icon must have an RSS reader installed on her computer which will detect the icon click and handle the subscription. If no such reader is installed, and the web-browser doesn’t also behave as an RSS reader (some do), the visitor will most likely be greeted by a screen full of XML that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
        <title>RSS Title</title>
        <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
        <link>http://www.someexamplerssdomain.com/main.html</link>
        <lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000 </lastBuildDate>
        <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
        <ttl>1800</ttl>

        <item>
                <title>Example entry</title>
                <description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description>
                <link>http://www.wikipedia.org/</link>
                <guid>unique string per item</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
        </item>

</channel>
</rss>

It’s quite a different action than that which occurs when clicking on the twitter or facebook icon, which simply opens the twitter or facebook page in the browser.

What RSS isn’t

Because of the placement of other social media icons near the RSS icon, all of which lead to other web pages, people who are not familiar with RSS naturally expect the RSS icon to do the some thing as the others. Open the “RSS web page”. Unfortunately, as I’ve just discussed, there is no such thing. There may be web-based RSS readers such as Google Reader, but RSS isn’t a web page. It’s a bunch of XML gobbledy-gook meant to be read by a machine. A machine running an RSS reader!

My radical solution

Since the social media icon context has changed from meaning click here to subscribe to my RSS feed with your RSS reader, to meaning click on these icons to read my tweets and updates on social media websites, I suggest surrendering all of the social media icon space on your website to social media website. RSS icons aren’t really necessary, anyway, as these days hidden code within a website can tell an RSS reader what to subscribe to. This allows you to subscribe to a website’s RSS feed simply by entering the website’s address. It would eliminate the confusing RSS icon and make all social media icons behave the same way.

I realize this post is a little technical, and hard to understand if you’ve never used an RSS reader before. Here are a couple of links to popular readers so that you can try them out.

Google Reader (a web-based RSS reader)
RSS owl A stand-alone desktop application RSS reader for most platforms.

Well, it’s time for you to take over your shiny new site and make it work for you. And that means you’re going to need to learn how to use the WordPress CMS (Content Management System. A great place to start is with the WordPress Lessons documentation which can be found here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons

Another great way to get comfortable with your WordPress site is to watch a tutorial video. This way you will be able to see somebody actually walk through the WordPress dashboard and follow along. There’s a great WordPress tutorial video series here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJoodIiuy5I&feature=related

Another excellent resource is lynda.com. this site offers a wealth of information and tutorials on all things technical including excellent tutorials on WordPress. There’s a fee for the service and we’ve found it to be good value for money.

http://www.lynda.com/search?q=wordpress&x=33&y=8

Finally, book a training session with us. With most projects we offer a one or two hour training session. It can be a great way to answer any lingering questions you may have after reviewing the resources above.

Happy WordPressing!

Here are five questions you should ask your potential hosting provider in order to make sure you are choosing one that will be problem free, and easy to work with.

1. Is web-hosting the company’s primary business?

To provide web hosting is not a difficult task. Any company with access to a server room and a fast Internet connection can do it. As a result, just about every telephone company, Internet service provider, and communications firm offers hosting.

Unfortunately, while it may be easy to offer hosting, it is very difficult to offer good hosting. When a company’s main focus is something other than their web hosting, you will usually find that they are slow to respond to your support requests and they don’t keep their service up to date. They often have downtime and take a long time to restore service.

2. Does the hosting company offer the LAMP stack?

Yes, Windows has come a long way and definitely sucks less than it did in the 90s. But it still makes for a poor web-hosting platform for anything meant to run on a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack.

When you are running WordPress, Drupal, or any of the other PHP-based (PHP) CMS (Content Management System) platforms, you should always choose to run them on the platform for which they are developed. This will help prevent unexpected incompatibilities such as the Windows file-path problem, and non-standard URL rewriting systems.

3. Is an easy to use control panel provided?

Just about every hosting company offers a control panel these days. What makes a big difference is if the control panel offered is easy to use. There are several third party control panel products available these days. If you are comfortable using one of them, make sure your hosting company uses it, and make sure it is kept up to date. A 2 year old version of CPanel is a sign of a stagnating web-hosting company.

Also, look for a custom built control panel. If a hosting company has developed their own control panel system, it’s likely that it is going to be simpler to use. Just make sure you get a chance to take it for a test drive before you commit.

4. Do they make it easy to get SSH access to the web-server?

This is perhaps the most telling question you can ask your provider. If SSH access to the server is not provided, it usually means the company is not confident about their system’s security.

Going without SSH access will also mean many of the tasks involved in uploading, launching, and maintaining your website will take much more time than is necessary. This could lead to high system administration bills if you’re paying someone to take care of these tasks for you.

5. Can you seamlessly upgrade you service?

It’s a great problem to have. You launch your website on an inexpensive shared hosting environment, and it becomes so popular that you need to move it to a private virtual server to get the kind of performance your visitors demand.

But there’s often a catch. Lesser hosting companies will stop supporting you once you’ve moved onto a private server. You may even find that you are required to take care of all of the system administration of your new private server.

Make sure when you upgrade your service your hosting company will continue to support you and will provide you with a complete turn-key web-server, and will continue to provide system administration services such as data backups, and system upgrades.

Major search engines submission pages:
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

It can also pay off to have your site listed in DMOZ. DMOZ is an open website directory project that gets included in a lot of smaller search engines all over the world. To get your site listed in DMOZ, follow these instructions.

DMOZ submission instructions:
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Finally, I always think it’s a good idea to ask for feedback about your site by addressing a couple of appropriate google (Usenet) groups. It’s an easy way to get people looking at your site, and can help to create a little bit of link popularity to get your site started on its way to the front page of the search engines.

Browse the list of google groups for one which is appropriate to you site, and politely ask for people to have a look and tell you what they think. If you’re intimidated about posting to Google Groups, you can read about Usenet posting ettiquete here: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

Google Groups:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!browse

Last year, Media Democracy Day drew together more than a thousand people in dialogue about the state of media in Canada and around the world. Two of this year’s key speakers are Judy Rebick, author and founder of Rabble.ca and Dr. Sut Jhally, professor and founder of the Media Education Foundation.

Panel discussions will include topics like unions and public opinion in a crisis economy, aboriginal uses of new media and the future of journalism.

The Sunday program will include hands-on media workshops.

Media Democracy Days’ mission is: Know the Media. Be the Media. Change the Media.

For more information visit the MDD site: http://mediademocracyday.org/2011/09/