TIP - Copyright

This post is in response to a question by phaseoutgirl (Cecilia) who hosts a blog called 'Dance with the Sun' (what a terrific name; doesn't it just invite you to visit?). She wished to know how to post a copyright note at the bottom of her pictures, similar to how David manages to copyright his own pictures. So let's deal with that first:

Thyson being introduced to a baby lovebird!
Photograph © 2007 Terry Fletcher

 

Follow the normal steps you use to post a message and an image, by using the 'Compose' (WYSIWYG) editing window. After you've inserted the picture and arranged it to display where you want it, hit return once and type in your copyright information. Then highlight those words and select 'center' and the text 'font-size-colour' you want it to display in (note: If you didn't already know, you can get the © symbol by simply using the key combination "Alt+0169" on your number pad - doesn't work with the numbers on the top row of your keyboard!).

Done!

Not one to stop with just a single example (hey, that's my weakness and you'll just have to put up with it) I decided to add these, too:

 

 

If you use a graphics programme that supports 'layers' (Photoshop, etc.), you can type in information as in the example above and superimpose it over the original picture.

• the first is Cecilia's copyright info on a transparent background so that it can be copy/pasted over any of her photographs just by lifting it off this page (go for it, Cecilia!).

• the second is displaying the same information over a gradient background composed of the colours from the background colour of my page and that of Cecilia's page to show that, regardless of the background, the lettering always shows through clearly.

• the third displays the same info over a gradient of white leading to the background colour of Cecilia's page background, showing that regardless of what the background colours are, the lettering will always show up clearly.

If you use this idea you should make the lettering white (hex #FFFFFF) and give the layer drop shadow properties of the following:

Opacity=100% | Angle=120º | Distance=1px | Spread=0% | Size=1px

and you will find that wherever you place the copyright information on your picture it will always show through.

That's all, folks!

 

W3C . . . who, what, when? . . . NOT!

W3C is the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium. It was formed by Tim Berners-Lee (Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA - the acknowledged 'father of the web' and a Brit, no less) with the aim of setting standards & rules for all users of the WWW to abide by. Of course it doesn't happen, but the more 'anal-retentive' people like myself try very hard to meet their standards. Hand over heart, I can say that all but one of the 12 sites I've built (and currently administer) meet those standards, and if you stumble across one of my sites and see the W3C button proudly displayed, you can be assured that clicking on it will confirm that it is so!

Imagine my horror to find that a 'virgin' Blogger site (this one), with only the template loaded and NO posts, did not meet the validation standards, and managed to serve up an error count in the high 80's. Further checks on other Blogger sites I visited confirmed that this is the norm. A search for an answer to this anomaly threw up an explanation that, since Blogger changed to their new format, NO site validates correctly. And that all users are advised to accept this state of affairs until such time as things are rectified. If they ever are!

Aarrrgggghhhhhh!!

I am not about to launch into a discourse on the advantages of standards validation; it is a boring subject and you need to be a bit 'geeky' to even want to investigate it. But I will mention that if you don't try to meet the basic requirements of "Accessibility" then you aren't being very kind to some of your visitors.

• Visually impaired users ( some are even blind) make up a large number of web surfers. They generally use software called 'screen-readers' that will speak every character it comes across. So try and remember that all your 'pretty pictures' aren't much use unless you add some descriptive text in the 'alt' tag. Screen-readers can't unravel graphics. And rather than say something like, "this is a picture", try and make it a bit more descriptive like, "this is a picture of an underwater-basket-weaver". Get the picture?


• You are probably connected to the internet over a broadband connection and have a humoungus-sized computer with a gigantic 22-inch flat screen LCD or TFT monitor. But what about the poor guy with a dial-up connection (DUN), a piddly little P3 and a 14-inch CRT? Exaggeration? Perhaps a little, but there is a small percentage of this kind of user out there and you really ought to take them into consideration when you build your site!

If some of that made you think, even just a little, then we're well on the way to designing super sites that are also accessible to all types of users.

If you are in a masochistic frame of mind, take a trip to the W3C Markup Validation Service, enter your site URL in the box, then sit back and view the results - with horror!

It just has to be the way ahead!

 

TIP - Picture displays 101(a)

Let us step back to the original request about how to insert a picture within a post so that, when clicked, it will take the viewer to a larger version of the same picture, hence allowing more detailed examination.

The only caveat I would add here is that you should try and keep your original pic to a reasonable size, say 800 pixels wide, so that people with slower dial-up connections don't have to wait an age for them to be downloaded to their screen. The real down-side to making the pictures 'huge' is that people might stop visiting if they feel that they have to wait an unnecessarily long time for something to display!

These are views of my garden when I was lucky enough to live in Cyprus for a short time. The house and garden were perched on top of a cliff that overlooked the blue Mediterranean. Glorious!

I just uploaded the originals to Blogger, chose to have them display as 'centred' and in a 'medium' format (size) on the page, and Blogger did the rest.

Now that Blogger had done the hard work I then clicked on the 'edit' icon below the post and chose to edit the HTML version, but only to add a couple of little 'extras'.

You should make it a rule for any picture you display on your site to 'identify' it by giving it some 'alt' text. This helps the visually impaired who may be using a screen reader to access your blog. I did this in the code that Blogger generated. The second thing I did was to insert target="_blank" at the end of the code line so that when a viewer clicks on the picture it is opened in a new window. Frowned on by the W3C standards validation people, but I will explain my reasons at a later date!

Nothing difficult about that, huh?

 

Let's take another tilt at this windmill . . .

I started the 'Sandbox' on the 29th April in response to questions on David McMahon's authorblog, about how to achieve simple picture displays.

In my haste I completely overlooked the fact that I was hosting my blog on my own server, and that editing it to achieve the results I was after was a bit 'geeky' and that it concentrated on editing HTML code. Not something everybody is familiar or comfortable with!

A comment on the Sandbox by 'papoosue', who has a blog called Random Blethers, gently reminded me that not everything I assumed was a simple task, was actually that 'simple'. I gulped, and decided that, to meet the needs of the visitors to David's superb blog, who come to him with many questions and varying degrees of ability, that any explanation needed to concentrate on how things are done using Blogger's excellent built-in system of 'editing'.

The ability to edit most of your display, especially by manipulating the template you've chosen, already exists within the Dashboard elements of Blogger, so why not give your site that 'unique' look?

You could even register another blog, not publish it, but use that as the 'testbed' for any changes you wish to introduce. That way you won't break your original, and when you're satisfied that you have achieved the design of your choice, then copy it across!

So, what are you waiting for?

 

My Profile

This is information about me that does not appear on my Blogger profile. I've added it here to test out the functionality of an 'additional' profile that expands on what Blogger publishes.

• I was born in India in 1944 and studied in various English-medium (Anglo-Indian) schools, some as a day scholar, most as a boarder, until the age of 16.
• By the time I'd turned 17 my parents decided that the only hope for me to make my way in the world was to pack me off to the UK.
• I arrived in the UK in March 1962, and stayed with friends that originally came from the same Railway Colony in which I lived in India.
• I arrived on a Sunday and had landed a job by Thursday. An 'apprenticeship' that ultimately turned out to be a con, but that's for a full post some time in the future!
• Dissatisfied with the mind-numbing, repetitive task of producing 'electrical cable twists', from the sort of light stuff (pun intended) you use every day, to heavier lengths that often ended up as 'undersea cable', I applied to join the military.
• My first port of call was the Army, but they didn't have vacancies for 'tradesmen', only canon-fodder in the infantry. I declined and approached the RAF.
• The RAF welcomed me into the 'Communications' trade and that's what I spent the next 36 years doing, never bored, because you never knew what awaited you when you signed on for your shift. One of the highlights was speaking to an aircraft tasked to carry HRH, The Prince of Wales, whilst it was still on the deck in Kathmandu. I happened to be on a tiny, remote island in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away. That, too will appear as a post some time in the future!
• I met Maria during my last months in the RAF, and in 1998 I joined her in Portugal to start another life. Which I am still living. Eat your hearts out!

That is a quick résumé, to which I might add from time to time, as the notion takes me  ...