Funny.pho.to

There are some really neat, fun things available on the Internet for free, and here's one. Funny.pho.to is a quick, easy way to make a sketch of your photo, which I used for a birthday card I was preparing. This is a great website, very intuitive, and easy to understand. Give it a try.

Street graffiti. How cool is this.

Internet Privacy Tool

In cruising around the Internet you sometimes find yourself looking for one thing and finding another. Finding Ghostery is an example. I was not looking for this tool, but now that I have it, I'm happy to share.

With Ghostery installed in my Chrome Browser a popup window opens when I visit a website revealing what they are tracking. Ghostery is free, and if nothing else it helps level the playing field when I know what they know.

It all started with this article in Forbes: The Web Cookie Is Dying. Here's The Creepier Technology That Comes Next.

Ghostery has an interesting Facebook page, and who knows where this might take you.

TinEye Reverse Image Search

I got interested in knowing what free images I can use in brochures, posters, etc., and I first turned to Google and found webTegrity, which was a big help in how to search for photos and images that can be used without worries about copyright infringement.

After you've located the perfect images, and you just want to be sure, the next step is TinEye Reverse Image Search.

Here's what TinEye says about themselves:

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.

TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 11,350,945,081 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.

There are many people who do want their work shared, and sometimes this comes with certain restrictions. Creative Commons is a resource worth knowing about, if it's your work, and you want to share, but you want certain control over how your work is used.

New Walnut Grove Responsive Website

I'm reading an article in the Toronto Star (article) this morning, which has to do with citizen journalism. Here's an interesting statistic, which if true says something about how many of us are carrying and using mobile devices. According to the article, a 2013 report by Google estimated that 56 per cent of Canadians use a smartphone, and that eight in 10 smartphone owners don't leave home without their device. And, smartphone owners are becoming increasingly reliant on their devices with 66% accessing the Internet every day on their smartphone. The article is here.

That said - for those of us who design and build websites, best we all start thinking responsive. My latest website (walnutgrovekingston.ca), does just that.

Re-sizing your browser window will quickly demonstrate just how responsive works. You build one website, but because it responds to re-sizing, the mobile viewer isn't left trying to read small type, or menus that are too small to be functional.

I currently build only Joomla websites, and my responsive templates come from either RocketTheme or JoomSpirit. The Walnut Grove website is an example of RocketTheme responsive website template. The Inglis Advertising website is an example of a JoomSpirit responsive template.

Sketch Photo Effect Action Tool For Photoshop

Before - Nice picture of a pink rose

Here's an interesting Photoshop tool that many (including me), may find handy. It's a sketch effects designed to quickly give your pictures a watery look and feel, something like they've been drawn. Although, I don't think anyone would be fooled for a minute, I still like what it does.

After Sketch Effect

Here it is after. All it took was a punch of the action key and here's what we get.

You can create these actions yourself, or you can buy them here.

After Sketch Effects

Finally, here's sort of a blend. I made a copy of the original photo and dropped it on top of the one I had modified with Sketch Effects. Then I reduced the opacity slightly to achieve this look.

Click on images to view them in a larger size.

How to use textures as bump maps using lighting effects in PS

This image has been modified in Photoshop using layers, and then lighting effects.

The texture layer is simple enough, and here's the link to a quick video, which explains how to do this plus the light effects.

To achieve lighting effects in Photoshop follow these menu steps: Filter/Render/Lighting Effects.

Thanks to John Shaver at My Design Deals for kicking this off for me. John has a pile of helpful videos on his YouTube channel, if you're looking to get the creative juices flowing in Photoshop.

Joomla 2.5 Change Contact Page Header

I must remember how to modify this Joomla default Contact Page header when necessary. Actually, it's easy.

Assuming you are using something like cPanel, follow this path: File Manager/web root go/language/en.GB/en-GB.com_contact.ini/.

If you are using cPanel, click the edit icon on the top row. Then select edit from the pop-up window. Look for these two lines and change the copy in quotes to look like this:

• COM_CONTACT_STATE="Province"
• COM_CONTACT_SUBURB="City"

Save your changes, and you're done.