WestHost Webmaster Connection May 4th, 2006

Specials    6 Months Free & No Setup Fees!    Managed Dedicated Server Special  Web Development Tips    Photoshop Image Correction  Marketing Tips    Track Your Rank using the Google API  Notable Site    Alistapart.com  Quote of the Week    Hard Work

Specials

6 Months Free & No Setup Fees! For a limited time, WestHost is offering up to 6 months free and no set up fees when you sign up for a new account! The offer is good for a limited time only. For more details, please visit our Packages Page. back to top Dedicated Server Special For a limited time, WestHost is slashing set up fees on dedicated servers, and DOUBLING the bandwidth on our plans! For more information, please visit the Dedicated Server Section of our website. back to top

Web Development Tips

Photoshop Image Correction Eight years ago we sold our darkroom equipment and moved our image editing to the computer. The image editing software we chose was Adobe Photoshop. It took us about a year to be able to make images from the computer that were as good as ones we had made in our wet darkroom. Today we are making images that we could not even have dreamed of making before. Since then our expertise in Photoshop has increased many times over, and we continue to refine our workflow. This tutorial is based on Photoshop version 6 for Windows. The following is the basic workflow we use to prepare our images. Levels Adjustment to correct exposure and color cast Hue/Saturation adjustment to correct overall saturation and saturation of specific colors Removing dust and scratches Sizing the image for output Sharpening the image USING an ADJUSTMENT LAYER Although tools like Levels and Hue/Saturation can be applied directly to an image layer, Photoshop offers another more flexible means called adjustment layers. An adjustment layer differs from an image layer in that the adjustment layer does not contain any pixels. It does include instructions on how the image layers below it will be affected. An adjustment layer can also contain a mask, which limits the areas of the image that will be affected. Using an adjustment layer has the advantage that you can come back at any time and make changes, even after the image has been closed and reopened. By using adjustment layers your original image is left unchanged. In this tutorial the use of the Levels and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layers will be shown. They make up the basis of image, color correcting in Photoshop. (Click Here to continue reading this article) back to top

Marketing Tips

Track Your Rank Using the Google API By: Bernard Peh In 2002, Google implemented an API for its popular search engine to allow web developers to perform Google searches on their own web sites. Using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the API allows the search and results retrieval to run in the background. Many people also like to make use of the Google API in order to customise the way search results are displayed on their sites. However, one of the lesser-known benefits of being able to access the Google API is that you can use it to find your site's search ranking in Google, without having to visit the Google web site. Developers and site owners are often interested in keeping up to date with how well their sites rank for certain keywords. The traditional way to do this is to type your search term into google.com (or your browser's Google search bar), then manually sift through the result pages that appear, looking for your URL. If your site is not optimized for the keyword that you searched for, your URL may be ranked quite low (for example, on the 50th page!). In situations like this, looking for your URL would be tedious, to say the least. Fortunately, web services are available that automate this otherwise time-consuming process. However, many of these services place restrictions on the number of records you can query. For example, some web services will stop looking for your URL after the 200th record. In this article, I'll introduce a script that enables you to utilize the Google API to find your site's ranking in Google. The script has a built-in feature that queries the Google server again if there is an error, and allows you to limit the number of results that are returned. I've packaged up this script so you can download the code we'll use in this article. Note that at the time of writing, the Google API was still in beta. As a result, there might be some changes to the Google API in the future, though I don't imagine that they'd be too drastic. (Click Here to continue reading this article) back to top

Notable Site

alistapart.com alistapart.com provides a great resource for webmasters including articles on coding, design, and the process of building websites. To find out more, please visit http://www.alistapart.com/ back to top

Quote of the Week

Imagination "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." - Thomas Jefferson                                                                                 back to top

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