Words from Alejandro U. Alvarez
General talk
A place for all random thoughts and ideas that come across my mind and I can’t find the right “category” to put in…
Web Design DIY
Apr 11th
I've recently found out that I've committed the design error I hate the most in the world. I've thought as I was doing my first design in paper "I'll put ... right here, as it is now done". And I must say, this is the greatest brick wall for a designer, where many get stuck among the others, that humongous group formed by all the mediocre designers out there that do stuff the way it is supposed to do, the group of web designers who think that being original is "putting that cool badge in the header" or adding an "accordion menu" in their sites...
And of course I'm not saying that an accordion menu is not a good navigation element, which could be perfectly discussed it that were the current topic, or that having the Web 2.0 badge is not appropriate, and I'm sure that if you as a reader are not understanding it is probably because you have fallen for this common errors.
The solution: The simplest thing possibly, let your inner designer go, free yourself from conventional constraints that diminish your ability to create great sites, original layouts, CSS innovative techniques... After all, you don't need to be a Guru to create high quality things, you only need to use your unique understanding of the world, of the design fashion, and the site's personality to develop the final design.
Following this philosophy I've been experimenting with this blog's design, and my main website's design, without arriving at a result I actually enjoy. Many ideas are running around my mind without taking a concrete form yet. I am willing to produce all the graphics myself, with bright colors and a high contrast relation between background/foreground, without any intermediary elements, a design that will make both the logo and design pop out, without over-filling the background with distractive images, but still have it be astounding.
I wonder if you've ever heard of M.C.Escher, for me one of the greatest artists of all times, an artist who new how to blend the illusion with the art, creating a deeply emotional kind of art that seemed almost magical. I wish to produce a design for both my website and blog that will share that ability, and create in the reader the illusion/delusion of art.
Hopefully you'll soon be able to see here in this blog that idea coming to a concrete shape, and materializing into my definite public appearance.
For the moment you'll have to cope with this 
Thanks to all of you readers,
Alex
Digg’s Math easter egg
Apr 10th
I was digging around a while ago (1-April-2008) when suddenly my diggs appeared like the following (Click to enlarge)
Do you know if this is some sort of easter egg?
PHP easy image editing:
Apr 9th
Do you have a picture upload and you don't know how to easily resize/edit the uploaded images?
Well here is a solution for php that will make your life really easy!
It is called Asido, so you may go and download their code, to follow this tutorial.
First of all I'll suppose you already know how to upload an image. I may write an article about it someday, but for now I'll assume you do know.
So once you have successfully uploaded and moved your picture to its final destination, include Asido's class object, then chose a driver (the gd driver works fine), and then chose file names. You can leave in both the same, so that all changes are made to the uploaded image and stored in the uploaded image.
include('class.asido.php'); asido::driver('gd'); $i1 = asido::image($new_file_name,$new_file_name);
And now you can start working:
Resizing your image:
With Asido resizing an image is as easy as this:
Resizing proportionally using the width:
Asido::width($i1, 200); $i1->save(ASIDO_OVERWRITE_ENABLED);
Where 200 is the new width, "$i1->save(ASIDO_OVERWRITE_ENABLED);" saves the image.
You can achieve the same effect using "Asido::resize($i1, 200, 0);"
Resizing proportionally using the height:
Asido::height($i1, 200); $i1->save(ASIDO_OVERWRITE_ENABLED);
Where 200 is the new height.
You can achieve the same effect using "Asido::resize($i1, 0, 200);"
Adding a watermark
A very useful tip when you are developing a public picture upload, to get some marketing
So you need a png image with your watermark, for the example I named it watermark.png
asido::watermark($i1, 'watermark.png'); $i1->save(ASIDO_OVERWRITE_ENABLED);
You can place the watermark wherever you want in the original pic, just use one of the following constants:
ASIDO_WATERMARK_TOP_LEFT, ASIDO_WATERMARK_TOP_CENTER, ASIDO_WATERMARK_TOP_RIGHT, ASIDO_WATERMARK_MIDDLE_LEFT, ASIDO_WATERMARK_MIDDLE_CENTER, ASIDO_WATERMARK_MIDDLE_RIGHT, ASIDO_WATERMARK_BOTTOM_LEFT, ASIDO_WATERMARK_BOTTOM_CENTER, ASIDO_WATERMARK_BOTTOM_RIGHT and ASIDO_WATERMARK_TILE
Other features
With this great image handler you can do all of the following actions:
- Stretch
- Fit
- Frame
- Convert
- Rotate
- Flip
- Flop
- Crop
- Copy
- Grayscale
Visit their feature list for full support on the above actions.
If you have any questions please comment!
SEO Tool: Search Engine position checker
Apr 6th
I've just finished developing a stable release of quite an advanced SEO tool, I called it "position checker".
What it does is it crawls the selected search engines upon a list of given queries, and it tries to find matches with your site. If it finds them it tells you on which page and where was it linking.
It is pretty fast, and it allows you to easily know how well your website ranks for certain search queries.
Visit the advanced position checker
How it works:
It uses a lot of arrays to store the information, since it helped me a lot simplifying the task of handling multiple streams of information and comparing them looking for matches.
To crawl and extract the links I've used a class I've found at php classes, which is based in curl.
The full code and test page can be downloaded here:
- Download zip - 116kb (582 downloads)
If you have any suggestion, comment, or improvement for this idea, please comment!