Graphic/Web Design Blog

I receive numerous hits by a robot that only identifies itself as

www.nachofoto.com
with ip address: 216.218.135.114

As far as I can tell this website just harvests images providing no benefit to your website or blog. Plus the robot does not have a user agent.

I blocked this ip address from accessing my site and you should do the same.

Lately I have been receiving hits by a robot named Snapbot/1.o. In my referral logs it refers to itself as

ROBOT
with ip: 38.98.19.67 and user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (SnapPreviewBot) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9

or as

SPAM
with ip: 38.98.19.68 and user agent: Snapbot/1.0 (Snap Shots, +http://www.snap.com)

If you check out snap’s website, they state that the robot is used to show thumbnails of your site to users that have their browser plug-in installed. In addition, frequent hits could also be their robot snapbot/1.o indexing your site for future thumb views.

So if you are receiving traffic from ip address range: 38.98.19.66 to 38.98.19.126 they are from snap.com and appear harmless.

I love using BBClone as a quick on the fly page counting system. BBClone is a website counter written in php and gives the user a quick summary of who is on their site and where that visitor came from.

Note:
This post will be very technical assuming the reader has a basic understanding of BBClone and the ability to edit your blog’s source code with a text editor.

For starters this is the snippet of code you will need:

<?php
define(’_BBC_PAGE_NAME’, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
define(”_BBCLONE_DIR”, “../website/bbclone/“);
define(”COUNTER”, _BBCLONE_DIR.”mark_page.php”);
if (is_readable(COUNTER)) include_once(COUNTER);
?>

There are two parts to this code that make it work with WordPress. The first is on the first line and is dark red. $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] will display this when a visitor hits a page:

This is the complete path to the page minus the root directory.

Note:
If you are familiar with BBClone those stats will make sense. For readers not familiar with BBClone this tells me I had a hit to my Changing Measurements Shortcut in InDesign blog post with referer digg.com and with a search query of indesign.

The green text on line two: ../website/bbclone/ is the path where bbclone will write to. This will be different depending what directory contains the bbclone files.

I have not been able to get it to work except when adding the code manually to the source code of each page in my blog.

What I did was opened the following pages in a php text editor: 404.php, archive.php, index.php, links.php, page.php, search.php, single.php and then looked for this code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I placed the snippet of code directly after the get_footer() function. When I tried to place the code in the actual footer.php file all I received was error messages, so this was the next best thing.

Good luck, leave a comment if you get stuck and I will try to help debug.

For bloggers that do not have Adobe Photoshop, this image reflection generator is a slick online application that will let you create reflected images and logos. You can enter a url or browse your computer for an image, then select how much image will show in the reflection and what color to fade into. This is a screen shot from the site:

As you can see the best part of this generator is it has a download button. Clicking the button will save the image to your computer in .jpg form.

Adding a favicon to your website can be done with an online favicon generator and one line of html code.

First, check out this site to create your favicon out of a square image or if you prefer to create it in Adobe Photoshop you will need to download a plug in from telegraphics. Remember favicons are 16×16 square images so simple images are better.

Next, save this image to the root directory of your website.

Finally, add this snippet of code to the header section of each webpage:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/ico” />

This method is pretty universal but should be checked in many popular browsers. It should also be noted that depending on some servers the favicon man not display immediately.

Converting color profiles can be done in 3 steps with Adobe InDesign. The top reason is usually when setting up a document to be printed by a print press.

Note:
Always consult with print companies regarding printer profiles, some may provide custom color profiles for you to use.

Selecting a color profile gives the designer almost full control of what the output of a project will look like. Images should be converted using Adobe Photoshop prior to importing.

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Here is a quick tip to help new designers find Pantone color libraries in Adobe Illustrator. Pantone is a company that created the Pantone Matching System (PMS). This system allows designers and printers to be on the same page color wise.

For some reason Adobe hid this color library in Illustrator. This is how to find it. (more…)

Pemaquid Communications, a Maine based design company posted a press release on Press Release Maine that they are creating custom Facebook Applications using facebook’s open architecture. According to Pemaquid Communication’s blog, they have already created a dynamic interface for local Maine band Lost on Liftoff.

Read the press release on prmaine.com:
Pemaquid Communications releases Facebook apps

Trimming refers to a finishing process where sheets of paper are cut or trimmed to your specified size. This is usually the last or almost last step in a printing process.

For example: If you created a 6″ x 8″ booklet, the printer will print it on larger paper and trim away 3 sides to give the final result.

Changing your measurement in InDesign is very easy with this 2 click shortcut eliminating the need to go into edit >> preferences. Even though this quick tutorial is for InDesign it should be noted this tip is useful across the board in most Adobe products that uses a ruler.

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