How to Use Color Isolation in Blog Headers
Posted by How To BlogI’ve recently been playing around with creating quick but aesthetically pleasing header graphics for some of my blogs. I’ve hired illustrators to design header graphics for some of my blogs and have been quite pleased with the results overall. However it can be expensive and isn’t something I recommend for amateur blogs or people new to the blogging arena.
Therefore I’m going to show you how to use Photoshop CS 5.0 to perform something called color isolation.
Color isolation is quite simply, the process of taking a color photograph and “isolating” just one of its colors. Here’s an example of color separation:
Here’s the original photo:
And here’s the photo after the color isolation process:
As you can see, everything in the photo is in black and white except for the red top that the girl is wearing.
So, how do you do that? Well, I’m going to tell you:
1. Open Photoshop CS 5.0. Select the background layer.
2. Right click on the layer and select “Duplicate Layer” to make a copy of that layer. Name the duplicate layer or leave the default layer name.
3. Click on the duplicate layer and from the pull-down menu at the top select Image, Magic Extractor.
4. Make sure the Foreground Brush Tool is selected:
5. Click multiple times on the item that should keep its color. Red dots should appear wherever you click. You don’t need to cover the entire area, just be sure to cover some of the interior and the edges.
6. Select the Background Brush Tool:
7. Click multiple times on the areas that will be converted to black and white. Again, you don’t have to cover the entire area but be sure to click the areas that border the “red dot” area:
8. Click OK when done. The red area should not have a bounding box around it:
9. Select the background layer.
10. From the pull-down menu at the top select Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation.
11. Make sure the Preview option is selected. Move the saturation slider to the left. Notice that the color is removed from all areas of the photo except the red area. Once you’ve modified the saturation level to your liking click the OK button.
12. Voila! You’re done!
Bluehost Is Down
Posted by Amateur BlogsI believe I’ve discovered a pattern that seems to be in play with my Bluehost domains. It seems that almost every Sunday afternoon I begin noticing performance delays. It’s currently 5:00pm EST and right now I can’t get to any of my sites hosted on Bluehost. Why? Because the server that houses my sites is down.
As you may know, I spent a lot of time trying to resolve the problems created last weekend by a wonderful bleeping hacker at one of my niche sites. In a nutshell, this person exploited my Wordpress site by writing to my footer.php file through a vulnerability in my template. The call to wp_footer() is apparently a known issue that others have had problems with. It took all weekend and a few week days to finally get that problem straightened out. So I’d planned to get caught up on some design work this weekend. No such luck. And wouldn’t you know that Bluehost went down just as I was attempting to save some code I’d just typed into a template file.
In searching for the term “Bluehost is down” it looks like they had problems yesterday as well. I found several posts from people whose sites were down because of problems with Bluehost. I also found a couple of posts from some folks who believe the Bluehost servers are overloaded and therefore prone to performance problems. I’m not sure about that but I do know that none of my sites at Dreamhost have had any problems since I set them up a few weeks ago.
You know the saying “time is money?” Well, you internet marketers out there know that “uptime is money.” I wonder how many times do first-time visitors attempt to access a site before they give up? Two times? Three? Only once? Hmmn.
Right now I have domains at both Bluehost and Dreamhost. I plan to set up new sites with other hosting companies. So my question to you is:
Which Hosting Company Do You Use for Wordpress? How reliable is it? Would you recommend it to others?
How to Overwrite Your Blog In 1 Easy Step
Posted by How To BlogLast week I noticed that the search traffic to one of my niche sites had dropped off considerably. As in, I’m now getting less than half of the normal traffic. So I started poking around my Wordpress files to see if I could identify the culprit.
What I found was that when I selected View, Source in IE 7 the bottom of the page was showing <strong>500-600 spam links</strong>. Imagine hundreds upon hundreds of porn-related anchor text! No wonder my site had been slapped by G. The links weren’t visible to the naked eye but were definitely present in the HTML source code for EVERY PAGE ON MY SITE.
I submitted some inquiries at forums to no avail – no one could figure out how the links had been placed there. I then ran a few Google searches and came upon a similar problem that someone had reported with their Movable Type blog. Apparently their site had been spammed because of a plugin they’d activated that contained malicious code. Hmmn.
A check of my plugins showed that one of them had a modification date of 3/22/09, the day BEFORE my site took a nose dive. Since I haven’t added or modified any plugins in several weeks I quickly disabled and deleted it. However, I still had to find out how to get rid of those spam links.
A check of the Wordpress files at my site showed that footer.php had been modified on 3/22/09. Coincidence? Hell no. I haven’t modified the footer in months.
Sure enough, when I opened that file I found the source of the spammy links. They were all listed at the bottom of footer.php. Guys, you just don’t know how angry I was when I saw those porn links. I’ve deleted them and I’m monitoring the site, but this really pisses me off. My footer.php file was 6,000 times larger than normal.
Here’s the worst part of this story. Because of this problem I decided to manually upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.7, which is supposed to be more secure than earlier versions. I made a mistake and ended up OVERWRITING A DIFFERENT NICHE SITE! Yes, I overwrote the entire site because I highlighted the wrong domain in FileZilla. I called BlueHost and the nice man from India told me that I was screwed (my words not his). BlueHost doesn’t keep backups. I have a backup SQL file but I’m clueless as to where to copy it. And I’m gun shy now that I messed up the site. I’ve submitted a ticket with BlueHost about this.
I went to the Google cache and was able to copy and paste several of my posts into Notepad but then Google decided that I was a spam robot and cut me off.
So, in a nutshell, TODAY HAS SUCKED. I think I need to go to church . . .