SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SECRETS. Danny Dover. Wiley. wiley.com.
Trade paper, $34.99, 355 pp.
Search Engine Optimization Secrets is a good book, not only for those who want to make a career out of search engine optimization (also known as SEO), but also for those website owners who want to attract more traffic to their sites. It is a tricky field to enter, because the search engine such as Google and Bing are constantly changing their rules. Here’s an example: Not long ago, web designers would “stuff” keywords into text, sometimes hiding them in small white characters at the bottom of a page. It worked for a while, until the search engines caught wind of it. According to author Danny Dover, this tactic not only does not work any longer (if it ever did), but it can also get you penalized by the search engines and earn you low rankings on search results.
He also talks about other tips for getting high ranks. Something called the “temporal algorithm” can often get you momentary hits on your website; for example, if a timely news item like Michael Jackson's death makes an appearance on your site, a lot of people will visit your site's seeking information about this event. Another tip is to avoid pitfalls in naming your domain: avoid hyphens, names longer than 15 characters, and generic uncommon domains like.ws and .info. Most helpful is the suggestion to provide good content, stuff people actually want to read such as humor and your own style of tips. He also tells you to avoid Flash, JavaScript (the kind with no HTML alternative), and frames. For example, on my website Bates communications.net, I have HTML links as well as JavaScript links on my pages. If I didn't have both and a non-JavaScript enabled visitor tried to access my pages, they wouldn't be able to do it. In addition, he heartily recommends that webmasters sign up for Google Webmaster Central, that handy control panel for websites with SEO tools. He also lets you in on keyword density tools, both free and fee-based (like that of his company, SEOmoz, the Term Target Tool). (In between tips that you paid for by buying this book, the author inserts plugs for his own SEO business and its tools.)
Some of the book’s design is a bit annoying. For example, to emphasize a point in text or a cogent snippet, he “highlights” it in dark blue. This is to approximate the old yellow highlighter that we all used in college. However in this case, it makes reading the highlighted text a bit harder. Also, his marginalia is formatted slightly off-kilter and in an informal-looking script. A lot of it could just have likely have been ported to the notes that he does provide, or rewritten as part of the text itself. I also would've liked him to have toned down – or eliminated – his hokey sense of humor, the kind that those “Car Talk” guys use on National Public Radio. Humor's a very subjective thing and people read such books for instruction, not amusement. Also, why did he point users to an introductory SEO article on his website, rather than just insert said article as Chapter 1? Could this have been just an afterthought caused by an oversight? (“Omigosh, we forgot to provide an introductory article to SEO in the book!”)
Despite these flaws, this is a worthwhile book filled with detailed information about how to critically evaluate a client's home page for possible improvement or why to start a blog or write for a content aggregator (like e-zinearticles.com). He says it is a good idea to search on terms relating to a company's brand name that could possibly indicate a bad website, like brand-name sucks and brand name review. (This is very clever, by the way.) If I were optimizing clients’ websites, I would choose this book for its many tips. Unfortunately, it could use a glossary.
--Peter Bates
PHOTOSHOP CS5 RESTORATION
AND RETOUCHING. Mark Fitzgerald. Wiley. wiley.com.
Trade paper, $44.99, 355 pp.
Retouching photographs can be an arduous and tricky procedure. Photoshop does not necessarily respond in the way that its help files say it does, and quite often the results are unsatisfactory and perplexing. That is why I was happy to read Mark Fitzgerald's Adobe Photoshop CS5 Restoration and Retouching.
This book is superbly well-written and well-organized. FitzGerald wisely starts off with a introductory course in digital editing as it applies to Photoshop. In fact he does it for the first 164 pages. He not only discusses Photoshop but touches upon Adobe Bridge, the organizational software for viewing and categorizing photographs. This Creative Suite product is also capable of performing initial touchups to photographs, but Fitzgerald chooses not to get into that aspect of the product.
Instead, he concentrates on Photoshop itself, that behemoth of options, tactics, plug-ins, and strategies for enhancing old photographs or those you've recently taken under less than favorable conditions. He does not spend time discussing arcane tools like Vanishing Point or Render Clouds but rather those that are most often used. In that respect, I find his book more helpful than most 1000 page reference tomes. By concentrating on what is most commonly used and what is most necessary, like adjustment layers (such as Curves and Levels), and color adjustment tools (Color Balance and Variations). FitzGerald performs a highly needed service. Each section ends with a short one-page Q&A, which is not exactly a summary of the chapter, but adds additional useful information.
The tutorials are splendid. He takes existing photographs and walks you through removing tears, dust, glasses glare, and even changing people's heads from one photograph to the next. He talks about that bugbear of all retouchers: knowing when to stop. If you are charging by the hour, sometimes a client does not want the photograph to be as perfect as your additional hour of labor would make it. They would prefer to have been charged less money. Also, if the final print is going to be only an 8 x 10, you do not have to get out every nasty blotch as if it is going to be a 30 x 40 “ poster.
However, there are two things that I wish he would have included in this book (in addition to discussing Adobe Bridge retouching tools).
One, I wish he would've discussed the most useful addition to Adobe Photoshop CS5 since the previous edition of this book, when it covered Photoshop CS3. I'm talking about Content Aware, that feature that allows you to select a relatively large portion of the photograph, remove it and automatically fill in the hole with the surrounding environment. I've seen entire horses get removed from fields, using this tool. He briefly mentions it in regards to its additional use as an option for the Spot healing brush, yet he doesn't show how to use it, nor does he discuss its operational quirks like he does for other components, such as the Patch Tool.
Two, I wish he would have included a section on other helpful plug-ins. He does discuss one of them, Portraiture 2 by Imagenomic. There are many others that can help. An entire chapter could've been devoted to discussing some interesting retouching plug-ins for Photoshop, such as Akvis Retoucher. Such plug-ins are invaluable in addressing Photoshop's built-in quirks and shortcomings.
Ah yes, quirks. I admire Fitzgerald for talking about the quirks of some of Photoshop's tools and how you have to be aware of “gotchas” like smudging, and the fact that the Spot Healing Brush “works best in areas that are low in detail such as backgrounds.” Other how-to books simply give you instructions, making you feel like an idiot if these instructions don't work exactly as described.
This is an excellent book, and probably the best one about retouching Photoshop on the market today. It is not perfect, but it's pretty close.
--Peter Bates
Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, The Bright Motels.
Wendy Drexler. Puddinghouse Press. Chapbook, $10.75, 32 pp.
What a savvy concept for a chapbook: growing up in Colorado, seen retrospectively through the eyes of a child. Wendy Drexler’s Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, The Bright Motels, although only 32 pages long, is a thoroughly sage portrait of her as a child, her thought patterns, her trying to make sense of her parent’s divorce and her mother’s dating, and her own maturing body. There is humor too, as when she satirizes ‘50s mores in “Mommy’s Boyfriends”:
“. . . I tell him
I want her to marry Jack.
After, Mommy says I can hate
Norman if I like, just be polite.”
To add authenticity, she includes a poignant letter from her childhood: “Letter to my Mother on her Honeymoon.” Nice choice. It’s got memorable lines that only a child would write, like “Fellow cut his hind foot and it’s a bloody mess.”
Drexler includes the mundane, like her difficulty with knives and dishwashers, as well as the highly confounding component of growing up. In “At the Drive-in I Ask My Father About Sex," she zeros in on the her father's candor. To his credit, when asked at the drive-in how babies are made, he gives a clinical rather than typically deceptive reply:
“there’s another hole that’s not
for peeing where the penis goes in
and where the baby comes out.
I want to see, I run to the ladies room . . . . ”
I’m not sure “Western Motel” quite belongs in this collection, since it’s inspired by an Edward Hopper painting and has nothing to do with Wendy’s youth. However, it’s notable for its asking of powerful questions, like: “Which is hardest? To be the one/or the only one?”
You’d expect a book of this sort to have an apt concluding poem and it does. In “Leaving Colorado” the author exhorts herself to leave the past, down to the physical topography she remembers, the rocks, and finally the river: “Love the river for daring to leave.” This is a stunning first collection, one that presages enhanced profundity and irony in the future from Drexler.
Order by check from:
Wendy Drexler
60 Glendale Rd.
Belmont, MA 02478-2922
--Peter Bates
THE DIGITAL COLOR PRINTING HANDBOOK.
Tim Daly. Amphoto Books . Trade paper,
$24.95, 156 pp.
If you ever found yourself a bit lost navigating the tricky terrain of digital printing, this book should help you out. It certainly did me. I immediately benefitted with Daly's advice to obtain a third-party aftermarket driver for my Epson film scanner. This product, Silverfast, does a better job of getting the picture in shipshape than does the driver that came with my scanner. It has also saved me hours of fiddling around in Photoshop. That is only one of the many tips this book provides. Each one follows a set format: a one-to-three page tip, complete with procedures and sample photographs. With this book, you get practical tips like how to replace color in a picture and how to deal with the new duotone and Photo Filter features of Photoshop CS2. There are also generic tips culled from the old analog photography days, like using test strips and taking proper care of your lens. The book does contain arcane artistic tips, like using inverting color, creating "distressed color," and using the Channel Mixer. Toward the end of the book, some of the tips, like "Using Transfer Paper" and "Autochrome" become so specialized I can't imagine using them on a regular basis. But perhaps they'd be fun things to try. This book is worth purchasing. If you end up integrating one tip into your photographic arsenal (as I did with the scanner software), it is certainly worth it.
--Peter Bates
FLASH MX SAVVY.
Ethan Watrall, Norbert Herber. Sybex. Trade paper,
$50, 746 pp. With companion CD.
This is a good beginning-to-intermediate course on using
Flash MX. It begins, as it should, at the beginner's level,
introducing the novice to the Flash interface and explaining
each tool in detail. It's pretty hard to get lost and confused
when the authors take a concept like the timeline and give
you instructions how to use it, complete with labeled screen
shots. Each major part is followed by a "Hands On" section,
a tutorial that walks you through the concepts explained in
the collection of chapters. What type of information does the
book contain? Here's an example: Chapter 7, Creating and Manipulating
Reusable Content , explains how to create symbols and how they
fit into the Flash MX library. A tutorial for each chapter
would have been nice. As a reference book, Flash
MX Savvy is fairly good, if you know where to
dig. This is one example where a quick read of the book may
be helpful before you use it in daily problem-solving. For
example, I wanted to create a sequence in which an imported
bitmapped image darkens on the timeline. But you cannot simply
import a bitmap and use the Properties panel to darken it.
You have to convert it to a symbol via the library. The "bitmap" entry
in the index doesn't point you in this direction to a procedure
you can use to get around this issue. However I did find out
how to automatically link to an URL fairly quickly. As an introduction
to the complicated world of Flash MX and as a provider of some
tips, this book is a good resource.
--Peter Bates
ERIC MEYER ON CSS: MASTERING THE LANGUAGE OF WEB DESIGN.
New Riders. www.newriders. Trade paper, $45, 322 pp.
This book is an excellent way to learn CSS. But beware: Its
tutorial approach is time-consuming and occasionally frustrating
when the examples don't quite match those in the book. (You
can download them from his web site.) Yet if you just read
it, you don't absorb everything. Cascading style sheets are
a subset of HTML and offer the best way to format documents
and apply the changes to an entire web site. The best way to
learn from this book is to go through it and mark up the items
that interest you, such as creating your own CSS rollover buttons
without using graphics. Then apply them to the next web page
you create. I never knew about the "fixed no repeat" variables
that forbid a background image from repeating itself and scrolling
with the text. Sometimes Meyer is a little too entranced with
the technology and in the case of Chapter 12, "Fixing
Your Backgrounds," he actually creates an example that
can't be displayed in Internet Explorer for the PC, which 65%
of the populatio nuses. (Someone supplied a javascript hack,
but I couldn't even get that to work.) Despite such lapses,
Meyer's approach is chatty and even fun, if you have the time.
Before buying this book, make sure you have a fundamental knowledge
of HTML. If you do, it's the best introduction to CSS I've
seen.
--Peter Bates
PHOTOSHOP RESTORATION
AND RETOUCHING. Katrin Eismann. New Riders. www.newriders.
Trade paper, $49.99, 276 pp.
This book, more than any other I've read, has
helped me sharpen my photo retouching skills. Don't be mistaken,
this is not a beginner's book. It presupposes some Photoshop
knowledge. Yet even the opening chapter is helpful, because
it not only provides keyboard shortcuts but explains why to
use them (to save your wrists, naturally). In this book you'll
learn how to use tools like Adjustment layers to use the Threshold
and Curves features, which improve tonal range and contrast.
The "Working with Color" chapter is most helpful,
providing helpful charts like a CMYK representation of various
skin tones so you can reproduce them in your photos. Eismann
shows how to forge creative effects like soft focus, which
helped me touch up a man's pocked face recently. She also shows
how to rebuild old damaged photographs, while supplying no
illusions about how hard the work can be. She also helps you
develop good work techniques, such as telling you never to
work on the original layer, but always on a copy. The book
has a companion web site that allows you to download the practice
images. If you follow the tutorials, the lessons do stick.
It would have been good to have an appendix with information
about helpful Photoshop plug-ins (such as Auto FX software).
Still, this is an excellent book to provide the intermediate
retoucher with the tools needed to accomplish the job.
--Peter Bates
LYNX EYE magazine, Vol.,
IX, No. IV, 8th anniversay issue (ISSN 1078-1862; 5.5” x 8.5” 114
pp. $7.95) Cover art: line drawing by Wayne Hogan: “Ceci Une
Pipe” (after Magritte) ScribbleFest Literary Group , P.O. Box
6609, Los Osos, CA 93412-6609
by Bill Costley
Writers' groups - acting as self-publishers - are common in
GB, but not in the USA. This is the lovely quarterly magazine
of the ScribbleFest Literary Group [P.O. Box 6609, Los Osos,
CA 93412-6609] on California's central coast (around San Luis
Obispo, halfway between Monterey & L.A..) where every day's
a mentally clear day. Whence the title? “Lynx-eyed means sharp-sighted.,
and each issue showcases the work of visionary writers and artists.”
Their opening feature - Presenting - always introduces a previously
unpublished artist, this time, Eric Pencek, a 23 yr. old lifelong
resident of Scranton PA - with his short story “Meet Me In the
Garden of Stars” The editor explains: “Scranton, Pennsylvania,
a solid contender for the capital of the Rustbelt, and Ray Bradbury
read at an impressionable age, may go a long way towards explaining
this story.” I read Bradbury at an impressionable age in Lynn
MA, and I agree. Pencek writes a perfect C&W ballad (minus
rhymes); here's a sample paragraph:
I got bored with life and listened to my friends when they
told me I had to get out of the factory. Went to trade school,
became a carpenter, saw my income rise. Moved up to pricier
liquors. Started seeing my kids again when the eldest turned
nine.
Peter Bates (of Roslindale, MA, who I know personally) is represented
by 5 ‘microfictions' under the groupname ” What Guys Do” here's
the first: “Sweat then Shiver”
Kevin shouldn't have taken on this challenge. He filed into
the Translation Poetry Reading café' and sat on the
stage with two others. The moderator passed out the poems. “Speed
is important. Points will be deducted for fake coughs, cluster
sneezes, and excessive ahems.”
What am I doing here? I'm a Berlitz teacher, not a poet!
Ah, but the prize trip to Baffin Island!
The reed-thin woman next to him leaned close. “ I know 6,000 Inuit idioms.
Scared?”
A man translated a Wolof poem. “:Her hair…told tales…like,
like the beautiful hair of a big beef.” Applause crinkled like
potato chips and the moderator scratched her pad.
"All too often,” said the thin woman, interpreting
ancient Bengali, “you miss the odiferous pomegranates.” Spirited
applause from the Brotherhood of Grenadine Bottlers.
The French poem hovered before Kevin lie a jury duty summons. “I
came to realize…that I was eating at a restaurant called The
last Supper.” No response. “Nary a sigh, gasp, or groan. What
the hell. The former choir loft tenor jumped up and sang: “Je
suis venu/ rendre compte/ que je mangeais/ a un restaurant/apple'
Le Dernier Dejuner.” Heads bobbed in tune, applause from the
local glee club slapped the walls silly, and Baffin Bay opened
like a snowdrop.
All 28 authors in this magazine demo brio. Here's San Francisco's
A.D. Winans:
State of Affairs
academic verse
ampty hearse
east coast
milk toast
west coast
holy ghost
ivy league
masturbation
forced elation
language school
end run
safe sex condom
.--Bill Costley
WEB DESIGN WORKSHOP,
Robin Williams, David Rohr. Peachpit Press. www.peachpit.com.
Trade paper, $39.99, 372 pp.
If you haven't been inspired to design
your own web site lately, pick up this book. It organizes the
process from concept to search engine listings. Not a beginner's
book--that is the bailiwick of Williams' earlier book, The
Non Designer's Web Book-- it tells you how to obtain stock
photographs and and spiff them up, organize your page flow, test
your web sites, and deal with auto-responders, chat rooms, guest
books, and popup menus. Sprinkled throughout are many recommendations
for software and other resources. For example, MiniMix and WebIcon
from minifont.com are particularly useful as tiny fonts for popup
menus and Web Icons for graphics like binoculars and light bulbs.
Williams and Rohr also deal with sticky issues like client relationships.
Most of the time they give helpful advice, such as mapping out
with the client exactly what the site will include so there are
no unpleasant surprises down the line. However, sometimes you
have to adapt their advice to your situation, such as when they
suggest charging for estimates. This doesn't fly well with small
businesses who commission small web sites. Also, the authors
champion the use of "slicing and dicing," which is
an optimization process for 640 x 480 graphic images of a web
page using programs such as Adobe Imageready and Macromedia Fireworks.
This process allows you more flexibility in designing a web site,
but a single page can end up having hundreds of slices requiring
much upload time to the server. They should have advised designers
to have DSL or cable modems before attempting this process.
Other than these caveats, I recommend this book highly. Like
other good books, it provides information as well as it inspires
you to greater heights of competance in your artistry.
--Peter Bates
