WordPress is an amazing blogging and CMS system to use and create websites with. This blog right here was created using WordPress. I have started using WordPress when creating any new sites because its easy to use, customize and update. The only thing that gets to me is that I always seem to have to completely recreate the whole WordPress system when making a new theme. So I decided to create a very basic WordPress theme and save that so I will always have a valid theme to build off of. So I decided to give this Basic WordPress theme away to anybody that wants it to build off of. Now this is a very basic theme. Its not something to use as your blogs theme, its something to build off of. It has all the basic elements of WordPress along with a widgets enabled sidebar. It has minimal CSS just so all the classes are in the CSS file. As you can see from the image above there’s no real styling at all, no images, nothing but the standard WordPress install. Feel free to download it and let me know what you think or let me know if you find it useful. Hit the button to download the theme.

I have trying to do photo corrections and photo restoration for these pictures to give to my Grandma. I think I did well on the picture of just my Grandpa from when he was in the military. I also think I need well on the Christmas picture, although some detail was lost and needs some sharpening done. The last picture was such a pain to do. There’s still a finger print over my aunts face and its still some work to do there. I need more practice on doing photo restoration. I think that I’m off to a good start. Any tips? Critiques? Tricks? Improvements? Let me know! I am open to advice! (old picture on the left, restored on the right)

So I blogged (link) about the Capitol One having 4 adds running on CNN.com at once and it ended up getting a lot of traffic from people searching so I assume I am not the only one finds the ads annoying. The adds have come back a couple of times since, including today. Now Capitol one is in the business of making money and wouldn’t have these ads running for nothing. So now my question isn’t why are they running these ads, its whose clicking on them that make them worth it? The ads do wrap around the main content of CNN.com so is it people thinking its part of the site? The top banner does occasionally scroll across and maybe people think its a new ticker?Is there enough people like me who click their mouse randomly when reading something that accidentally click on them? There has to be a healthy amount of people that click on the ads to justify spending that much money on them. I would love to see a click heatmap of the main page to see where these people are clicking. I guess it must be good advertising design if its worth it, no matter how annoying or intrusive it is.

I discovered a pretty nifty trick the other day while working zoomed in on a huge image file. So when you navigate around an image in Photoshop you hold down space and then click and drag. This is fine if you are just working in a small area and don’t need to see the whole picture.

So while working on a huge image I was often scrolling around the image a lot using the space key and click and drag and repeat. Until I discovered a nifty little tip that Photoshop has. If you hold down space + c and click and drag a small box will pop up (see above image) and you will zoom out and the box will follow them mouse, then when you release the mouse it will zoom into where the box is now placed at the same zoom level as before. Get it? Well there’s a short video (go full screen on it) that I made that you can checkout below. It starts off with the normal zoom and then shows you the space + c zoom.