Every 3rd rate designer, charlatan, scam artist, and wannabe is going to tote about W3C valid code, high usability, and SEO, yet few will probably deliver on their claims. After all, most of their clients probably won’t have any clue they’re getting everything they paid for. These smarmy “designers” will probably flaunt their online portfolio, chalk full of cherry picked work that exemplifies their phenomenal skills and abilities—some may be truly inspirational. In fact, a well put together site from these unscrupulous individuals may look downright appealing, almost too good to pass up. But is it all smoke and mirrors? Are they truly legit artists that are going to provide bang for your buck?

Find out with a little bit of investigating. Just 15 minutes of digging can save you loads of cash, time, and ultimately your sanity.

Coding Standards

First off, check their code. First thing I do when I visit a competitor that claims valid code is to put their own website to the test. If they aren’t taking the time to implement proper, valid code into their own website, then there is a good chance, they won’t do it for you either. After all, any good designer will use their own personal website as a testcase—a practice arena to hone and fine tune their skills. You can do this by seeing if their website validates.

Visit the W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is responsible for making the internet into a coherent and usable place. They have outlined and set forth countless guidelines so that ultimately web pages show up exactly how they are intended to, regardless of what kind of browser or operating system a visitor is using. If you’ve ever been to a website that said it didn’t support your browser or was broken beyond repair, you will appreciate their vital service.

By visiting the W3C validator, and entering a designer’s website address, you can see if they meet the requirements, and indeed have a valid website. Note that entering www.szilveszter.ca, for example, only tests that single page, and may not give you an accurate account of the entire website. But it’s a good start. If their home page validates, you can always dig deeper (and probably should at least test a few of them), but if it doesn’t, well, chances are none will, and you can just move on.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another way is to check the code itself. This really applies to SEO over valid coding, but since that is actually a huge deal these days (and they are really intertwined), it’s something to be mindful of if you contract a web designer (especially one that totes: SEO).

Simply right click on an empty portion of their page, and select “View Source” (or equivalent) from the menu. You’ll be greeted with a new window full of code. Don’t worry if you have no idea what you’re looking at, that’s not important. What you should be focusing on is the meta stuff (metadata is essentially the data of data, like dimensions, file size, and colorspace of a jpeg, for example). Things like “description”, “keywords” and “title”. Below is an excerpt from a working designer from my local area (I have a client that has dealt with this so-called expert in the past—the word “nightmare” was used without restraint).

<meta name="description" content="This is where you add the website description." />
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, for the site, go here, separated, by commas" />

She obviously didn’t even code the website herself. Some “experienced designer.” Looking at the footer shows exactly where she got it from:

<!-- <div id="footer"> <a href="https://www.coffeecup.com/store/themes/">Web Templates by CoffeeCup Software</a> -->

While she changed the home page description and keyword tags, she failed to do so on the other pages. Sloppy and stupid—nice combination. Would you feel you’re getting your money’s worth? I know I wouldn’t. Ideally, you want a designer to design around your personal needs, and not use some “cookie-cutter” design. I may seem overly harsh towards this person, but I know she has inflated her prices, downright robbed clients through exorbitant fees, and has unlawfully accessed her client’s email accounts (for starters). Truth be told, she is the direct inspiration for this article.

What you are looking here is the basics. If fields are missing, that’s a good sign they aren’t optimizing for search engines. Looking deeper requires knowledge in the area of SEO, but at least you can find flagrant violators.

Affiliates

The next thing to look for are the affiliate links. Many charlatan’s claim they have worked with high profile companies. Big names like IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, or Fox. But what proof do they have? Other than a link and their word, do they present any evidence of their high profile contract, or the work they did for these Fortune 500 companies? Obviously a little bit of common sense will get you a long way, but it’s always nice to see concrete work that was done. A link to a live website. Some example of the work that are readily available to those that use the product. If you claim you’ve done the interface for xyz, then I should see it in action when I install the program.

And this gets me to my next point: See their work, live. Most of these unscrupulous individuals show fancy portfolios, but none of them link to the live website. I perused a local design firm that showed a lot of classy stuff. I thought they were inspirational, until I tried to visit one of their client’s websites. There was no direct link, so being the sleuth that I am, I uncovered the address through Google. When I went there, I noticed all the links pointed back to the design firm. What this company did was purchase an entirely difference domain name, create a home page, subsequently linking everything back to their own wesbite

Here is the entry in their online portfolio. And now the address for Landscaping Victoria, their so-called client.

Things look kosher right? Click a link on Landscaping Victoria. Wait what? Yep. It heads right back to the design firm. They have artificially inflated their portfolio and their listing on search engines. Smarmy.

In Closing

Keeping these small things in mind can lead you to filter out many of the assholes that make things difficult for qualified designers that take the time to fully deliver what they promise. When every website claims the same thing, it can be maddening finding a legitimate designer to contract and provide you with quality work.

CoverSutra is an iTunes controller for Mac OS X. It’s been around a while now. Back in the days when iTunes controllers were all the rage. Yet it stood its ground and has become quite robust—becoming a lean, mean, controlling machine—and a solid edition to any modders desktop. Moreover, it provides users with three nicely designed themes. But sadly, it’s not very modder friendly, if, you know, you aren’t into the default themes. However, there are always ways around things, and modders are notorious for dissecting and deconstructing programs.

This guide will take a lot of the legwork out of modding CoverSutra. So let’s begin. First, open up the contents of the program (right click on the app in Finder) and navigate to the PlugIn folder, found inside of the Contents folder. There, you’ll see the three default themes. Choose the theme you find most disposable (I’ve chosen JewelBoxing—the modern CD box displayed on the left Album Cover dialog screen in the Preferences Pane).

In Finder, right click on the file and choose “Show Package Contents.” As you’ll see, there isn’t much to a theme. A handful of .tiffs and an Info.plist file. Open up the plist and you’ll see the code required to make the theme functional. If you have any experience in modding, you’ll feel right at home, as this stuff is actually quite rudimentary.

Let me give you a precis of the plist file. The lines you need to change are the values of the coverFrame keys. These tell CoverSutra how to position and size the cover being displayed. Leave all other strings alone, even the size key, which dictates the actual image size. As pictured to the left, you can make the cover any size you wish, provided it is ultimately constrained within the dimensions of the current theme (144×144 for example). You’ll notice that each theme as 3 difference cover sizes (Extra Small, Small, and Medium—I guess Sophie doesn’t like large? Anyway, I digress). Medium is the standard size and is the one I’ve modded successfully, and will be the one I use in my example.

First thing to do is create your overlay image. This will be the image that is pinned on top of the album cover art that CoverSutra will display when a song is played. As I said, you can make this image any size you wish, provided it does not exceed the dimensions found in the theme. Simply start with a 144×144 (for medium) sized canvas and go from there. Tiff files support transparency, so position the image however you wish.

Next, save the file using the same file name (in this case medium.tiff and emptyMedium.tiff, where the latter is the image that will be displayed when your song does not contain cover art). Now it’s time to adjust the cover art to be displayed properly within your new image. These values are found under the coverFrame key (bolded values) of the plist file:

CoverSutraAlbumCaseMedium
    caseImage
    medium.tiff
    coverFrame
    {{15, 24}, {100, 100}}
    size
    {144, 144}
    emptyCaseImage
    emptyMedium.tiff

The first set of values (in pixels) represent the left and bottom offsets, respectively. The second set of values represent the actual vertical and horizontal cover dimensions. To promote clarity, let’s go through an example.

In the code above, the cover art is positioned 14 pixels from the left, 24 pixels from the bottom (represented by the yellow areas). The other two values represent the full dimensions of the cover art, as represented by the four red corners. Essentially, here the cover is 100×100 pixels and it is offset from the left 14 pixels, and from the bottom 24 pixels.

Once you have the correct values, simply save the changes to the plist file and then copy your modded theme back to the PlugIns folder found within the program. I’ve personally ported over my Fcuk Vinyl BowTie theme, which you can download here (as you can see, I’ve replaced the JewelBoxing theme). It is of note that I have only modified the medium size that is typically pinned to the desktop. Once you overwrite the default theme of the same name, open up the CoverSutra Preference Pane and you’ll see it listed in the Album Cover tab.

There really isn’t all that much to it, but hopefully I saved you the 20 minutes of legwork it took me to mod my first cover art. Now go and mod all your BowTie themes and bring them over to CoverSutra. But bear in mind, you will only be able to replace the default themes, and that means running no more than 3 themes at a time.

Modder 4 Life.

I used to receive repeated calls from strange 800-numbers. When I picked up, nothing but silence, then a click, followed up the lovely dial tone. I eventually traced the call and discovered they were coming from my local cable company. Once a week they would come, like clockwork. After repeated attempts, I was finally greeted by a salesperson, trying to peddle the usual promotion. I asked her why I had picked up so many times, yet never spoke to someone with a pulse? She informed me that they have an auto-dialer that randomly dials a list of numbers… when one caller picks up, the others are disconnected. First come, first served.

I thought, “Great, it’s not bad enough they are bothering people, but now they are bothering swarms of people at the same time.” Technology sure can be used for great evil it seems. It was a joyous day when I purchased my first cellular phone. No more calls from the local ambulatory burn ward looking for donations. No more calls from marketing agencies and smarmy cable companies. But it seems like the dream has since ended.

Almost overnight, I’ve been plagued with calls from Mexican lottery agencies (I actually won $12 million in a lottery I never entered? Really? I’m more interested in how you got my cell number), my bank (it’s not enough I let you play with my money, making you rich?), my service provider, a slew of marketing agencies, and even my university. And they just don’t give up either. If they don’t talk to a living person, they incessantly call back. I guess if they gave up too quickly, people would be out of a job. I suppose everyone has to pay the mortgage. But enough is enough, seriously.

I get peppered with calls, daily… three times a day by some agencies. I answer and nothing… looks like someone else picked up before me. I wonder how this is legal? I guess because shoving promotions down our throats generates revenue—respecting a person’s privacy doesn’t. Well today I decided to look up my carriers privacy policy because I’ve had enough (and found myself with some free time): During a most recent meeting with a client, I was harassed twice—the meeting lasted 45 minutes.

It turns out my carrier (and I’m sure they are all the same) collect and share a lot of information about you. They hide it under the guise of “improving service” and offering products and services they feel you might find attractive (I would find notices that service charges have dropped, so I don’t pay more than other customers for the exact same feature, attractive). Basically, how they can squeeze more money out of you, because let’s face it, they aren’t calling to lower the price of your monthly invoice. With some millions of subscribers, even an extra 50 cents tacked onto your monthly bill pays big dividends. It also buys new Bently’s for the senior stock holders. Win, win.

Well, it also turns out you can do something about it. By calling in and talking to a low level customer service representative, you can ask tell them to remove you from their marketing list. No special number to call or person to contact. No special menu item to select from the list. The only documentation of this “service” is buried on my carriers website:

Fido shares information with other Fido related companies (I love this inclusion and its specificity), including the Rogers companies, in order to offer customers products and services that they may find attractive. Notices on sharing information are contained on Fido’s invoice and on fido.ca. If customers do not want to be marketed with these products and services, they can contact Fido at 1-888-481-3436.

While I doubt they’ll stop collecting data and passing that information along, they’ll at least stop harassing you about useless new promotions that only serve to eat up your monthly minutes. I’m happy to put an end to at least some of the nuisances in my life.

Using PMSET on Mac OS X, you can prevent your external hardrive from going to sleep (or spinning down). If you rock a notebook, and rely on an external enclosure, you probably know how annoying it is when your drive goes to sleep on you and it takes a good 30 seconds for it to spin back up again. More annoying is when Finder becomes unresponsive until this happens. If your drive is set to spindown every 15 minutes, then this ends up being downright maddening, and seriously cripples your workflow.

Worst yet, most external enclosures are incredibly aggressive when it comes to their power saving features, and sadly, nearly all of them do not provide the option to change the frequency of which the drives power down. It may not be so bad if you could get the drive to spindown when you truly weren’t using it, but enclosures are dumb. They spindown regardless of your intended usage. If the system is not actively using the hardrive, then it goes to sleep. Well, I suppose that’s fine but system’s still consult your drives even if you don’t expressly do so (e.g., entering Front Row will talk to any drive connected to your system, and if a drive went to sleep, become unresponsive upon load until said drive wakes up).

I got real sick of this behaviour and decided to hit up google, hoping to find a workable solution. Sadly, all I found were ancient hacks, obscure cron jobs that wrote to the drive every n minutes, and over-priced programs that meant I had to run an additional process. I had hoped for a better way, and eventually I stumbled on one: PMSET.

PMSET manipulates power management settings. In fact, the Energy Saver preference pane is a simplified interface for pmset, removing some more advanced functionality. Well that advanced functionality is what we need here. Note: All changes made through pmset are saved in a persistent preferences file, located in:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist

So fire up Terminal (located in the Utilities folder), and we’ll get started. The -b, -c, -u, and -a flags determine whether the settings apply to battery (-b), AC (outlet) (-c), UPS (-u) or under all of these conditions (-a).

So if we type the following in Terminal: sudo pmset -c disksleep 0, we are telling our system to prevent the disk from sleeping when it’s connected to AC (power outlet), but to allow the disk to spindown normally when it’s either on battery power, or using a uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Note: For the settings to be applied, we need to use the sudo command. This means you’ll have to have administrator access and will be required to enter your password. Don’t panic if characters don’t appear when you type the password, this is completely normal. Sudo doesn’t provide character feedback as to enhance security.

If we want to prevent the disk from going to sleep no matter what kind of power source we are using, we would enter the following: sudo pmset -a disksleep 0. If we want to, say, extend the disk sleep interval to an hour, we would enter the following: sudo pmset -a disksleep 60. Again, this will apply the changes no matter what kind of power source we are using and if the drive is not used for an hour, allow it sleep.

But say you want to prevent the disk from sleeping on AC, but also to extend the sleep interval to an hour when you are unplugged and running on your battery. Well, you would type the following in Terminal: sudo pmset -c disksleep 0 -b disksleep 60.

There is a lot more pmset can do for you, but if you just want to prevent your external disk from going to sleep so you can work without OS X waiting for your hardrive to spinup back up all the time, the above examples should suffice.

Skip to the break if you just came here to learn about 301 redirects. I frequently check my server logs, looking for problems with my site. But a constant worry are 404s. I belong to several bulletin boards and frequently upload content to a temporary storage repository found on my server. Themes, icons, graphical changes to popular programs and most of what I upload, I don’t often add to my website. Why? Because, quite frankly, I’m too lazy. I also don’t see much worth in packing my portfolio with titbits, or odds and ends. But every now and again, I do manage to put up content and not being one to leave duplicates on my server, pull it from the storage repository mentioned earlier. Sadly, this leaves the links on the boards orphaned. I do go in and try to modify the links, but I’d rather spend my time doing, you know, fun stuff. Yet my concern for my visitors (yes, I love you guys; group hug!) is always lurking, and I don’t want them to be greeted with the dreaded 404: Not Found. So I started to employ 301 permanent redirects.

First thing to do is pull up your .htaccess file (should be placed in the root directory of your website (e.g., /public_html/.htaccess). Open using your favourite text editor and add the following line:

redirect 301 old-url.html http://www.url.com/new-url.html

Where “old-url.html” is the outdated page or link (it can be any link, for example, /tmp/files/pictures.zip) and “http://www.url.com/new-url.html” is the new url. Note that should you have a link with a space in it (e.g., “old url.html”), you will need to place the url in quotations:

redirect 301 "old url.html" "http://www.url.com/new url.html"

It’s that easy. So dig through your logs and do your visitors a big favour. There is nothing more disheartening than jumping to a site, only to be greeted with disappointment!