New web site

I just spent the last few days hunkered down in my office wrestling with the intricacies of CSS while rebuilding the Gilbert Consulting web site. My previous web site used tables for layout and positioning. I decided to join the 21st century and bring my site up to modern standards with CSS. Hopefully the new site also does a better job of explaining who I am, what I do and how I do it.

A few interesting items I ran across while sweating through the web site rebuild:

• Adobe's Dreamweaver Developer Center houses all kinds of CSS goodness, tutorials and links.
  
  
• I found Pop Menu Magic 2 from Project Seven very helpful for creating the menu system. The newsgroups run by Project Seven at forums.projectseven.com were invaluable for troubleshooting a couple of thorny issues with the menus and CSS.
  
  
• The inclusion of the O'Reilly CSS Reference Guide in the Dreamweaver CS4 Reference panel is great. Concise O'Reilly guides for HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP and other syntax are also included in the Reference panel.

Minneapolis InDesign User Group meeting

I've scheduled the next meeting of the Minneapolis InDesign User Group for Tuesday evening, August 4, from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD). The agenda is still being finalized, and will be posted on the IDUG web site soon. If you're in the Twin Cities area, please save the date and plan to attend!

Minneapolis InDesign User Group meetings are free and open to the public, but registration is required. Hope to see you there.

How to format a Table of Contents

I've written a feature article for the latest issue of InDesign Magazine (Issue 30) about how to format a Table of Contents (TOC). The seven-page article is about how to format many different types of TOC layouts. Even if you never work with TOCs, you will learn something new from the article about tabs, indents, special characters, GREP and other formatting options. Of course, Issue 30 is chock-a-block full of other great articles and tips too!

Use coupon code FRIEND to receive $20 off a one-year subscription, or code FRIEND2 for $15 off a two-year subscription.

You can also purchase single issues at InDesignMag.com

If you're serious about taking your InDesign skills up a notch, I highly recommend this magazine.

Photoshop CS4 Adjustments Panel shortcut

The new Adjustments panel in Photoshop CS4 (Window > Adjustments) contains seven categories of adjustment presets. These adjustment presets can help you learn you to use the various adjustment options, or to quickly achieve a particular effect with a single click.

To use an adjustment preset, just click on one of the right-pointing "flippy triangles" next to one of the categories, then click on a preset.

Here's a handy shortcut, that lets you quickly browse through all the categories at once: option-click (Mac) or alt-click (Windows) on a flippy triangle, and all the categories will flip open at once.

This definitely falls into the "now how was I supposed to know that" category, but is a useful shortcut!

Amazing, inexpensive drive adapter

Real life story: A consulting client of mine called in a panic: her Macintosh wouldn't start up. This is every designer's nightmare! It was an older Mac, she was planning on upgrading soon anyway, so this accelerated her purchase of a new Mac. But she had lots of valuable data on her old Mac.

Based on her description of the non-responsive Mac, I suspected the hard drive was OK. When her new Mac arrived, I pulled the hard drive out of the old Mac, and used the $29.99 USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter from Other World Computing to temporarily connect the old drive to the new Mac. It worked flawlessly. I was thrilled by how quick and simple it was, and she was thrilled to have her data back.

Yes, there are other ways to do this, but the Universal Drive Adapter is inexpensive, quick and easy. It allows almost any 2.5", 3.5" or 5.25" hard drive or optical drive to be temporarily connected via USB to a Mac or Windows computer. Highly recommended if you need this sort of thing.