Author Tim Stanley - Tim Stanley

Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

Jun 16, 2008

Danny Dover has posted on seomoz.org an outstanding search engine optimization cheat for web sites.  It's a great reference point and a reminder of things to check. More...

Best High End Nikon Lenses 2008

Jun 13, 2008

What's the best Nikon lens?  Everybody asks that question, but can you really afford it?  Thom Hogan has written one of the best detailed explanations I've seen in his article Nikkor Lens Assessment.  The only thing missing is the prices in his best pick list.

I've written about some of these lenses in Nikon Lens Best Values.  Just read the Flickr Nikon D80 group and you'll see these lenses recommended time and time again.  Save some bucks and lift some weights though, these pro class lenses are heavy and not light on the pocketbook either.

These lenses are extremely popular and you'll often find them out of stock, so if you want one, you better act soon.  If you wanted a reason to get a D80, D200, D300 or D3 over a D40, many of these lenses are not compatible with the D40.

Most of these lenses hold their value over time.  So if you buy one and are lucky, you might be able to sell it a few years down the road and you'll have had the use of a fine lens for less than the cost of a fine meal. More...

Email CSS Guide

Jun 12, 2008

Campaign Monitor has published a fully detailed list of the CSS supported in email clients.  It's fairly extensive with 21 different sets of results and a breakdown of all the major email systems for both desktop and web clients.

They provide both a downloadable PDF and a Excel version.  Excellent work.

Email CSS

Free Textures

May 23, 2008

Free textures from various sites and a Photoshop texture tutorial.

Texture 1 More...

12 Slideshow Tools For Photographers

May 22, 2008

Why is it so hard to create a professional looking slide show of digital images on a web site? 

Infrastructure, Tools, and systems are critical for professionals and hobbyists.  If a tool saves time compared to the money it costs, it's worth it.  If it's free, that's even better.

It seems like putting photos on a web site and creating a slide show should be simple. Take some pictures, download photos off the camera, sort through them, pick a few good ones, do some minor editing and cropping, and upload them to a web site or gallery, update a few descriptions or notes and be done.  After that, post the image (or slide show) on a few other sites.  All of that should take about 15 minutes of work and using one tool that doesn't cost a fortune on both an Apple or Microsoft platform for any host provider. Sadly, in 2008 this can't be done on a Microsoft platform and can only be done by one host (.Mac) on an Apple platform.

The Apple platform with the .Mac hosting is the only thing that comes close. For everything else, it can take hours to create a photo gallery slide show. I can't find something simple to make this easier.

This is the list of 12 tools (okay it's a list of 14) with a few tools which are compelling. More...

BlogEngine.Net Control Parameters

May 18, 2008

How does one add or pass parameter to a user control in BlogEngine.Net?  This may be obvious to others already, but I thought I'd share a quick note on what I found.  More...

8 Days A Week

May 18, 2008

The physical amount of time spent on a task is not the same as the calendar time that it takes to complete the task. This is especially true when teams are working on multiple tasks. Project managers need to understand this when planning and getting estimates from a development team. More...