Description: Kim Raff is a nationally recognized photojournalist based in Lynchburg, Virginia. She wanted a custom portfolio site that not only showcased her best work but gave her control over its photographic and multimedia content

Work performed: Custom Web site coding and design, training, hosting, support

Description: Award-winning photographer Chet White needed a business portfolio that gave him the flexibility to showcase new offerings with minimal effort. His Web site allows him to manage his own content how he wants it.

Work performed: Web site creation, training, hosting, support

Description: Horse shows, riding lessons, boarding and sales, plus social media marketing and more – Codi Lambert and Kristen Nelson have a lot going on at Mane Top Stables. They asked for a cleanly designed Web site that kept a professional look while tying all their information together.

Work performed: Web site creation, training, hosting, support

Description: Working with Digital Endemic, LLC, I rewrote and reorganized Federal Knife’s Web site content to boost search engine rankings and convey its message more clearly. The results: increased traffic and high Google results for shear blades, industrial knives and other industry terms.

Work performed: Search engine optimization, content writing & editing

Description: In addition to creating and maintaining the Twitter account for The News & Advance, the newspaper of Lynchburg, Virginia, I also designed its Twitter background. The newspaper, mouse and cell phone represent the organization’s commitment to delivering news on a variety of platforms.

Work performed: Graphic design

In a nutshell, WSJ.com has some articles where you can only read the first few paragraphs for free before being prompted to subscribe.

However, you can read these same articles for free by coming to them via Google or Google News. I’ve made a Web browser bookmarklet that speeds up the process a bit.

The normal process without the bookmarklet involves a few steps:

• Go to the article and see that it’s restricted to subscribers
• Copy the headline
• Go to Google.com
• Enter the headline (and a site:wsj.com for good measure)
• Search
• Click the resulting link

Firefox users can simplify it somewhat:

• Go to the article
• Highlight the headline
• Right-click the headline and choose “Search Google for…”
• Click the resulting link

However, when you do this, WSJ.com isn’t always the first result (I keep getting Yahoo! News results), hence the benefit of a WSJ.com-specific search.

In the spirit of being really lazy efficiency, I have made a Javascript bookmarklet that shaves a few steps off.

It’s not perfect though. Ideally, you could go to the WSJ article, click the bookmarklet and go straight to the full version.

This bookmarklet is a step removed:

• Go to the article
• Click the bookmarklet, which pulls up a WSJ.com-specific Google search for the headline
• Click the resulting link

It works by using Javascript to extract the article’s headline from its h1 tag and perform a WSJ.com-specific Google search for that headline.

This should ensure that the first search result is the article in question, although it might not be perfect.

(In fact, if the article is not yet indexed in Google, it won’t work at all. So there’s that.)

If anyone knows how to make it go that final step of essentially clicking through to the Google search result using Javascript, please let me know. I am not sure it’s possible, however; I think WSJ.com might check the HTTP referrer to see if you are coming from Google, and I don’t think you can spoof that with Javascript (though you can get Firefox add-ons that do it).

So what’s the point of all this? It was mainly a Javascript bookmarklet exercise for me, and if it does save someone a little bit of hassle by removing a few steps from the process of reading WSJ, that’s very good. It’s not stealing from the WSJ; after all, the paper’s Web site allows readers coming from Google to read for free. This just expedites the process.

Anyway, here is the bookmarklet. To use it, drag the button below to your browser’s Bookmarks toolbar. Then go to a Wall Street Journal article and click the bookmarklet in your toolbar.

[WSJ->Google]

Questions? Comments? Leave me a comment!

When that happens, you need to make your own. Here’s a fast, simple way to make a snowflake graphic perfect for weather stories.

Sure, you could spend hours drawing your own vector snowflakes in Illustrator, but who has time for that?

The time-saving secret here: Photoshop brushes.

The general idea is as old as Photoshop itself: specialty brushes + a few cool effects = nice-looking graphics with little time and effort.

For this tutorial, I’m using:

• Snowflake Brushes by Meldir
• Snowflake Brushes by Photoshop Brushes

You can find plenty more with a simple search.

Here we go…

Create a new document. On NewsAdvance.com the graphics are a maximum of 300 pixels wide so I’ll start with double that and shrink it later.

This document will be 600 x 520.

Create a nice gradient on your background using two shades of blue. It should be a subtle gradient, so make the shades similar.

This will simulate a sky lit by sunlight/moonlight.

Create a new layer.

Hit the “d” key to set your colors back to black and white.

Go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds.

Then go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 20 pixels.

Set the opacity of this layer to about 20%.

This will make a snowy/cloudy background effect.

Go back to your background layer.

Go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise. Choose about 6% with a uniform distribution.

Go to Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur. Choose an angle of about 45 degrees and a distance of about 4 pixels.

This texture will simulate lots of tiny snowflakes in the background.

Now for the snowflakes. We will first add some dark ones in the background and then lighter ones in the foreground.

Create a new layer.

Choose the brush tool and a dark blue color similar to the darker shade of your gradient from earlier.

Pick out a couple of nice snowflake brushes that you downloaded. You can change the brush size, but I recommend only shrinking, not enlarging. If you make a snowflake brush larger, it will not look as crisp.

Place two large snowflakes in opposite corners.

Set the opacity of the layer to about 20%.

This is just to create an interesting balanced geometric effect in the background.

Create another layer.

Choose a shade of gray very close to white, like #EDEDED, and drop a few medium-sized snowflakes on the layer.

Go to Layer -> Layer Style -> Outer Glow. Choose a bright blue color, like #98EFFF, with Blend Mode “Normal,” Opacity 75%, Technique “Softer,” a spread of 0% and a size of about 10 pixels.

This will give your foreground snowflakes a nice glow.

Create another layer. Now scatter a few smaller snowflakes around.

Grab the Outer Glow effect from your previous layer and drag it to the new one to duplicate it.

Double-click the new Outer Glow effect and change the size of the glow to 5 pixels instead of 10 so it’s not as dramatic on the smaller flakes.

If you want, you can also make the glow a slightly darker shade of blue for variety.

You’re done! It’s quick and easy. Click here for the Photoshop PSD document used in this project.

Do you use Gimp? Learn how to use Photoshop brushes in Gimp.

You give it a set of Web pages to watch and tell it how often to check them, and it notifies you when they change.

It’s ideal for keeping up with Web sites that don’t offer RSS feeds, or checking changes on just a single page of a large Web site (for example, a company’s listing of open jobs).

You can also use it to see exactly how a news story changes as it evolves online.

Here’s an example: I set Update Scanner to watch a page that showed an Associated Press story about President Barack Obama planning to call for tighter restrictions on banks.

Update Scanner has options, as you can see in the screen shot below, including setting how often it checks the page (as often as every five minutes, though it gives you a warning if you choose this).

Another option is to highlight changes to the text.

If Update Scanner checks a page and sees a change, it alerts you with a small box in the lower right corner of your Firefox window.

Clicking on the link in the alert takes you to the page. Update Scanner highlights the changes (if you’ve chosen that option) and offers you a chance to see both the old version of the page before the change and the new version.

As you can see, this is useful for learning which parts of a news story change from one update to the next.

The changes to the news story above are relatively minor, but on fast-paced breaking news stories you may get frequent updates bathed in yellow highlighting. Such is the nature of online news!

Update Scanner only uses highlighting for changes, not strike-through text, so it appears it won’t show you when text is eliminated.

However, you can see for yourself where text has been eliminated by looking at the older version of the page (via the “Old Page” link) and comparing it to the newer version.

Do you find this useful? Do you know another good use for Update Scanner? Leave a comment below!

This appears to be the case with Google Bookmarks, which I access via Google Toolbar.

A few days ago, I exported my Google Bookmarks to an HTML file and imported them into Firefox. A bookmark showed up that I had deleted long before (it was for a Web site I no longer run). The same thing happened again tonight.

So what’s happening?

It seems plausible that every site I’ve ever bookmarked is stored on Google’s servers as part of my account, and the ones I’ve deleted are simply flagged as invisible to me.

I’m not surprised, but it does seem to erode the trust between a user and a company when an action the user takes – deleting data – doesn’t actually produce the result the user expects.

Has this happened to you? Can you think of another possible explanation?

… “Five Virginia correctional officers charged in dog fondling.”

Why?

While it was an odd story, it wasn’t a local Danville story, and local stories almost always are more popular than non-local stories.

The answer: Twitter.

Referrals from Twitter were responsible for thousands of page views on the story.

In fact, more than one-third of the traffic to the story came from the popular microblogging site.

And a special nod, I suppose, goes to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. He was individually responsible for more than 300 page views – a small piece of the overall Twitter traffic but noteworthy nonetheless.

It’s just another small example of the power of social media in determining what people read on the Internet.