Don't Have Time? Take 60 Seconds To Improve Your Photos

idigitalphoto.com has a great blog post entitled "Improve Your Photos 60 Seconds at a Time". It's perfect for people like me who really don't have the time to read through a long and thorough tutorial on various photography techniques and skills.

The post is broken up into a number of different sections:

1. Light
2. Landscaping
3. People
4. Color
5. Composition
6. Being Ready

Each section has between 3-7 short "tutorials" in point form (e.g. "Framing the lines") that should take you only 60 seconds to read and absorb. Great job!

Maybe only taking 60 seconds at a time is the reason why I still need to take hundreds of photos to try and get a couple really good ones.

Now You Can Add RSS Feeds To A Rails Site

We've recently added some RSS feeds to make it easier to keep track of changes made to the ProductCritic site. This is an easy feature to add extra value to your site and with Rails it's quite easy.

There a number of ways to do this but I decided to use a straight forward method of using an XML view.

First step is to create a new method in your controller. For the home page feed which provides updates on the latest product reviews on the site, I added an 'rss' method to the PageController class that looked something like this:

def rss
@products = Product.find(:all, :order => 'created_at desc', :limit => 20)
render :layout => false
end

Now all that is needed is to create a 'app/views/page/rss.rxml' file to create the RSS feed. In this example I used this:

xml.instruct! :xml, :version => '1.0', :encoding => 'utf-8'
xml.rss('version' => '2.0') do
xml.channel do
xml.title "Latest Products from ProductCritic"
xml.link(request.protocol + request.host_with_port + home_path)
xml.description("Recently added products to ProductCritic.")
xml.language "en"
xml.ttl "40"
xml.pubDate(Time.now.rfc822)
@products.each do |p|
xml.item do
url = request.protocol +  request.host_with_port +
url_for(:controller => 'product', :action => 'show', :id => p)
xml.title("#{h(p.name)} (#{p.score})")
xml.description(h(truncate(p.teaser, 500)))
xml.link(url)
xml.guid(url)
end
end
end
end

Ruby and Rails both have some nice helper methods to make creating the feed. Ruby's Time class has a rfc822 method which correctly generates a date-time in the required format and Rails has a truncate method to keep the body of the post a reasonable length.

With this method, we've added feeds for:

1. The main site - provides updates on the latest products added to ProductCritic
2. Digital Camera Reviews - provides updates on the latest cameras added to the site
3. Camcorder Reviews - provides updates on the latest camcorders added to the site
4. Cell Phone Reviews - provides updates on the latest cell phones added to the site

Finally, we added a feed for every product that is on ProductCritic. This means that if you are interested in one specific product (e.g. the iPhone), you can get a RSS feed for it and get updates whenever we add a new review specifically for that product you're interested in.

If you have requests for any other feeds from the site send us some feedback and we'll see what we can do.

Top 6 Resources To Learn Ruby On Rails

In a previous post, we discussed why we are using Ruby On Rails to develop ProductCritic. We're not saying it's the best framework since sliced bread (nothing ever is) but it's fairly easy to learn if you're interested.

With Rail's growing user base, the resources for learning the framework are certainly growing. The following resources are what I am currently considering the best locations of information.

1) Free Original Screencasts

Three free movies that give a great overview and show what the framework can do. Watch them through at full speed to be entertained but then go through them and follow along with your own editor to rebuild the applications yourself.

2) Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

When just starting out I found it useful to have the print book but it's also available in PDF as well. This book brings together all the components in building an application is really worth the money. It's been recently revised for 1.2 so it should have a reasonable shelf life.

3) The Ruby Way, 2nd Edition

This book provides a huge number of Ruby idioms and examples that I find really useful for learning the "ruby way" of completing tasks. I came from a C++/C# background and found a number of ruby semantics a bit strange at first, specifically blocks. Since the Ruby language allows for completing tasks in any number of ways I like this book to see what the current accepted methods are for certain tasks.

4) Jamis Buck's Blog

Jamis Buck is a core contributor to Rails and employee of 37signals. Out of all the blogs on the net about technical aspects of Rails I find his writing the most interesting and easiest to understand. He is also quite prolific churning out good content at regular intervals.

He also created the Capistrano deployment tool and provides a lot of insight into the tool and deployment in general which is useful.

5) PeepCode Screencasts

These screencasts are very high quality at a very good price. It's like having a veteran rails developer mentor you on a topic that would be rather hard to document in a book. I found the RESTful Rails and Test-First Development for Rails the ones the most useful so far but all of them have been very useful.

6) Programming Ruby, 2nd Edition

Known as the "Pick Axe" because of the cover image this is a great resource and reference for the Ruby Language. I find the Ruby Way more useful for learning how to do a specific task but if I want to understand all the details of the language I refer to this book.

This post brought to you by:

If you love to learn, have you ever considered earning your online degree? If you love learning, sign online and find out how easy it is to further your education with an online degree. Whether you are interested in business management, engineering, or medical billing, there is sure to be a career path you would like to choose!

Our Simple And Free Method For Submitting Sitemaps

Creating sitemaps for your site is a very important part of ensuring that the search engines can spider your site easily and know the most about its pages. You can view ProductCritic's sitemap at http://www.productcritic.com/sitemap.xml

At ProductCritic, we mostly care about Google and Yahoo! since these two sites combine for more than 80% of the search traffic to the site. If you have not done so already, you should set up your sites at both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Once you've set up your sites and verified that you own them (I've found that the easiest way to do this is to upload their generated html file to your site vs using a meta-tag), it's time to create and upload a sitemap.

When we first launched the main site, we tried some free sitemap generators (just do a search at Google and you'll find a ton of them). The free online one that we found was the best was XML-Sitemaps.com. Still, I found it a pain to generate it online, download the resulting files, and then upload them to our server. Also, while free, XML-Sitemaps.com only has a 500 URL limit.

So, I found a Windows application that does the job very quickly, is FREE and has a ton of advanced features if you want to use them. It's called GSiteCrawler and can be found at http://gsitecrawler.com/. The author, John Mueller, lives in Switzerland and works on the software on the side. Although he offers the software for free, I definitely believe that once you use it, you will want to make a donation to him for the time and effort he's devoted to the project.

Once you install it, just "Create A New Project" and it will walk you through a mere four screens in its New Project Wizard. Using the wizard, you have tons of options to tell it what type of files and urls to crawl on your site. You can choose file extensions of files you want crawled, images, and videos. You can also choose to upload the sitemaps directly to your ftp server once the files have been generated. See the options you have in the four screencaps that follow.




Once you have generated your sitemaps and uploaded them to your site, you need to let Google and Yahoo! know that there is a new sitemap that the search engines should use to crawl your site.

Do this on Google Webmaster Tools by choosing the "sitemap" tab and either "Add a Sitemap" link at the top right or once you've added it, just select that file (click on the box next to the sitemap name) and click on the "Resubmit Selected" button.

For Yahoo! Site Explorer, click on the "Manage" button next to the sitename and add the name of the sitemap file (usually "sitemap.xml") to the feed.

It's quite simple and you should make a point of updating your sitemap when there's new content for the search engines to crawl.

How To Save A Wet Cell Phone

Just a quick post today...hopefully a useful one. I think there's two camps of cell phone users, those that take real good care of their phone and those like me who drop their cell phone a lot. As I type, my phone currently has a huge crack across its front and its been there for quite awhile now. I should replace it but nothing else is wrong with the phone! The LCD works just fine (both exterior and interior) so I just keep using it.

OK, maybe I'm also lazy and cheap.

Anyways, in my regular dropping of my cell phones, occasionally it happens in the middle of the street on a rainy day. Lucky for me, so far, it hasn't fallen directly into a puddle. If it does, the warranty is void and the phone company knows what you did.

But, if you're not so lucky and it happens to you (or your kid throws it into the toilet), have a look at this article on wikiHow that provides as much help and instruction as possible on how to save it (if it can be saved).

Not Sure What Type Of Camera To Buy?

I read a lot of forum posts on Yahoo and CNET and a lot of the questions are very general in nature and are usually of the type "What is the best camera?" or "What camera should I buy?"

This is a very difficult question to answer because, like cars, the type of camera you buy depends highly on what you will use it for, how much you want to spend, etc.

About.com has a very simple Digital Camera Selector Quiz that may help you by at least pointing you in the right direction about which cameras you should do some research on (of course, you should then do that research on ProductCritic). I tried the quiz acting as different types of buyers and I think it retured fairly decent advice...although it said I should get an advanced camera instead of the dSLR that I thought it would recommend given my answers to the quiz.

If you are looking to buy your first digital camera and are a little intimidated by all the choices, do yourself a favor and take the short quiz.

The Easiest Way To Understand All Those Camera Functions

Although many of us have digital cameras, how many of us really know what all those camera terms like f-stop, aperture, and ISO mean? I own a Digital SLR (Canon 20D) that has almost every imaginable setting but even on my pocket camera (a Canon SD500), I can adjust some of these settings.

It's taken me awhile to understand what all these terms are and how they affect the picture I'm taking (I still don't have a full grasp of it all) but that took a lot of time as I learned through lots of trial and error. Each of these settings affect the other settings and all these combinations can definitely be overwhelming to learn.

Photonhead.com has a load of fantastic tutorials on how to use a digital camera:

• Beginner's Guide to Photography
• Digital Camera Buying Guide
• Photography Tips
• Photo Editing

But, the very best thing on Photonhead is SimCam which is an online Film and Digital Camera Simulator. It gives you the ability to play around with things like f-stops and apertures, take a "virtual picture" and see what the results would be. I think you would find it very useful in learning how all the various settings interact with one another.

In the end, Photonhead has a great tip to learn to take better pictures...take more pictures! I couldn't agree more.

Get The Most Out Of Your Digital Camera...Take This Free Course

The original motive for starting ProductCritic was because we were tired of the hassle of keeping track of all our research before we bought a product. In fact, the current three categories of consumer electronics that we provide review aggregation for on ProductCritic were chosen because we had recently bought a camera, camcorder, and cell phone.

So, part of this blog is also about the products that we cover. I definitely consider myself a very amateur photographer who really enjoys the creative outlet that photography brings. Although I'm not sure that my own photography skills have improved a lot, my pictures have turned out better just because of my current camera, the Canon 20D.

In order to actually improve my skills (and not just my tools), I've recently started going through one of the best free online photography courses I've found. From instructor, Jodie Coston, it's very well written and gives good background information behind the instructions.

The 10 lessons are broken down into:

1. Composition and Impact
2. Aperture and Shutter Speed
3. The Lens
4. ISO, Grain, & Transparency
5. Fun Effects
6. Landscape, Nature, & Travel Photography
7. Portraits and Studio Lighting
8. Studio Lighting
9. Tying It All Together
10. Special Requests

If you want to be happier with the pictures you're taking from that fancy new digital camera you bought, I suggest reading through the course. Also, be sure to check out the best DSLR Tutorial that I wrote about in a previous post.

The Best Canon Digital SLR Tutorial Ever!

Like I've mentioned before, although I take much better pictures than I ever did with my Canon 20D (much thanks to the camera and the lens), I could still use a lot of help with composition and the camera settings. I find that I never have the time to take a whole weekend and just take photos and learn from my mistakes.

PhotoshopSupport.com has the best tutorial I've ever read on using a Digital SLR and it's even better that it's focused on Canon cameras. Given that I'm on the computer all the time, maybe I'll be able to pick up a few tips.