Much of web development comes down to personal taste. How you indent your code, whether you use b & i or strong and em tags, whether you compartmentalize all your styles into neat little external stylesheets or liberally pepper your HTML with inline styles; most of these types of decisions have little bearing on the functionality or even “correctness” of your code. Likewise, there are many ways to handle some of the common elements that fall within the domain of that most sneaky of snake-oil salesmen—the SEO expert.

But I’ve spoken before of my disdain for that profession. What I’m going to talk about now is one little nugget in that arena:
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With my post about pixel-perfect guides in Photoshop consistently being the site’s most popular, I thought a new series of Photoshop-related posts might be in order. This will be the first of an irregular series about Photoshop Basics, wherein I’ll talk about some of my most used—but basic—tips, tricks, shortcuts, and skills to help you use Photoshop more efficiently or effectively.

What follows is a smorgasbord of quick tips that, as a web developer, I use nearly every day.
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, so let’s have a little refresher.

When my niece was born, I decided that I wanted to do something original, creative, and personal for her each year for Christmas. Since she was living overseas, and I knew I might only get to see her (and therefore to share a book with her) a few times a year at best, I struck on the idea of doing an audio CD of me reading some of my favorite children’s stories to her. Thus: Storytime.

In 2006, for my third CD, I had a couple realizations—first, that there are only so many kids books I consider “favorites”, and second, that my niece, being a girl, would be more interested in “girl” stories than the “boy” stories I used to read. So, I would have to branch out into unfamiliar, and at times, uncomfortable territory. Case in point, our first track from 2006.

I picked Christmas is Here! (at my wife’s prompting, I’m sure) because it’s a Christmas story, and because girls love Strawberry Shortcake.

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Though I’ve long known of the Windows Alt- and Mac Option-key codes for producing extended characters, I’ve only recently discovered a couple different shortcuts that allow the same thing under Linux.

A discussion at Daily Writing Tips about em-dashes, specifically regarding when to use them, spun in the direction of how to produce em-dash characters.

The immediate and obvious suggestion was to rely on word processors’ automatic character replacement—which generally involves swapping out two minus signs for “—” as-you-type. It was also pointed out, however, that there are specific key sequences you can use within different OSes to produce these characters without benefit of a word processor.

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One of the chief struggles for an amateur photography enthusiast, apart from developing your skill as a photographer, is figuring out how best to manage your ever-growing collection¹. Importing, naming, securing, processing, and filtering thousands of photos often requires sophisticated planning and a stable workflow.

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