Craig Soup Blog

&amp;quot;Free&amp;quot; Credit Report

Craig — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:01:08 +0000

Don’t EVER go to freecreditreport.com unless you enjoy being robbed. They lure you in with a FREE report, and then in little tiny letters that nobody ever notices, they tell you that they’re signing you up for a free trial for Triple Advantage credit monitoring, and if you don’t call to cancel before the free trial is up, they start charging you $15/month. They’ve been charging me this for several months now, and I just now noticed it. So I called to figure out the problem, and after they tried to sell me more products, I had to tell them that I was never interested in doing business with them again. And she assured me that I had no grounds for a refund for the $90 they’ve stolen from me so far.

Why have we turned into a society where we have to trick people into giving you money in order to make a profit? Why has the human race stooped so low that we can no longer trust the people and the businesses that surround us?

I want to encourage everybody out there to stop doing business with companies who don’t even respect you enough to tell you the truth without cleverly disguising it.

And if YOU are a business person, if you own a company, I implore you to restore my faith in humanity by being honest. And in my estimation, hiding a $15/month charge among a deluge of tiny paragraphs of text is NOT honesty.

Growing Traffic to Your Blog

Craig — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:49:31 +0000

When you first start building a blog, the temptation to spend all of your time increasing traffic is almost unbearable. However, if you want to create a successful blog, the most important thing you can do for it in the beginning is to just start creating some solid content. If your website has good, solid content that’s worth coming back to, then eventually someone will notice and word will spread.

On the other hand, once you’ve created some solid content, you’ll want to start exploring different ways of building traffic to your blog. There are endless techniques for doing so, and there are entire blogs devoted to teaching these techniques. But you have to start somewhere.

Well, for my School of Flash blog, I recently started exploring some of these techniques, and in just a couple of weeks, I’ve been able to boost my traffic from 20 visits a day to over 400 visits a day. If I was able to do this in just a couple weeks, imagine how much more traffic I’ll be able to pull in over a few months and over a couple of years.

So, how did I do it? Well, it’s difficult to point at any one thing, considering I’ve been trying so many, but I did want to share with you a couple of things I’ve done to boost my traffic so much. Following is a list of techniques that will help you get the traffic you’re looking for.

Submit your site to search engines. This is step numero uno! If search engines don’t know about your site, then how do you ever expect to achieve any organic traffic? If you want to know if Google has recognized your site yet, simply do a search on Google for your domain name (i.e., search for “craigsoup.com”). If you get no results, then your site hasn’t been recognized yet. So take the time to submit your website to all the search engines and directories you can get your hands on.
Include a link to your RSS feed. Make it a big link! This is how you get people to continue coming back to your site. I would suggest using Feedburner for your RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful free tool, and it also allows you to build forms to get your readers to subscribe using their email addresses.
Build traffic through social media. This is the one that gave my site a big boost. Through a combination of Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and MySpace, I’ve been heavily marketing my site. Every time I create a new blog post, I submit the post to Digg, and this has brought me an increasing flow of traffic. Another blogger even saw one of these posts on Digg and linked to it on his own blog (which is why it’s so important to create QUALITY content)!
My latest monumental surge of traffic, though, has come from StumbleUpon. Just like with Digg, every time I create a new blog post, I go to the page for that post and vote for that page on StumbleUpon. I did this last night when I posted a new tutorial on ActionScript 3.0 Masks, and this morning I woke up to find that I had a record number of visitors for the day . . . and that was at 8 IN THE MORNING!
Post regularly. If you’re a sporadic poster, don’t bother. It will be practically impossible to build any sort of steady traffic if you only post once a month. Try to post AT LEAST twice a week. Every day, if possible!

There are hundreds of other things you can do to build traffic, but this is a good start. What have you done to increase traffic to your website?

Google Analytics - Two Thumbs Way Up

Craig — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:21:46 +0000

Until recently, I’ve always used the website tracking tools offered by my webhost. For the most part, they were decent tools, but I have several domains on the same server, and it was difficult to weed through all the information to figure out how each domain was doing individually.

Enter Google Analytics.

I had certainly heard of Google Analytics (Who hasn’t?), and I had even heard that it was a fantastic tool, but for some reason, I had always assumed that all analytics tools were the same.

I was wrong. After using GA for only two days, I can already tell that it’s going to be much more informative, much easier to use tool than I could have imagined. So, why is it so handy?

1. First of all, it allows me to view each of my domains separately. Might not sound too exciting, I know, but after a year of using the tools I’ve been using, you’d be excited, too!

2. It’s remarkably easy to use. The different categories of statistics are easy to access and easy to understand. And if you DON’T understand a certain statistic, you can easily click on the “About this report” link on the left side of the page, and it will explain everything for you.

3. It’s a great teacher. Along with explanations of what each report means, Google Analytics also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your stats.

4. Easy link tracking. GA has an amazing “site overlay” tool that opens up your site in a popup window and shows you visually how often each link was tracked (see picture below).

All in all, Google Analytics is an amazing tool that anybody with a website can benefit from (not just web designers). I avoided it for so long (for no good reason), and with my new Flash blog (http://www.SchoolOfFlash.com), I finally decided to swallow the red pill, and I’m glad I did.

New Flash Blog

Craig — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:05:05 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately. Well, they’re about to get even quieter, but for a good reason.

I recently started a new blog called School of Flash, and I intend to put a lot of effort into making this new blog into a valuable resource for anyone interested in Flash. So head on over and let me know what you think.

Also, let me know if there are any questions you have or any tutorials you would like to see.

Microsoft and “Suspicious” Websites

Craig — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:00:59 +0000

Just when I was beginning to think that I couldn’t hate Microsoft any worse, they have to go and prove me wrong.

In an effort to “help” protect us from bad websites, Microsoft’s latest release of the worst browser on the planet (Internet Explorer 7) has started randomly labeling sites as “suspicious” in order to kill commerce.

Okay, so they’re not really trying to kill commerce, and I’m sure their labeling tactics aren’t RANDOM, but from what I’ve read, there seems to be no common thread among people who have had their websites labeled as “suspicious” by Internet Destroyer . . . I mean Explorer.

And the real kicker is this . . . If Microsoft screws up (which seems to happen more often than not) and labels your site as “suspicious”, then you have to go to their website, fill out a form, and wait around for them to “check out” your website to make sure everything is alright.

Get over yourself, Microsoft, and stop trying to “help” people who don’t need it!

GET FIREFOX, EVERYONE!!

Wireless Connection Finally Fixed

Craig — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:16:15 +0000

For ten months I’ve lived in this house, and for ten months I’ve had an internet connection that has been about as reliable as the first generation release of any Microsoft product on the market. At times I’ve been driven to the brink of insanity by a wireless connection that sometimes won’t stay alive long enough to download an MP3. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve shut down and restarted my wireless router, I would own more islands than Keanu Reeves and Marlon Brando put together (which, I believe, adds up to about two)!

And this morning was the last straw. As I logged on to start the workday, my lousy ActionTec router refused to stay connected for more than 30 seconds at a time. I restarted the router over and over, and every time I restarted it, it began working again . . . but only for a very limited time.

After an hour of this, I felt my brain swelling inside my skull like a volcano ready to pop. Over the past few months, I had tried everything that it made sense to try. I tried restarting routers, tightening cables, and I even purchased signal boosters, all to no avail.

So, since common sense didn’t seem to get me anywhere, I tried the only thing left to try. I knocked it over.

Okay, I didn’t KNOCK it over, but I did take it off the upright stand it had been sitting on and set it down on its belly. And guess what! It worked! Ever since I set it on its belly, I haven’t had a single problem, and my internet connection has been chugging along faster than ever!

And it’s all kind of strange, considering that I had a similar problem with my xBox 360. As soon as I set it in the upright position (which it was supposedly designed to be able to do), I started having major problems.

The moral of this story? If you purchase anything that comes with an upright stand, throw it away. Electronics like to lay on their bellies.

To the City

Craig — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:37:58 +0000

While watching the Red River Shootout this weekend, I decided to exercise my creative muscles a little bit and play around with Photoshop. This is what I came up with:

The design is just a compilation of images I downloaded, sliced apart, threw together, and added some color changes to. It was actually inspired by a similar piece that I had seen on the internet, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find the image again.

Anyways, the moral of the story here is that it’s good for the creative mind to take a break from “work” every now and then in order to create something just for the sake of creating something! It reminds us that we love our jobs, that even though we may get bogged down in the business side of things every now and then, we’re still designers, and we love what we do!!

Flash Forward Boston

Craig — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:10:58 +0000

Well, the Flash Forward conference is in full force, and Boston is beautiful! The weather here is absolutely perfect right now! The sun is out in full force but without the oppressive heat of late-summer Texas. In this weather, I’d be just as comfortable in a light sweater as in a short sleeve polo . . . which is fortuitous, because all I brought was short sleeve polos and t-shirts!

The sessions so far have been great! Thus far I’ve been to sessions on Flash games, the SWX data format for Flash, and website branding on social media sites (digg, twitter, MySpace, etc.)

One quick note on MySpace . . . Even though it’s ugly, bulky, and downright icky, MySpace can still be a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. There, I said it. Enough about MySpace!

I’m really excited about the next session I’ll be going to. It’s called “One Man Bands - Flash Animators Going it Alone.” Aaron Simpson will be the speaker, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

More later!

Shipping Off to Boston

Craig — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:23:24 +0000

I’m catching a plane to Boston this afternoon for the Flashforward Conference, which starts tomorrow. Telling my wife goodbye this morning was harder than I thought it would be, but it’s only for a couple of days, and I’m sure it will go by in a flash (pun intended)!

The speakers at this week’s conference include Aral Balkan, founder of OSFlash; Chris Georgenes, an amazing Flash animator and the owner of Mudbubble design and animation studio (can’t wait for this one); Seb Lee-Delisle, a well known Flash game programmer and animator; Erik Natzke, an amazing designer; and many more!

With such a great lineup, I can’t help but get excited about this! Plus, it’ll be a lot of fun meeting up with other Flashers out there and finding out what other people are doing with Flash and other Adobe products.

I’ll keep you updated!

Photoshop Tutorial - CraigSoup.com Background

Craig — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:06:08 +0000

I’ve had a couple people ask for a tutorial on how to create the craigsoup.com graphic that I created in my last post, so I thought I’d go ahead and do so while I made a desktop wallpaper out of it. I’ll be using Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial, but you should be able to follow along in older versions of Photoshop as well.

I’m going to start with an image of some old, crumbly wallpaper. I took this picture at my wife’s uncle’s house. Lots of great photo opportunities there! Anyways, here’s the photo (click on the image to get the full size version).

The original image size here is 2272 x 1704. I want to make this for a few different resolutions (1440 x 900, 1024 x 768, and 800 x 600), so I’m not going to resize anything just yet.

1.) The first thing I want to do with the image is tone down the colors to give this a more antiquated look. To do this, I’m going to create a new copy of the layer with the image in it. For something like this, I almost always start with a new copy of the original layer, because I don’t like messing with the original image. You can make a new copy by dragging the current layer to the “New Layer” icon ( ) or by pressing Cmd+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (PC) with the image layer selected.

2.) Now we want to remove the color from this new layer. To do this, I’m going to select the new layer (which should be directly above the original layer) and desaturate it (Cmd+Shift+U or Ctrl+Shift+U). This layer should now be a grayscale version of the original layer.

3.) Now, we’re going to make ANOTHER copy of the original layer by once again dragging the ORIGINAL layer (not the grayscale one) to the “New Layer” icon or by selecting the original layer and hitting Cmd+J or Ctrl+J. Drag this new copy to the very top of the layer stack so that it’s directly above the grayscale layer.

Your Layers Palette should now look like this (notice I’ve also labeled the layers appropriately):

4.) Now, simply change the blend mode of the top layer (the “Color Copy” layer) from “normal” to “soft light” (the blend mode dropdown list is found at the top of the Layers palette). This results in muted colors that give our photo a more antique-ish feel.

Very cool! Steps 1-4, by the way, are always a GREAT way to give your images an older, vintage feel. The blend mode you choose in step 4 may vary depending on the image (sometimes “overlay” works a little better), but for the most part, this technique almost always yields great results.

5.) Another thing I want to do is to rotate the photo 180 degrees so that the corner of the wall is closer to the right side of the image. To do this, go to “Image > Rotate Canvas > 180″. And voila! The image has been flipped.

6.) Now I want to bring up the contrast and reduce the brightness a little bit in order to make our image look a little more spooky. I’m going to do this using an adjustment layer. You can create an adjustment layer using another handy little icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This is the icon that looks like a circle that’s half black and half white. When you click on this icon, you’ll get a popup menu. Choose “Brightness/Contrast” from this menu. For this image, I’ve chosen a brightness of -36 and a contrast of +81.

And here’s the result:

Now we’re getting somewhere!

7.) Now we’re going to get really nasty! Select the “burn” tool ( ), and using a large brush size with soft edges, go to town on the grayscale layer. (I had my “exposure” for the burn tool set to 34%, in case you’re wondering.) This will darken the parts of the image you brush over, so don’t go overboard, but especially try to darken the edges of the image. Keep brushing over the grayscale layer until your image looks something like this:

Freaky! I love it!

8.) Now I want to highlight the hole in the wallpaper that you see right in the middle of the image. So I’m going to choose the “dodge” tool (located in the same spot at the “burn” tool) and touch up the hole (again, on the grayscale layer) to make it stand out more . . . like so:

9.) This is where things get fun. At this point, we’re gonna jump on over to brusheezy.com and download some new Photoshop brushes. For this particular effect, I suggest the Blood and Splatter brushes, the TurkHitBox Grunge Set brushes, and the Floral Swirl brushes. (If you don’t know how to install new brushes read this article.) Using the paintbrush tool, select your choice of any of the previously mentioned brushes, create a new layer, choose white for the foreground color, and click somewhere on your image. This will result in a bright white shape. To calm the shape down, simply change the blend mode of the layer to “overlay” or “soft light”, whichever works best. Sometimes when you do this (especially with the grunge brushes), the shape won’t be bright enough to see. If this is this case, simply make a copy of the “soft light” layer right on top of itself, and it will brighten right up. If it’s too bright, simply lower the opacity of one of the layers.

So go crazy with this step, using whatever combination of brushes you like. This is what I ended up with:

As they say in Canada . . . Not bad, eh?

10.) Now for the text. Pick the font of your choice and type in the text of your choice using the Text tool. (Use white for the text color.) Rasterize the text so you can transform it as you wish, and then play with the blend modes to get the desired results. In my image, I made a second copy of the text and reduced the opacity of this second copy to 30%. I used a blend mode of “overlay” for both of these text layers. Here’s my final result:

Here are some download links if you’d like to use this wallpaper on your desktop:

1440 x 900
1024 x 768
800 x 600

Enjoy! Let me know what you think!