Pixels and Waves
Adventures in Digital Art
December 2006 - Vol 1, Issue 4
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Dear Ignatius Makarevich,
Convy

Greetings! I hope that you and your loved ones are enjoying this festive time of year in happiness and health. Welcome to the fourth and final edition of Volume 1 of Pixels and Waves. I must say it's been an interesting experience gaining insight into what the configuration and content of this work should be.

Many thanks to those who provided guidance for the evolutionary path now followed, you know who you are. Many thanks also to you, dear reader... you've made Pixels and Waves outperform every single industry spec listed by my service provider, Constant Contact! That feels great and I hope to continue to meet your expectations.

As a website copywriter, I was very happy indeed to learn of this new development. It's going to change things for the better, for folks who write for the web... and for folks who look for information... for business or pleasure. Latent semantic Indexing, or LSI, is the latest innovation by the young geniuses at Google and it is now fully integrated into their search algorithms.

The search team at Google is dedicated to delivering the most relevant pages possible when a search term or phrase is entered, under the assumption that the practice will maintain their dominance in searching the web. Up till now, indexing, the methodology used to catalog web pages and then refer them, has been based primarily on keywords. Writers have had to integrate these keywords into the copy of their pages multiple times in order to gain the recognition of the search engines. It can be a challenge to come up with nice-sounding, naturally complementary prose working under this guideline.

LSI brings Google technology one step closer to real artificial intelligence in mimicing the way humans think. It has the ability to understand what the writing on the page is about and through its vast informational databases, can now realize that a site's theme and a page's content are relevant to a particular search keyword... even if that keyword isn't on the page.

Writing for the web can now begin to approach writing for books, magazines and other print media. Naturally written and worded pages will be recognized for the quality of their content and referred to information seekers in an appropriate manner. Writers can let go of the instinctive need to keep inserting keywords and worrying whether they've stuck it in enough times for it to count, freeing up the creative workflow to use variations and tenses and just words related to the keyword. Pages will read like they were written for the reader rather than to satisfy a machine. This is really good news.

It will be a little while before this dream is fully realized, as the other less innovative search companies like MSN and Yahoo are still stuck in the rigid keyword-based world and seem happy there, (with Yahoo algorithms being a bit more advanced. i.e., lenient, than the others in this group), but history shows that they will soon follow Google's lead, and when that happens in a bit, reading the web and finding things on it will change dramatically... for the better.
It's traditionally a good idea to keep image files as small as possible on a web site, mainly to prevent long load times and the loss of interest that would typically result from such an occurrence. However there are times when it is a necessity... for stylistic purposes or for the display of, let's say, an artist's works where lots of JPEG compression artifacts would take too much away from the image's impact.

With the advent and continuing advancement of CSS, discussed in the last issue, it is now possible to display large pictures and GIF animations directly on websites and have them load quickly. How? Here's what to do... Simple, just create a division and reference the image url as a background for it! Since the image is referenced, displaying it is treated as a separate operation, hence it loads quickly. The image will need to be uploaded to a server, preferably yours, but any will do. The resultant code would look something like this... "greater than sign"div id="car" style="position:absolute; top: 830px; left: 280px; width: 560px; height: 350px; background-image:url(images/fgt2.jpg)">"greater than sign"/div"less than sign"

Using this technique will let you get away with some surprising things... the earth animation you see here is a 1.24 MB file... yes... megabytes! Spinning globe courtesy NOAA/NGDC.
Dead Air
Fragmentation is enough to mess up your day. Unfortunately, the computing devices we all rely upon for so many things have a bad habit of slow self-destruction. It matters not what sort of computer you have. The files we look at and use and the operational controls themselves have a strange tendency to fall apart like crumbly cake and spread the remains over vast and scattered areas of the hard disks they're on. It isn't really mysterious, but an artifact of the logical layout and the result of files being modified, truncated, expanded, deleted and generally being used. The system is clever enough so that it can read all the scattered bits, but eventually, things will start to deteriorate significantly in performance and even storage availability.

It's important to defragment... and the more critical computers are to your business or lifestyle, the more important defragmentation becomes. There are many programs out there to accomplish this task... in fact Windows has had a simple one as standard for many years. Do use it. Regularly. You'll be glad in the end.

Well, here's to all of us having a fantastically enjoyable and profitable year in 2007! Let new doors open and new vistas appear for us to behold and benefit from.

Sincerely,
Iggy F Makarevich
IFM Productions LLC

phone: 203.253.8391 cell or 203.661.9326
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This email was sent to iggymak@ifmproductions.com, by iggymak@ifmproductions.com
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