Noemi Millman: Triopter: Blog

Outsourcing overseas can be tempting, and there are times when it is an appropriate approach to a web project. But it can be dangerous if you do not have the technical expertise to properly evaluate the quality of the work. Let me tell you a little story:

Recently a client came to me with a small project: a single new page on her site, password protected to keep out casual browsers and search engines, but not requiring a high degree of security.

When I’m very busy, as I am now, I occasionally subcontract to other American-based freelancers with whom I’ve …

As part of a recent project for the excellent Nolej Studios, I needed a way to track which Drupal users are currently logged in — this is surprisingly not really possible using the Drupal core, and even more surprisingly not supported by any contrib modules than I could identify.

The obvious solution was to code my own module, and here it is: usertrack. You can also check it out from Subversion at http://svn.triopter.com/drupal/usertrack/trunk/usertrack/ .

Usertrack includes simple Views integration for filtering, sorting, and annotating your User view with login status and last logout date. Please read the …

As we learned in Part 1, there are two major types of image formats, vector and raster. A raster image is made up of a grid of pixels.

But there are several different raster formats. What’s the difference between them?

BMP
Let’s start with BMP, which is the most straightforward format. BMP stands for “bitmap”, and it is literally a list of pixels, with a color specified for each. Although Microsoft Office seems to like them a lot, BMP’s are not especially desirable for designers. They have large file sizes and often low color depth (meaning they …