vagabond by nature

Originally posted for .eduguru Blogger Search Contest in November 2008.

Tom just can't help himself

Like most professions it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day projects, politics, and assignments inside Higher Education. However, sometimes especially during holiday breaks or slow fridays we do get some breathing room to catch up or sometimes step forward in our professional lives.

It Starts With You

Now most you by merit are visiting this blog (or reading it on your favorite RSS reader) likely suffer from the same addiction as me bogged down with information overload from RSS feeds, Twitter, email and number of other sources that provide a swell of ideas, useful tricks, and inspiration. Now in order to leverage that bit of information you came across, rather then filing it away or sending it to bookmark oblivion. You need to TAG it, try using these handy addons from delicious, Remember the Milk, or your own Get Things Done process. The important part is that you classify the article/idea to help you later act on it.

Handy Resources to fill your plate

Now in case you haven’t had your fill of sources, let me point out a few good feeds to add to your inspiration toolbox that vary on your role:

Graphic / UX Design

• Smashing Magazine - Showcasing some of the best designs and web techniques around to inspire us all.
• PSD Tuts - Staple of the Envato network, excellent resource for photoshop tutorials.
• Boxes and Arrows - Take usability to next level with these indepth articles.

Marketing / Social Media

• Traffic’d - Social media Marketing is what they do [period]
• SheGeeks - Feeding your social media and Web Addictions
• Alumni Futures - Quite frankly one of the best High Ed authorities on marketing with emphasis on technology.

Professional Development

• Freelance Switch - We’re all ‘freelancers’ at heart aren’t we? Helpful tips managing your personal brand.
• Lifehacker - Improve your life, not just your career with tips ranging from DIY projects, personal finance, to software tricks.
• Freelance Folder - Another read for perpetual multi-tasker and everyman in the office (or home office).

Web Design / Coding

• Net Tuts - New from Envato, has quickly become indispensable resource for coding how-tos.
• DZone - Digg-style mashup of latest greatest coding and design articles on the web.
• Vandelay Design - Alittle of everything to give you tuturials, tips, and lots of inspiration.

Useful add-ons from Remember the Milk & Delicious

Preparations

Once you found a task from your varied sources you need to quickly tag it with the type of action or category (see catagories above for example). I prefer to cross tagging such as DIY (Do it Yourself) with Office Upgrades or Inspiration and Web Design to aide with some quick context when you revisit the task later.

Just like attending a conference, schedule the time for yourself to work on these individual projects - such as a slow Friday afternoon, a quiet holiday break. And in case your boss wonders what your up to - reassure them this is to develop your skill set just like conference or training seminar and doesn’t cost them a dime.

Why it Works

The key to making this work, is that you select projects that interest and challenge you, especially if you haven’t flexed those skills in a while or EVER!

For instance, take a tutorial on creating a movie poster in photoshop - can increase your understanding in typography, graphic layering, and help you ace that next marketing design or HTML email.

Or try that integrating your favorite social media service into your portfolio or blog - not only will it help professional site it will give you the skillset to deploy the same integration in your next project website.

Finally, take the time to write that guest blog you’ve been itching to do to highlight your latest projects and expand your ability as copywriter and educator.

All these actions benefit your value as a working professional and build on your existing strengths to both your employer and yourself - so I encourage each of you to make the time to pick a new and fun project for the holiday season and sink your teeth in.

Sound off below and share your tips for professional development, everyone has method to organize the maddness - what’s yours?

Finally dropping by Missouri State campus to kickoff HighEdWeb 2008, we were welcomed to some upgraded scwag, wifi necessities, and our introductory workshops for us lucky few who arrived early and could afford this unique sessions.

I was fortunate to catch Derek Tonn last year in Rochester and was floored by his presentation on “Graphics Optimization for the Web: Advanced Tools and Techniques”

Needless to say, this is not your mom’s “Save for Web” in photoshop 3 hour workshop; instead opting to delve into the nitty gritty and occasionally command line wage war on the file size of your images.

By the most impressive aspect, is the ability to take staple images in your design and reduce thier filesize by nearly 60-90% in most cases with these techniques - now why would you want to do this?

1. Traffic Spikes - Your team just won the BCS championship ( ChasetheHeisman.com ;), or campus-wide emergency occurs, or you’ve become the latest target of DOS attack. Regardless the reason, when your site get slammed you want to have the lowest filesize footprint to quickly serve your audience and your image files are largest offenders of bloat of your web pages.
2. Broadband IS NOT everywhere - while adoption rates in the US of broadband connections continues to rise, you still have an audience in rural areas still on dailup and espcially the international crowd looking at your instutituion (and yes some of them use IE6). We design our website to be accessibile for the lowest common denomonator - that includes the download size of your website too.
3. $torage $pace - It doesn’t matter wether you host internally or with a vendor, filesize does equal cold hard cash to your IT staff hosting your website. Imagine your photo library of 3,000 images at 800k per image that’s 240g. Now cut that by 60% and your under 100g. It may be pennies, but every cent counts in High Ed.

So let’s look at some of the helpful tools to get you there, mind you I reccomend using this for your graphic designers and web developers - I would not reccomend use of these applications to your content owners. I will be doing a followup post this week on useful tips and software geared toward the end user.

• XAT Image Optimizer (Windows Only) - This handy tool does all the heavy lifting, from removing exif, meta, to very robust zonal compression to work over your JPGs and GIFS.

• ImageMagick (Mac/Win/Lin) - Unfortunately for Mac users, ImageMagick is going to be the closest all purpose tool for downsizing your image tool.

• Flash Optimizer (Mac/Win) - Even your cumbersome SWF files can sqeeze into that size 0 website of yours. This optimizer inspects the various audio, video, photos, shapes, and ActionScript to condese your finished flash file even further.

More to come later… now it’s time to dash. For complete details and tutorials, be sure and visit Derek’s site at

http://graphicsoptimization.com/