You may have already seen this video (it's from mid-August) on resizing images in a more content-aware way: called "seam carving". If not, take a look.

I've shown that video to a few people over the last couple of weeks and nearly every one of them asked where they could get software to do that. The package that everyone points to is the GIMP plugin "liquid resize".

The only problem with pointing people over to that plugin is that it's not exactly obvious that it shows up under the "Layer" menu in GIMP. Similarly non-obvious is exactly how to use it to get the best results.

If you just fire away, you don't get the benefits of preserving people's faces, for example. Instead, you get a distorted image that's little better than if you had just resized it and ignored the proportions.

Fortunately, a tutorial for using the liquid resize plugin landed in my RSS reader this morning and I thought I'd share.

Oh, and, for the record, while GIMP is typically run on Linux, you CAN run it on Windows as well. Just make sure you run the GTK installer before the GIMP installer (both on the site).

If you don't like the results that the GIMP plugin gives you, take a look at this other implementation of the idea or wait for Photoshop to integrate it (they hired the guy from the video).

Now that I've gotten this Wordpress installation straightened out and errors removed, I'm looking at doing a new theme/redesign (yes, starting again). I didn't really like my last attempt and would really like something I can stare at for a while before needing it re-done.

I also would like to finally make my theme standards-compliant. At various times, I've looked at many of the starting points that are out there for CSS-based layouts. Unfortunately, they all pretty much consist of variations on 1, 2 and 3 column layouts.

That causes a problem because what I'm looking to do is much more of a magazine-style grid, especially for a new front page. I want areas for featured posts, recent posts, subscription information, etc. And, when I just shove them into left or right columns like I'm doing now, I'm not really happy with the result. The kinds of grids that the linked article uses are way more complicated than the samples to do with CSS.

While I'm perfectly capable of getting it to work eventually, I'm not interested in spending 5 times as long to build the thing with pure CSS as it would take to hack it together the impure way.

I was lamenting this overall situation to someone a few days ago and they suggested I take a look at the YUI grid CSS setup. I messed with their grid builder a bit and read through the documentation and I definitely think that YUI grids are a really slick way to build those more complicated layouts using CSS. The elements are nestable (one of my biggest pet peeves with most CSS layouts), stackable and otherwise provide most of the necessary controls to build the more complicated grids.

I'm thinking if I can get a grid working that I like, then apply color and design to that grid, I can make future changes to just that color and design bit, to freshen things up instead of starting from scratch the next time. Having it all laied on out on a bare grid would probably work better for working with a designer as well. Lots of the problems the last time I did that came from layouts that just wouldn't work with all of the elements on this site.

It'll still have to wait until next week or later due to how much crap is going on this week, but for the first time in a long time, I'm confident that what I want to see done with this site can be done *easily* with CSS.

I'm taking yet another stab at redesigning this site, though this time I'm just starting with a template from OSWD rather than from scratch. That's really helping on the graphic design front. However, given that a site like this is primarily text-based, I'd really like to have better font control than HTML usually offers .

That's where sIFR comes in. It uses Flash to do high-quality font replacement in web pages. While it doesn't really work for body text, this would be a way to use something other than the same 4-5 fonts we all end up using for headlines, pullquotes and other accent text.

I've mentioned sIFR before, but haven't ended up implementing it anywhere in production. Part of that was the conversion of a TTF font into the SWF Flash file that sIFR uses to work its magic. The Javascript/HTML part itself is relatively straightforward, but when the instructions for getting the font ready in the first place included launching the full version of Flash, I kind of lost my momentum.

However, now that I'm looking at a redesign, I wondered if there was another way to get the SWF from my existing fonts. Like most problems that exist for very long, there is indeed a solution.

The sifrFontEmbedder is pretty basic. You give it a TTF font file and it spits out the SWF for use with sIFR. You do need to download SWFMill as well, but other than that and sIFR itself, you don't need anything else.

I grabbed the tools and generated a copy of my LetterJ font that worked flawlessly on the test page. If you'd like the SWF, you can just grab it.

Now I can use any TTF font on my system. There are some pretty good candidates that are 100% legal to use this way on the 20 Best Free Fonts list and the fonts under the Open Source Font license are always a good place to start.