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The Death of the Yellow Pages

In these harsh economic times, it is a popular and entertaining pastime to declare the “death” of such-and-such an industry.  Newspapers are a common target and a popular subject — take Walter Isaacson’s recent Time Magazine cover story on “how to save your newspaper.”  With the global popularity of the internet, blogs, and the omnipresent Google, it seems logical that as more and more people turn to online sources for their information, traditional printed resources will fall by the wayside.  But is this necessarily so?  Specifically, what about another once-popular printed resource?  Has Google killed the Yellow Pages?

Blogger Tracy Coenen of WalletPop thinks so (and she’s not alone).  In July of 2008, she wrote a series of articles entitled “Top 25 things vanishing from America” — in at #24 was The Yellow Pages.  In her article, she referenced the results of a study by The Kelsey Group, a Princeton NH-based local advertising research firm, predicting that usage of newspapers and print Yellow Pages would drop by as much as 10% in 2008 — nearly triple the falloff rate of previous years.

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CRI Recycling, Inc.
http://www.crirecyclinginc.com

Jim and Rosemary Chesser joined the recycling adventure over eight years ago.  Based in Louisville, Kentucky, their family-owned business has blossomed from a one-room office into a sizeable redistribution warehouse located east of Downtown.  They purchase recyclable cell phones, inkjet and laser toner cartridges and provide a variety of recycling services.

CRI Recycling, Inc. offers three main services:

1. Fundraising for non-profits,  through their recycling program
2. Acting as an empties broker for inkjet and laser toner cartridges
3. Recycling end-of-life electronics, computer hardware, and cell phones

In addition, CRI Recycling, Inc. pride themselves in providing excellent customer service — we have personally spoken with several of their customers and all agree that Jim and Rosemary are an immense pleasure to work with.

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Keyboard Shortcuts that can save you time:

Here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts that some people might not know about.  Most of these can be discovered simply by hovering over any particular tool icon in Photoshop, but for reference here are the ones I use most.

• D — Restores the default Foreground and Background colors (black & white).
• X — Swaps the Foreground and Background colors
• H — Selects the Hand tool
• T — Selects the Type tool.  Shift + T rotates through the different types of Type tool (Horizontal, Vertical, etc.)
• M — Selects the Rectangular Marquee tool.  Shift + M alternates between the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee tools.
• V — Selects the Move tool.
• L — Selects the Lasso tool.  Shift + L rotates between the different Lasso tools (Regular, Polygonal, Magnetic).

Basically, any tool that has multiple types (e.g. the Lasso, the Eraser, the Pencil) has a shortcut key assigned to it, and using Shift + that key will alternate between the types.

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This is something I’ve been meaning to post for a while now, just havent felt like puting the time in to go through step by step and produce a quality tutorial. Creating a Master Page from an HTML design is one of the first, and definitely one of the most important, steps to turning a good design into a functional website. This tutorial will outline creating the Master Page from an original HTML file, and then recreating the index page using the master page.

If you want to cheat, you can skip to the bottom and download the final version HERE.

1 » Get Organized

1.1 » Download Source Files

You can create a Master Page from any HTML file, as long as you have the CSS and images to go with it. I

downloaded “Shades of Gray” by Arcsin @ FreeLayouts.com. You can download the .zip file from my site HERE.

1.2 » Create a New Website

Open Visual Studio, using the file menu choose “New Website”. (Shift+Alt+N) You can save the project anywhere you like and name it whatever you want, but I saved mine to the desktop and named it “MasterPageTutorial”. This will create a new project for you and add some default files.

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This will be the first of many photoshop tutorials I will be posting on this blog.

If you are into web design or photoshop, follow me on Twitter at @TylerGoss.

The first tutorial will show you how to airbrush the photo of a person’s face to remove acne, wrinkles, and anything else on their skin you don’t want.

So we will start with this image of a girl.  You can see the pores, wrinkles, and some spots on her face.

The first step is to remove any visible dots from her face.  You will do this by using the Healing Brush Tool, it looks like a little band aid.  You want your cursor/circle/brush to be just slightly bigger than the spot on the person’s face.  Click on the spot, and it will magically disappear! This tool takes the colors/patterns right around where you click and clones that into the area you just clicked on.  So when using this healing brush tool you’ll need to make sure to have at least a little area of skin around where you’re clicking, otherwise it may clone some hair or clothing depending on what is around.

Now we are ready to airbrush.

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