Web Design
Adobe Photoshop Black Canvas Fix.
So I just started testing out Adobe Photoshop CS4. I ran into a little problem to start with. Every new image I made would be solid black and I could not see anything I was trying to do. When I first started using the new version of Photoshop it gave me a message about implementing GPU processing. This was enough of a clue to get me started.
Steps to take to fix the black canvas:
Adobe recommends that you try to update your video drivers to support GPU processing, and if this works I would take this route as it will make Photoshop more powerful.
If that does not work try the following:
- Open Photoshop go to Edit > Prefrences > Proformance.
- Then under GPU Settings uncheck Enabled OpenGL Drawing.
- A restart may be required, but I do not remember for sure.
Well that is what worked for me. I hope this helps others, because at the time when I Googled for a solution there was nothing.
Becoming Alexa Ranked in two steps.
So when I started the major revamping of http://www.samplusplus.com I became interested in a few things. One of those things being Alexa page rank. I had been tracking my visitors with Google Analytics. However I wanted to see how I compared with other sites on the web. After reading up a little on Alexa this is what I learned…
How Alexa works:
This is just my general understanding of how Alexa works. Alexa gauges the number of visitors to your site by the number of visitors who visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. The Alexa toolbar reports back to Alexa and that a visit occurred. Alexa realizes that not everyone will have the Alexa toolbar installed and then adds a percentage to this number to determine roughly the number of visitors you get. Well I don’t know about you, but the the type of visitors that visit my site are not going to have the Alexa toolbar installed. Until about a a month or two ago I was not Alexa ranked because of this. With some further research I found that many believe that anything that makes a call to Alexa counts as a visit, so I tried a few things.
How I became ranked:
First I installed Firefox extension: Search Status.This extensions shows the Alexa rank and the Google page rank of every site that you visit in the bottom part of Firefox. However since this calls to Alexa it is believed that this is considered a visit by Alexa. I can not prove this though.
Secondly I installed an Alexa site widget. I use the Alexa Traffic Rank Button because I wanted something small. I then put it on 90% of my websites pages through a simple php include. I did not put it on my main pages where I desire a very clean look.
Results:
Withing a few days I became ranked. It was not very impressive somewhere in the 8 millions, but I had a rank and I was happy. Within a few months as Alexa collected more data I Jumped to 2,966,415 were I am at the time of writing this article.
Hope this helps others who want to become Alexa Ranked.