Wil_Soft Development Weblog

I’ve got some rendering business and some AutoCAD customization as wellas some Web Design projects on-going right now.
This is a new logo design I’m working on for my own site.

I was experimenting with some different types of lighting for my renderings in 3D Studio Max and thought this was an interesting image.

Will you switch to a better browser? You probably use Internet Explorer, as do 85% of the people who visit this web site, “because it’s there". It ships with your operating system, you don’t need to do anything but fire it up and hit the web!!

But what if there were a better browser out there? Much, much better!!!! Easier to use, safer for your data, better at loading pages, better at presenting pages accurately, better at blocking anoying popups, better e-mail, able to import all your bookmarks and e-mail contacts, would you switch? No! Too much work? What if it was free? And it automaticaly loaded your favorites and e-mail contacts?

Check out Mozilla Firefox 1.0 I think if you give a try you’ll find it is a huge imporvement. Tabbed pages as opposed to new browser windows popping up all over your screen, is reason enough for me to love it. Download it here and give it a try! (No, I don’t make anything off it, it’s free for everyone to try)

Another wonderful alternative is Opera 7.54 It’s free too and works as well or better than Firefox. Try them both and decide for your self.
After all, Microsoft has already announced they will no longer be updating IE, so what do you have to lose?

If you’re site can’t be found on the first couple of pages of a Google search, you will not get much traffic to your site. SEO, or search engine optimization, includes many factors and if done correctly will help move you up the search engine dog pile.

One under discussed factor in search engine optimization is HTML validation, or “Web Standards". W3C is the international organization that helps set the standards for web page coding.

Web page validators check your site for valid html markup language and provide suggestions to cleanup your page code. Clean, valid pages have been found to rank better in google and yahoo searches, so either take the time to validate your site today, or hire someone who can do it for you, but don’t overlook your code cleanup chores!

AutoCAD was first released by a group of programers, including John Walker, back in 1982. The AutoDesk papers, is a compilation, by Mr. Walker, of the original papers and information relating to the early and ongoing growth of AutoCAD and AutoDesk. It’s a truly fascinating history for anyone interested in AutoCAD. Definatly worth a read.

While using paper space viewports (mview command) to setup a plot, it often becomes necessary to create viewports of different scales, and model space views, in order to present your ideas correctly. When some of the viewports overlap or fall within the limits of other viewports it can become difficult to click inside a viewport to change to that views model space for layer manipulation. If you keep getting the wrong viewports model view when you click, try using Ctrl-R to cycle through the various views instead.

The first versions of AutoCAD included the “Text” command for creating text entities. It asked for a start point, rotation angle and then provided only a single line of text at a time.

Soon the “Dtext", or dynamic text, command was added. It allowed you to input additional lines of text below the first line simply by hitting enter to proceed to the next line. This allowed the creation of the first paragraph like text, but unfortunately, the text was not tied together in any way, and thus lost its paragraph formatting very easily during editing operations.

Finally, true paragraph text, called “Mtext”, was added in Rel 13. It allowed much more flexibility in creating associated paragraph text.

What many newer users don’t realize is some of the power and flexibility still available in the older text creation tools, particularly, Dtext. If you need to create rotated text to align with an object, mtext will not allow it, but text and dtext will. At the text rotation prompt you can use any object snaps to align with almost any object on screen, and all following lines of text will maintain that alignment. Also, you can select a new start point at any time while in dtext. Instead of hitting return or entering more text, pick any point on screen and the next line of text will start at that point, using whatever alignment and justification you’ve already set. You can also list all available styles, or select any valid text justification with dtext, prior to starting your text.

Like most older command line based commands, it benefits you greatly to read the command prompts and experiment with some of the options. You may just find some situations where it does things not available with any other commands.

If you check out the Free lisp routines page here you will find some routines written specifically to ease working with text objects.

I’m learning Civil 3D right now and applying it to several on going development projects. The tools are very powerful, but the interface and methods of interaction are very foreign to anyone who has used LDD for any length of time.

I’ve been using LDD since 1986 when it was an autolisp add on from DCA, a New Hampshire Engineering consulting firm. It became Softdesk after many years of development and then became LDD after being swallowed whole by Autodesk. Now we have Civil 3D, an outgrowth of the desire to automate the civil design production cycle.

It uses styles and palletes to control the interaction and display of various design items and processes. Point data, surfaces, alignments, road corridor design etc. are all interactive and can be tied to each other in various ways as well as having changes updated through out the project when ever edits are made. Autodesk offers on line traing through microsoft netmeeting and has a list of ongoing training sessions at the Civil 3D Demonstration page.

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about link building in order to increase page ranking of a web site.

While it may be worth your time to search for links, please keep in mind that page content is becoming one of the most important aspects of getting more search traffic to your site.

High Page Rank is only a part of ranking high on google searches. You need to make sure your content is fresh, relevant, useful and appropriate to your sites purpose. Search engine optimization includes so many different aspects, that if you spend all your time and effort on linking only you will be shorting yourself in the search engine results page, which after all, is really what your after in the end.

We can help you with on site and offsite optimization, keyword research, file and directory structure naming and a host of other aspects which all come together to place you high on the search results page.

After all, you can’t sell from your site if no one ever see’s it, can you?

I’ve noticed over the years that new AutoCAD users always seem to want to reselect or retype the same command they just ran. If you want to reuse a command there are two good options besides going back to the menus.

1. Hitting enter at an empty command prompt will re-run the last command used
2. Use the up arrow button to scroll up through the list of typed commands already entered

Also, by entering @ when prompted for a point will always use the most recently selected point.

I’m hoping to use this blog as a means of communicating with my site visitors. If you have any questions or comments feel free to add them to my posts. I’ll do my best to reply on here. I am also hoping to comment / instruct using this blog…

I’m planning on making small information “chunks” regarding web design, AutoCAD instruction, rendering info etc. available here. Hopefully any visitors who read these posts will find something informative here.

Added WordPress blog software to my site so I can add and comment on a more regular basis.
I’m going to try it and Greymatter out and see which I prefer. Wordpress installation was quick and easy and works well so far…..