CollageIt Pro is an automatic and easy to use collage maker on Mac OS X & Windows. Making collages is as easy as 1-2-3 with only 3 steps…
choose template
add photos & customize
export collage
Other features include
Various layouts and diverse templates.
Easily personalize collage by cropping, adjusting photo number, photo space, page margin, rotation, sparse, and so on.
Save collage as an image file; set as desktop wallpaper; share through Email; or print it out.
To celebrate Mothers Day in the US we have 20 licences for CollageIt Pro to give away – 12 for Windows and 8 for OS X. Below are 2 entry forms – 1 for each licence type. Simply use Facebook and/or Twitter to enter.
I’m happy to announce the release of a new WordPress plugin – Artiss Vine Embed.
Just days after Vine released details of how to embed one of their videos into a site, this plugin makes the experience incredibly easy. With both a shortcode for embedding into posts and pages as well as a widget for sidebars it couldn’t be easier.
I’m already working on the next release which will introduce a simple administration screen for setting default options. After that expect responsive video options, amongst other things.
Remarkably this plugin wasn’t the first at WordPress.org to introduce Vine videos (beaten by 2 days!) but it’s already the most feature rich.
I’ve been offline a bit recently. Let me tell you my story…
Last Monday (the 18th) I was sat at work, idly chatting to my manager. Suddenly he tells that my nose is bleeding. I look down and there’s bloody all over my shirt. I hold my nose as prescribed but it doesn’t want to stop. Soon a first aider appears and then another (all giving me conflcting advise, I should add). The blood just won’t stop so they decide to get me to the local A&E – my manager kindly takes me. It’s about 5pm by now so it’s busy in A&E. In fact I spent hours sat holding my nose and when I’m finally seen it’s stopped by itself. After a Doctor has a quick look and confirms that it’s stopped they send me a home – I get a taxi. Next day my wife takes me to work.
All was fine. Until Friday.
Again, sat at my desk looking at my monitor and suddenly my nose starts dripping blood again. Again it doesn’t stop and someone kindly takes me to A&E. It’s early afternoon and quiet so I get shunted through quite quickly through to the specialist department (although now with a cannula in my arm). The nose specialist gets me to unblock my nose and let it stream into a pot whilst she looks at it. She finds the source of the bleed, in my right nostril so cauterises it. It’s not quite the “soldering iron up the nose” that people expect – they spray liquid up your nose to numb it and then use a thin stick, on the end of which is a chemical that performs the burning action when pressed against the skin. I leave after a couple of hours and all appears well. However this was slightly more traumatic than my Monday experience and I’m feeling wobbly so go straight home.
That night, exchausted, I head for bed early and around 9 put the light out. At this point I sneeze and my nose starts bleeding again. But this time it’s different, apart from being at home. It’s more traumatic – blood is everywhere and it’s going down my throat in massive amounts. My wife calls 999 and I’m soon off to A&E again by ambulance. A cannula is put in my hand and I’m seen quickly by a specialist. This time it’s my left nostril but the bleeding is so far up she can’t see the source. At this point she apologises and says she’ll have to use a “pack”. You know it’s not going to get well for you when they apologise first.
The “pack” is properly called a Rapid Rhino. If you watch the video in that link you’ll get a sense of what I’m about to tell you. It’s a long white putty-looking device. It’s the width of a chipolata sausage but the length of a jumbo sausage. She inserts the first inch up my nostril and I was wondering if she was going to have to trim off the excess. No. It goes all the way in – some twisting and crunching and it goes in. It was the single most painful experience of my life. It’s then inflated with liquid so that it applies pressure from inside the nose.
This has to stay in for at least 24 hours – it’s midnight now so it won’t be taken out until Sunday morning. I’m moved to a ward, covered in blood and feeling very sorry for myself. The Rhino is very uncomfortable in place and I’m on constant pain relief to make it all a little easier. I spend my time in hospital doing… nothing. My brain switches off and I sit there like a dribbling vegetable. I can’t sleep and I have no appetite.
Sunday morning they remove the pressure on the Rhino and, a little after, remove it. Removal was painful but not as bad as when it was put in. I go off to see the specialist again and she can see 2 points in the nostril where it could have been bleeding from so she cauterises them.
I’m now back home but taking things very easy. I can only drink cold and hot food, have to apply antibiotic cream up my nostrils 3 times a day and have some limited mobility – staying out of the cold outside, not stooping, etc. I was signed off work for a week, unsurprisingly.
It’s amazing what a simple nosebleed can do to someone, but this weekend has been hellish.
But what caused it? The likely candidate was the 2 colds I recently had, pretty much back-to-back. I was using a Vicks inhaler as as well as decongestant sprays overnight. Never again.
For the last couple of years Artiss.co.uk has been transformed from a personal blog to a commercial “entity”. However, it’s always been a one-man labour of love and, as so often happens in these circumstances, I simply don’t have enough hours of the day to do everything. I have a full time job, a family and in my spare time I like amateur theatre, playing Battlefield and developing WordPress plugins.
In the past I’ve tried to accomodate the time to write articles buy cialis and perform product reviews by spending less “spare time”. But that’s not healthy for anyone.
So, changes are afoot. This website has already changed – the personal posts that I used to write (and I moved to a separate site – that will now be closing) have returned and the whole “look and feel” is returning to a more personal site. Expect some rants and, yes, even some reviews. But gone will be the regular articles, competitions and all those things that made this site less a hobby and more a business.
My Google+ and Facebook pages have also closed as has my @artiss_tech Twitter feed. Please follow me at @davidartiss instead.
My WordPress plugins, which generate the majority of my visitors, will move from here but I’ll announce further details about that in due course.
It’s not a farewell, but it’s a new journey. I hope you stay with me.
Back in January I was a bit “offline” – Artiss.co.uk was certainly extremely quiet. There was a very good reason, though.
Back at the beginning of December I applied for a job at Automattic.I’d applied before but, this time, rather than just send my CV and a small, boring covering letter I thought I’d be a bit, I don’t know, dynamic. Here’s what I wrote…
Dear Automattic,
I’m David Artiss, a developer for 29 years (23 of those professionally, the rest as a teenager wrestling with 6510 assembly).
Although I write code for an antiquated IBM Point of Sale system during the day, my passion is for PHP, MySQL and, particularly, WordPress. The “Code is Poetry” mantra of WordPress is something I vehemently believe in. Coding is an art – it requires passion, imagination and creativity.
I have two blogs (a personal and a technology review blog), both of which are self-installed versions of WordPress. Although my technology blog uses a commercial theme it’s been heavily modified by myself (modifications which I’ve fed back to the theme’s author), including a complete re-write of their commenting system. I’ve also written bespoke competition and review software (which makes use of Rich Snippets to pass review details to search engines). Indeed, I am considering creating my own theme for distribution in the future.
However, it’s my work on WordPress plugins that I’m most proud of. I am the owner of 15 plugins (my username is dartiss), 14 of which I authored myself (the other I took over from the original author after he no longer wished to support it any further). My most recent plugin is Artiss Transients Cleaner, which I created after speaking to your own Andrew Nacin. I’d found an issue with the way transients are housekept within WordPress and confirmed with Andrew that this was a known problem. A change to Core is due, but with no current time-scales so I created this plugin to perform the suggested actions that will, eventually, be implemented within Core. Although I’ve not worked on Core, I believe this is a demonstration of the fact that I could do so ably.
I’m looking for a change in career and this is just the kind of role I’m craving. I’m more than happy working from home – it’s big, has lots of WiFi (I put extenders everywhere) and I’m on 80 Mbps fibre-optic. It would seem churlish to not make more use of it.
My CV is attached. It’s a bit dry, for which I apologise – I’m a bit more dynamic in person and even so more with my code.
I didn’t know if it was a bit too informal but my wife certainly liked it.
A couple of weeks later I was told I was to be interviewed but they had quite a queue so it might be a few weeks. That initial application was, I later came to find, stage 1 of a 5 stage induction process.
Stage 2 came a couple of weeks ago. I had an hour long Skype messaging (not video) conversation with one of their developers. This included some technical questions. I felt it went well, especially when I corrected him on a technicality. After the hour he was happy to move me to Stage 3 – a coding challenge.
I was given an existing plugin to improve in whatever way I felt. I had a week to do it. I turned it around in less than a week and spoke to my Automattic developer soon after. He seemed quite happy at what I’d done but there were a few issue he’s highlighted – security is particularly important to them. Again, I highlighted something he’d missed (he thought I’d not coded something and I had) so potentially gained some points for that (or annoyed him). He gave me a few days to change the code but I turned it around in a day and spoke to him the next night.
I was worried that rushing to make the changes I might have broken something. I didn’t. And the way I solved his issues had impressed him. I was now through to stage 4.
This is when it got exciting.
It even shows up on my WordPress notifications!
I was now officially working for Automattic as a contractor. The idea is that they pay you, per hour, to work on a project. The developer who you’d been assigned would keep an eye on how you’re getting on and let you continue on the project until they’d made a decision either way as to whether you’d failed or passed. This could be days or months.
I get a listing on Matticspace!
Automattic employees, whether contractors or not, gain access to a site named “Matticspace”. As people are scattered throughout the world this gives a private “base” for everyone to congregate online. This includes an employee directory, on which I was listed. Matticspace, though, can only be access via a convoluted set-up process that involves generating and submitting security keys from command line.
However, it was at this stage that it all ended. Not by Automattic but by myself. Bearing in mind I still had a full time job, a family and social life there was no way I could realistically fit in the work that they wanted me to (which, by the way, was to make changes to the debug mechanism for Automattic developers within WordPress.com). So I told them I couldn’t do it.
Stage 5 would have been a meeting with Matt Mullenweg, founder and president of Automattic.
At the very least, though, I can say, if for only a brief time, I was working for Automattic. It looks good on my CV too.
CollageIt Pro is an automatic and easy to use collage maker on Mac OS X & Windows. Making collages is as easy as 1-2-3 with only 3 steps…
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