When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · November
· · · · 29 (2 entries)
The Last Leaves of 2004 · Back in September of last year, I wrote: “There’s a visual effect that I’ve only seen here in rainy green B.C. and has so far eluded all my cameras. It works like this: On a grey day, as dusk gathers, something you’d think would be unremarkable, like a fern against old wood, or these autumnpearleaves, can make you look twice or three times, colour reaching deep into your machineries of vision. I think it’s of the mind rather than the eyes, but haven’t abandoned hope for lucky light on a dark day with camera in hand.” This one gets halfway there ...
The Cherry-Tomato Challenge · I have recently adjusted the ongoing software so that each and every image has descriptive text in both its
alt and title attributes. This is good accessibility practice and should also make it possible for search engines to find my pictures. But they can’t. The image here, which is in a file whose name, unhelpfully, is IMGP0990.png, is correctly labeled in both title and alt attributes as “Sunlit cherry tomatoes on white-painted wood.” I just now visited John Battelle’s helpful list of search engines and lots of them offered “image search” capabilities, but not one turned that picture up when I searched for “sunlit cherry tomatoes”. (Lots of them turn the page up when you do an ordinary text search.) How hard can it be? I hereby promise that when I find a credible general-purpose Web Image Search tool that leads me to that picture via “sunlit cherry tomatoes”, I will publish a rave review here and do my best to spread the word.
