Toby's Log page 103

Lynda.com WordPress Certificate

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Our class decided to use Lynda.com to learn more about WordPress and some other topics that will help us with our Stearns project.  Our teacher has an account and was able to set up a limited time and course version for us at a reduced price.  We are doing five courses with a little over a month to complete them in.  I was worried this would be too short, but have been moving along pretty quick thus far.

Just recently, I completed the “Self-Hosting a WordPress Site” course, and they gave me this certificate for my trouble.  This was the most important for the course, so that is why I did it first.  I don’t know what weight these certificates would really have on a portfolio or resumé, but I think I will complete a few courses just for those.

So far, most of the videos I’ve watched have been about stuff I already know somewhat well, but there have been tidbits here and there to fill in some missing knowledge and a few videos about things I in fact know little or nothing about.  Some of the videos seem a little long winded, repetitive, slow moving, or boring at times, but they do seem like they’d be good for complete beginners.

I’ll continue with the other four courses we have available.  I’ll probably not be able to complete them all, but at least a couple more would be good.  We have an SEO one which would be especially helpful, but is also rather long.

Applied for Job: Bluestar

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Angela Berlingeri, my instructor for my Web II class, forwarded me an email about a potential PHP developer job at bluestar-design.com.  There weren’t any details about the job, including information about what skill levels and sets were required, so I went ahead and sent my resume.  Julia Brigg sent me an email fairly quickly saying she might have an entry level position (the kind I’d need) in the near future.  Yay.

She also forwarded my resume to an associate, who called me immediately.  He needed a full time developer, which would conflict with my schooling, so I was unable to meet his need.  But he did say that he might be interested once I graduate.  Yay again.

Suddenly I have some job prospects here.  That is a good thing.  I was just starting to get a little concerned about going through my savings.  This was by far my most positive job application yet.

Stearns Design Mockup Chosen

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On Monday we met with Debbie to show off our design mockups.  Wednesday Debbie came back, bringing in three board members who would need to be involved in the decision.  They discussed various things about the site, including what it will be including and what they have for it.

They also were ready to make a decision on the mockup they wanted.  They had done some user testing of the mockups.  Rocki’s was chosen.  It has a picture of the front of the farm in the header, which they liked because it would be the first thing you’d see if you went there.  But they did want some changes to it.  They wanted a lighter brown for the wood grain that makes up the other part of the header.  They wanted a more solid navigation menu rather than the hanging signs currently in use.  And they wanted a less cluttered appearance for the home page.

They gave Jason’s second place.  His was very clean, also using a wood grain and a horizontal drop-down menu.  His drop-down seemed to be more along the lines of what they wanted, so something like that may be placed into Rocki’s.  Many of us were thinking that Jason’s would be chosen.  But you can never be sure.

So finally we will get to start building the actual site.  This should be the fun part, certainly the part that I have more experience with.  The site will be built using WordPress, so there won’t be a lot of actual programming most likely.  We may need to figure out how to interface other data with WordPress and add admin pages for it.  We will certainly need to figure out how to use “feeds” to get the information we want where we want it.  We’ll need to figure out how to set everything up so that it is easy for them to update.  Most of this should be doable within WordPress or using plugins, no hardcore programming. We’ll see though.

A lot of time will certainly be spent turning Rocki’s Photoshop theme into a real WordPress theme.  Then of course there is the insertion of the pages and filling them with content.  It will need to be organized in a way that will be easy to update for the Stearns people.  This may be hard.

I’m looking forward to some fun and some learning.

Stearns Site Design Mockups

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Over the past couple weeks we’ve been working on our mockups for the site design for Stearns. We each picked one or two of our wireframe concepts and have used Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks to create the fleshed out, full color and image versions of them.

I used Photoshop, since I’m familiar with it and have never dealt with Fireworks before (hadn’t even heard of it till this class).  As a non-designer, it took me a long time to do.  I tried to keep every piece separate and organized to make it fully modifiable.  This can be painful in Photoshop though, especially since you can’t modify some aspects of multiple layers at once.  And with all those little bits, they really bogged down even the powerful computers at school at times.

My version of Photoshop at home is old (7), so I couldn’t really work on them there.  Some of the stuff from CS4 didn’t fully translate, I don’t have all the fonts, and Photoshop 7 didn’t have the nested layer groups and other benefits that I was heavily using to keep organized and work on this thing.  I had to spend extra time at school and at my parents (my Mom has CS4).

Next time, I think I’ll be faster at this, as I know more what I’m doing, how to deal with all those pieces and what not.  Hopefully also I’ll be better at making a good design.  I’d like to learn that Fireworks, as it looks much better for this purpose.  I think it even makes it very easy to convert the mockup into actual HTML and CSS for the live site, which could save a lot of time with that.

So finally, my mockups.  I did two of my ideas, plus a modification of the one.  There are two pages for each.  They all have very similar (copied and then slightly modified) content sections.  They were all designed to be about 975 pixels wide and with 600 pixels as the above the fold height.  They have an additional 200 pixels of width to show the sides and as much as 600 pixels below the fold of height for content.

iTunes CDDB info for the Yars

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In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there). I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it. I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them. I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them. And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data. I wanted to wait for that. So I never got around to importing it.

Today I decided to. It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now. But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses. I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album. But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs. So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist. Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen. The songs are like HTML elements on a page. And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access. But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me. I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.

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Geocities closure

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My former roommate/bandmate had mentioned a few months back that geocities would be closing. I had my site on there until I started my own server and entered the world of server side scripting and databases. The site is still up, though I haven’t used it in years. The last thing I did with it was to simplify it, link only to the more important content, and make sure to have a notable mention of my new site. But I still wanted to preserve the old stuff. I’m not sure what I may have backed up from there still.

Geocities doesn’t offer any way to download files at all through its file manager, and I wanted an easier way than opening each file through the editor, copying and pasting into a local file.

A post mentioned using wget to download the whole site. I guess Mac OS X doesn’t come with wget (a nice utility for downloading http stuff from the command line), so I had to install that. Using it didn’t get all of my files though, because much of the old stuff was no longer linked, and some of the files were accessed with javascript. It also didn’t get files linked from within CSS or javascripts.

I tried using iCab to download everything. It has a nice site download feature that allow you to follow links and set limits on what is downloaded. But it kept failing at some point with a cryptic error -1100. It downloaded less than wget.

So I ended up having to get the items not gotten by wget by copying from the geocities editor and pasting into local files. The images had to be viewed and downloaded.

So now that is backed up before the shutoff date in just 11 days. I doubt I have any use for it, as I think all of the old stuff that was really in use was pretty well destroyed or disabled.

Potential Freelance Group

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I am very excited about this.  Last week I asked Nadia, a girl from my Web II class who is good with design, if she would like to form a freelance-like group with me.  She had mentioned earlier in the semester that she didn’t like the idea of going fully freelance, being totally alone.  She liked to have people to critique ideas and collaborate with, as well as to share expertise.  I had thought when she mentioned that to ask her about forming a group, but my shyness and unsurity made me wait.  I finally did it, and she said yes, and was excited about it as well.

We talked a bit (via email) and she wondered who else we could include in this group, so I mentioned Jason, another good designer from our class.  We asked him the next day of class, and he said yes.  He, of course, was also excited by the prospects.  And he has had experience with freelance design.

They are both very good at design, which I am not.  They can do flash and drawings and what not.  I am fairly good working with scripting and data, and have, and have some experience turning designs into HTML/CSS.  So we should complement each other well.  We seem to work together in class well as well, which will hopefully make things work smoothly.

So we’ve been talking a bit via email and class.  We have to figure out things such as what sort of business entity to become, how we will handle money (don’t want any disputes with this), what sort of contract we will use, etc.   We will probably want to become an entity like a partnership, with a separate name from our own, so that we have a brand and people can pay that single entity.  This will also make sense for tax purposes.

Part of the idea of this is to be like freelancing, but with the support and image of the other members of the group, so we don’t want it to start off as something complicated and expensive.  It is also going to be set up as something that can be done on the side of a full time job.  We want it to be easy for people to come and go if need be, and maybe even have only part of the team work on some projects.  Our entity and other choices will have to reflect this.

We’ve discussed where to find clients, and we may start with some free sites, such as for non-profits, to figure out how things will work and get a group portfolio going.  Those shouldn’t be too hard to find.

We will continue talking, get things going, and hopefully it’ll work out.

WordPress.com blog

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I have created another blog, separate from this one, on wordpress.com.  I did so as a requirement for the Web Design II class I am taking at Tri-C.  It mainly stores information about the project we are working on for the class.  Since it is my first project of this sort, full from start to finish for a client, it contains my first workings and views on parts of the process.

I am not sure how to handle this blog though when I am done with class.  It obviously will no longer be needed for that, and maintaining two completely separate blogs has its problems, what with increased maintenance time, separated data that all may be related, separate presences, etc.  It may work though if they have two distinct purposes.  I’m not sure that I really need it separate though.

WordPress.com has a number of features, such as integrated stats and greater connection to other blogs, but it has limited features and some important features such as style need to be payed for.  So I may not want to keep the account.

So I could potentially just merge it onto here.  I have also been thinking about maintaining two blogs or one blog that has a fully separated category of posts from the front end with completely different appearance and no access to the other categories.  I would do this on my planned portfolio site for my “professional” posts while I maintain the other blog for my personal posts.  So I could potentially place the wordpress.com content on the professional blog and move some of my older web and server related posts there as well, maybe after a bit of cleanup.

I am also considering breaking away from wordpress by building my own blog ware.  This would give me more control over the data, the blog functionality, and integration into the rest of the site.  But this would take some time, and I have a lot of other projects that would have priority over that.  Getting it anywhere near the capabilities that I like from wordpress especially would take a while (don’t even know how to handle pingbacks/trackbacks).

wORDprESS Capitalization

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Hmm, an interesting discovery I just made:

wOrDpress seems to change the capitalization of all instances of its own name, ie “woRdpreSS”, within the title and content of posts. Since URLs can be case sensitive, this caused a problem for one of the links I had on a previous post. It was changing the lowercase “p” to uppercase “P”. To solute the problem, I used the HTML escape sequence “p” in place of that “p”, and the link works just fine. I’ll have to watch for that next time.

[Update] Interestingly, the capitalization wasn’t changed on this post at all, but it was on the other. I’m not sure why.[/update]

Stearns: Thematic Wireframes

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After making our layout wireframes, we brainstormed some various thematic ideas.  We mostly thought of items that’d be on a farm.  Some of the ideas that were popular were: wood grain, hanging signs, the historical sign, barn, sun, etchings, grass, farm animals, silo, straw hat, pitch fork, seasonal changes, red, brown, and trees.  It was a brainstorm, so there were many other ideas, although some were less applicable.

In class, we each drew up one or a few quick thematic wireframes.  We didn’t have much time, so many weren’t fleshed out.  I drew three:

Stearns thematic wireframe 1

These two were based mainly on the historic mark sign that the farm has. The first had many little signs for top buttons and logo, two big signs for a sidebar and main content area, and then a grassy ground below that serves as a footer. The page background would be a blue sky. I felt this might be a little overboard with the signs, but liked the grassy footer and blue sky a lot, using them in most of my designs. The next drawing kept the footer and had one sign as a sidebar with the logo and accordion navigation. I included the wagon wheel that is at the base of the Stearn’s sign. I felt a light red barn side or white slatted house side would work for the main content area.

Stearns thematic wireframe 5

My other drawing used faded wood signs for everything. I wanted an etching on the top banner for the logo and a burn in look for the banner text. The main content and side bar would be place on parchment nailed to a giant sign. All of the signs are hanging and hang from each other.

We were then given a couple days to create some more.

Stearns thematic wireframe 2

This one would have barn red as the body background with an open barn door holding the main content. I wasn’t sure how to handle the content, so I figured a fairly normal div box set would work if I couldn’t think of anything else. The top banner would be a wood sign over the door with an etching of the farm, burn in title, and silhouettes of animals with white lettering for the main navigation. I continued with the grass footer.

Stearns thematic wireframe 3](https://www.tobymackenzie.com/_/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/scan0002_2.jpg)

Next up I made the back of a red barn. The roof would hold the title (probably no room for a logo) and the main navigation in white paint-like lettering. The sub navigation would be in a side bar with the same lettering. The main content would be on a big off white type cloth nailed to the barn. The footer would again be the grass. A sun was featured over the roof to add a little brightness.

Stearns thematic wireframe 4

Finally, I came up with a variant of the barn door idea with something inside. A farmer would be standing with a pitch fork forking a large, squarish pile of hay. The hay would hold the main content and the farmer would have the accordion side navigation on his back/side. This version of the door had a cloth banner nailed across the inside top of the door with just the logo and title. This one seemed very kiddy to me though, would probably only appeal to kids.

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