Posts Tagged ‘site updates’

Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steam­ship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­at­ively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­urdays off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in work­aholi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­ment­a­tion. I spent forever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stan­dalone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally settled (grudgingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­pleViewer plugin.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­tiv­ated itself without my noti­cing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­pleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an altern­ative that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­li­frey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recog­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gal­lery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­pleviewer, you were fant­astic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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I seem to go through phases of rapid devel­op­ment, fol­lowed by periods of stasis. I just real­ized, after having worked 35 hours in the past 3 days, that I’m in a “rapid devel­op­ment” phase. Or I’m just working so much that I can’t help but pick up things faster.

Anyway, new projects!

• Word­Press theme for Jaye Wells
• menu design
• web­site for Mar­ilyn Hicks
• and I’ve updated Marilyn’s iden­tity page, finally (more…)

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing sim­ul­tan­eously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many stories and pho­to­graphs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new pro­jects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rear­chi­tec­turing of Fern­wood Pub­lishing.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails powered site to a cus­tom­ized Word­Press site, which could easily handle everything my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that manu­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for everything lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­covered the power and flex­ib­ility of Word­Press earlier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

So con­trary to what the local paper reported, I am not, in actu­ality, a firm made up of three people, one of whom is named “Dinah LeChaton”. Dinah has actu­ally been missing since November, and Marigold returned to Ottawa, where she may con­tinue doing some client rela­tions work. I decided it was high time to bring on new staff. So I picked up Kal­liope, an eager new talent whose skills include get­ting her­self tangled in plastic bags, finding a lap to curl up on even when said lap is covered in laptop, and elim­in­ating the evil mon­sters who live under­neath bedsheets.

I am, nat­ur­ally, enam­oured. (more…)

It’s only taken me about half a year, but I’ve finally crossed an item off my per­en­ni­ally growing “to-do” list: add flash to port­folio. I’ve always been fond of this mono­logue from Fear & Loathing, and not solely because it seems like a shop­ping list for debauchery. While I was at it, I added a t&s time cap­sule chron­ic­ling some of the various dif­ferent designs this site has under­gone (that’s another strikeout on my to-do list). And then for good measure (I was on a roll at this point), I added screen­shots of the Brambles Antiques website—both the public site and the admin panel. These days, I’m working with COPAN Off­shore to develop a logo for their new busi­ness, and am painting my bed­room walls a bright gold.

Brambles Antiques is finally fin­ished, com­plete with a fully func­tional backend admin panel. (Screen­shots to follow!) I spent a good long time re-re-re-designing T&S, to what is at least a tem­porary sat­is­fac­tion, and I’ve learned that I’m infin­itely my pick­iest, most annoying, and most demanding client. And I’m refusing to work for myself ever again.

I’ve finally settled into Lun­en­burg and am in the pro­cess of repainting my whole apart­ment, which is growing in scope expo­nen­tially every time I find more paint chips in a hard­ware store. I’ve just fin­ished the Ideal­bikes web­site, and I’m cur­rently breaking the ice with two new cli­ents, both based in Lun­en­burg. New web­site should be coming soon, com­plete with a better design and more stuff to look at!

I con­verted my lay­outs to XHTML/CSS only (finally saying adieu to tables) and am but­ting major heads with MSIE, the scourge of the web world. Everything works in Opera, Safari, Moz­illa, and Nets­cape (Mac and Win, when applic­able), but IE5 Mac has this tend­ency to create major random glitches in my page layout. You know, like ren­dering links non-clickable, or eval­u­ating 20px as 250pt. All skins are at this point func­tional even in the sad scen­ario that you’re using IE Mac. But really, if you’re using a Mac, what are you doing using a Microsoft clunker of a browser?

Oh yes, and I’m still working on some of the work term pro­jects, which are turning out to involve the archiving of ten years’ worth of badly formatted Front­Page code. I’m hoping to get through this lot by the end of the week and poten­tially taking a trip home before my child­hood home is sold. (more…)