I never thought I’d see the day but shy old me is on YouTube.  What’s hard to appreciate from the video is how packed the little gym is and how nervous I am.  Well, maybe it’s not hard to appreciate how nervous I am.

Thanks again to Dan Taylor, Jean Anne Carroll and the rest of the Creative Minds crew for having me out.  I look forward to many more gatherings, from the comfort of the audience.

A big thanks to Dan Taylor and Jean Anne Carroll for inviting me to speak tonight at Creative Minds.  My theme was [cough cough] keeping your website up to date.  Like the title says, do as I say, not as I do.

I’ve been busy, OK?  Keeping the site up to date was put on the backburner in order to focus on finishing websites for my clients, but it’s no excuse.  Keeping your site up to date with periodic posts is my number one tip to small businesses for generating a bond with your prospective clients or customers.  People want to see that you visit your own site and that you care about what image your business is projecting.  To that end I’ll be redesigning my own site in the near future.

I like the image of me beside the books because it’s a hint at the wide range of knowledge required to do my job.  What I don’t like is how heavy I am in the picture.  Anyone who was at Creative Minds tonight will wonder who the guy is in the picture.

The other thing that I don’t like is the confusing set of names.  I was introduced tonight as Kennedy Data Solutions, the website says Quinte Web Design, and neither are memorable or particularly meaningful.

The name I’ve chosen to move forward with is Jacob Kennedy Solutions.  And I’m getting business cards.  Soon.

Thanks again everyone for laughing when they were supposed to and to anyone from Trenton, sorry, I didn’t mean it.

Jacob

Another website goes gold.  This one, investincheese.ca, is a website dedicated to the promotion of cheese-making and enjoying in the Frontenac, Hastings, Lennox and Addington, and Prince Edward County regions.

The site features dynamic pulls from Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well as some unique things like a news ticker, the Digg Digg plugin which enables easy sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz as well as the Share This plugin.  It is, of course, a Wordpress-driven site and is best of breed for March 2010.

Coming later this week is a news aggregator.  Very cool stuff.

I say, LET THEM EAT CHEESE!

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on a website for photographer Caitlin den Boer.  Her company is called Adelita Rose and the website features some neat tricks using Wordpress.

Along with her most recent Twitter tweet, we also automatically show an excerpt from her most recent blog post.  On the home page there is also a slideshow going on in the background.  I wanted the site content to be completely controlled by Caitlin so that meant using only standard Wordpress tools for the post and page editing.  Well, in the newer versions of Wordpress images can be displayed in galleries.  A gallery normally shows up as a series of thumbnails on a page which, while a neat way of showing a collection of images at one time, is not nearly as visually impressive as an auto-advancing, full-framed slideshow.  What I did was I hid the thumbnailed gallery and used Mootools to read in all of the links to the medium-sized images, used AJAX to follow the links and grab the images, stored them in local, hidden divs, and then created a cross-fading array loop of those divs. The effect is seamless and fairly quick.  The bonus is that each of the images is clickable to the full blown image (copyright Adelita Rose, of course).  The portfolio pages use the same tricks.

The contact page is a modified plugin and the music player is a free, Flash-based mp3 player that I have randomly selecting a loop of Caitlin’s chosen music.

The look and feel went through a couple of revisions with Rene Dick at Scout Design to nail down Caitlin’s vision but the end result is awesome.  I’m so glad we were able to deliver a non-Flash product that she can administer that still has that polished look a photographer wants.

Cheers to Caitlin and Rene on a very successful project!

J

This is a general call for help.  An APB if you wish.  I’ve got a client who has requested Google Maps.  No problem.  They want a CMS.  No problem.  They want to be able to get directions between the articles, which are points of interest, in the order in which the user defines.  No problem.  Now they want to bundle the whole thing in a single zip file, including the articles which should be pdfs.  No, er, what’s that?

I can put the attachments in a single zip file.  I can make the articles into pdfs.  What I can’t seem to do, for the life of me, is get the Google Map into a dynamically created pdf.  I’m sure there’s a way, I just haven’t come across it yet.  Anyone?

Anyone?

I’ll post the answer here and give credit where it’s due. promise.

Anyone?