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.

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

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!

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

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?

Gary essentially begged the audience to quit doing work that they hate.  He asked them to figure out what it is that they really like to do and do it.  Make that the foundation and then figure out how to make money from it.  That said, I’ll be launching a new site in the next couple of months.  Fingers crossed…

The most common questions I get asked by people who are really interested in what I do is ‘what are you using to build your websites with’ and ‘what javascript framework  do you use?’  It was in explaining my choices to Scott that I felt like it would be worth explaining them to the world (potential clients may be curious).

The lesser of the two questions is what I’m using to build websites.  The desktop application I’m using is Adobe Dreamweaver but I’m really only using that for the code collapsing, snippets and site organization.  My foundation of choice is WordPress.  I’ve found it to be almost infinitely customizable and flexible enough to cover just about any project.  I found Joomla too big and hit WordPress next.  I’d love to give Drupal a try but I have a strong belief that being really strong with one tool makes you more marketable than being slightly experienced with several.  I have not met a site that WordPress didn’t like.  (But just because WordPress is in my ‘lesser’ category, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s not important.  WordPress is amazing.  It’s only lesser because it’s so easy to use and largely unnoticed by site visitors.)

The bigger impact tool I’m using right now is a javascript framework called MooTools.  Scott had never heard of MooTools and I guess this is where the line between web surfer extraordinaire and web programmer is drawn.  A surfer may know which blogging tool or BB platform he’s looking at but he’s unlikely to know which javascript framework is in use.

MooTools isn’t for javascript n00bs.  You have to be fairly comfortable with coding in general but also with CSS and the DOM.  Once you’re pretty good with those, stepping into MooTools is heaven.  Once I started working with MooTools I realized that there really wasn’t a single thing I couldn’t do with a web page.  It’s that powerful.

Once you’ve decided that MooTools is interesting and deserves looking into further, have a look at Aaron Newton’s Clientside.  All of the things you want to do on a daily basis with MooTools are covered.  Man, it’s almost all done for you!  Aaron’s got a book coming out in August and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

I used to rely pretty heavily on the official MooTools forum which was shut down when version 1.2 of the framework was released.  I don’t lean quite as heavily on the community now but I invite everyone struggling with a MooTools script to try the unofficial forum at http://mooforum.net.  I cruise it quite often and try to help where I can.  My handle there is Lweel8 (it’s a bumper stumper for my punctuality when it comes to sporting events).

Best of luck to everyone out there.  I hope to see you in the forum.

Before you start flaming me with why other phones are better and that iTunes sucks you have to stop for a minute and examine the facts:

• I don’t currently have a cell phone
• I have a ton of iTunes-managed music, podcasts and video
• I need push email for my business
• I need mobile Internet access for my business

This device has all of those features in one package.  The fact that it carries a maximum price of $299 USD (for the 16GB model) makes it even sweeter.

The only question of affordability now will be the service plan.  We all know that Rogers is the only carrier currently capable of 3G, and that the 3G coverage isn’t even that great yet in Canada, but Mr. Jobs has pushed his ideal of availability to other carriers in other countries before.  Here’s hoping that he does so in Canada as well.

While Apple didn’t fully comply with my list of must haves (32GB would have allowed me to fit all of my tunes) they did run down a pretty good list of functions and added value features.  You can read about Steve’s keynote speech at WWDC08 over at Engadget.com.

Hopefully Rogers will extend their Vision network to include the Belleville area – Prince Edward County specifically.  I won’t hold my breath.