I’ve been teaching myself Drupal… this new tool will allow me to create much more dynamic sites. It’s a challenging platform, but the possibilities with this technology is exciting. Here is my testing site – its a functional test of a shopping cart.
3 Recent Websites
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Here are three websites I have designed and coded recently. I have more in production, but these are approved and live.
The Pattern for Progress Website (I did this through Ad Essentials)
The Artist Vindora Wixom's Website
The ASK Open Studio Tour 2010 Website
When it rains it pours. I have just come up for air from an incredibly busy period. I was working evenings just to try and keep my head above water.
I’m so relieved to be able to move on to new projects and finally tie up some older ones that got put on a back burner.
I’m finding it tough to dedicate time to looking for new work when I am in the midst of a big project with demanding deadlines. Budgeting a percentage of time for development and sticking to it will be my next goal.
Happy swimming.
A vehicle wrap, movie editing and a quick website
I had a pretty creative week. Highlights were definitely working on a design to wrap around a delivery vehicle and editing video for a website. After looking at a bunch of other great looking vehicle designs, I definitely focused on drama and scale of images. For the video, it had been a few years since I edited. I used iMovie and after finding a work-around for converting .vob to mpeg-4, it was a snap. I uploaded it to youtube and pasted the code into the testing site and it worked effortlessly. I can’t show you images from either yet, but I’ll be sure to post them when it’s time.
Then yesterday I met up with Nick Kozak, a sculptor and teacher, who needed a quick website. We put together his site in just a few hours. He cropped the images while I coded it. And we almost got done before the library closed. I think his site is perfect for what he was looking for: simple and made to order. 
Ulstercorps Food Drive Poster
Food Drive Poster
From June 21 to July 5th, School Districts, Businesses, Civic Organizations, and Local Supermarkets are asked to run food drives to benefit all Ulster County Food Pantries and Feeding Programs.
Ulstercorps asked me to do a quick pro bono poster for the food drive.
Connecting WordPress and FB
Melita's Art
My friend Melita Greenleaf is in France on an art scholarship and wants to be able to blog about her amazing trip. She asked me if I had a solution to connecting her FB page with her blog. I think I may have found it and this post will be the test. So, I have used NetworkedBlogs to connect my blog to my FB page and it seems to be working perfectly.
Art Along the Hudson
The Hudson Valley art consortium know as Art Along the Hudson is deep into another successful year. The kick-off was April 29th and was highlighted by networking and speeches from all nine communities.
I become involved with AAH during my work for the Arts Society of Kingston, as Communications Director, representing ASK and Kingston. This year, just as I was stepping down from that position (to focus more on freelance work), Linda Hubbard heard that her previous designer was not available to help out this year. It was very serendipitous timing.
Along with the annual six panel brochure, advertisements, and the press kit design, I got a chance to develop the AAH logo. They had never developed one.
It was a pleasure to work with this unusual group to create this logo. The group was good at coming to a decision and their comments and direction were positive. We started from around 9 very different looks and then went through at least three rounds of refining until we came to this final conclusion.
The whole project was a great success. In fact, for the first time this year, they created decal stickers with the logo and website for all the members to proudly show. Be sure to check out Art Along the Hudson for all the art events along the Hudson this summer.
Getting a specific RSS feed on your website
I am so pleased to have figured out how to add my blog RSS feed (Stylized with CSS!) on my website.
I used Feed2JS and with a little tweaking I got it working in about 20 min.
Yay! Yay! Yay!
Learning jQuery
I keep running into the problem of wanting (or a client wanting) animation/slide show/interactivity on my websites and therefore needing javascript. So, I have been told that jQuery is the way to go. Unfortunately I am feeling like I need a bit more knowledge before I can start using this. I found the website to be a bit too advanced for plug and play. The good news is I found this site (http://www.elated.com/articles/cat/javascript/) and it seems to break down using jQuery into segmented tutorials. Hurray! And so the web development continues…