One morning I had a bicycle accident. Nothing big. It was my first bike riding accident. A classic, really. I was biking towards a crosswalk where a car was and I didn’t want to hit the car, so I instinctively slammed on the brakes. I went flying over the handle bars. I lightly bruised my palm (bits of gravel, did actually) and I went along my way after giving an onlooker the thumbs up sign when he asked if I was okay.
I thought it would be kind of interesting to see how often other people hurt themselves. In the last week I’ve hurt my left hand with a knife while cutting vegetables, twice. I’m always thinking of projects to set myself on. Even if this isn’t a viable app, it’s a valuable exercise.
Screen shot of a blog post pinned then tweeted then facebooked then screen shotted etc.
This morning I was thinking about Richard Karstom’s inception facebook page cover. I was wondering with my new additions to my social media toolbelt if I could make a tunnel of social media. The theory needs more work. I couldn’t keep it going. There are some algorithms in the way, I think. I pinned my last blog post. I tweeted that pin. I facebooked that tweet. Then I took a screen shot of my facebook entry and then blogged that. Then pinned that. Then tweeted that. then facebooked that. I tried doing the process a third time and I couldn’t get my tweet to facebook. Maybe, I’ll try again tomorrow. If facebook had an syndication option to update my wordpress blog, this could get very messy.
(Update: Some people have told me to use IFFFT to create my social media loop. I have looked into using their services. It is kind of a rip off– in a sense. They brand your communications when they deliver them instead of twitter/pinterest/whatever. I think it takes away some credit to the companies that are storing your information.)
screen shot of lopera shmopera website phone view and desktop view
Today, I changed the look and feel of my website slightly to feature the logo more boldly. I added CSS sprites to the navigation bar. (They are images instead of text! The hover state is part of the same image as the nonhover state. How?… What? For more information on CSS sprites see yesterday’s post.) And massaging the design some. I’ll save critiquing this until tomorrow when I’ll make more changes.
As a part of my internship’s Social Media Project, I am currently investigating Facebook pages. Facebook is ubiquitous. Using Facebook pages is a way to reach a lot of people. Many users “like” pages as a form of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It’s a way to keep up with your favorite entities, music, artists, magazines, even soda. In web marketing, it was becoming obvious that banners weren’t enough. Competing for a person’s attention is almost impossible when the all the user wants to do is hang out with their friends. So, what do companies do? Get in there. (Here’s an article about “going native.”)
Recently, Facebook instituted a new layout/concept called Timeline. This reformatted everything. (See my review for what I think about it.) So, if you had a Facebook page before, it’s time to update your strategy.
Smashing magazine says more about the new era of Facebook.
“Milestones present an important and dramatic opportunity to educate the public, humanize the brand and remove a perception of corporate anonymity…
Our analyses of Page engagement have continually shown that brands posting content that depicts behind-the-scenes activities, exclusive updates or promotions encourages user interactions and promotes higher engagement rates. Using interesting milestones to craft the story of the brand over time (and updating the Timeline with new milestones as they happen) can help to stimulate conversations around major achievements.”
Then We Set His Hair on Fire: Insights and Accidents from A Hall-of-fame Career in Advertising By Phil Dusenberry is very similar to the title above in terms of my review.
I’m such a Luddite. StumbleUpon has been around since 2001. I’ve only recently heard about someone in my social circle using it (my sister). So, then, a week later, I’m trying it. Today’s my first day and I have to say that StumbleUpon is fascinating.
It’s called a discovery engine (a form of search engine). The Pandora of the Internet. (Pandora is a site for listening to music based on kinds of music you like. They use algorithms to categorize songs by their genres, subgenres etc.) Just think of Pandora but replace songs with websites and stations with your interests and that’s StumbleUpon. I have a new appreciation for the Internet. “Stumbling” is like traveling through the ghetto of an eccentric country. You meet some strange characters that you would have never run into otherwise.
A downside to all of this Social Media is attribution. So much of what Internet companies do is free to the point where they have to constantly push their brand as part of their business strategy. (Here’s an article about how there are no more direct links from StumbleUpon) Who painted this picture I found and at least 11 others wanted to share with their friends? The neato thing is that I can surf the web Internationally with this StumbleUpon. The not-so-neat-o thing is that this Paris painting is by Kal Gajoum and I had to do some investigating to find that out. It’s hosted on a russian art site. It should be more obvious. The new rule with content generation is (should be) that the title of the work and who did it should be embedded on the image otherwise after getting passed around a few times, its origin is horribly obscured.
I think people are afraid of registering for new social media sites because it feels like a commitment. That’s how I thought. Social Media is a big world. I feel like a husk of an Interneteer if I can’t at least scope this stuff out. My advice for timid Interneteers: Have a standard username and profile pic for your exploring of social media. Try it out. It’s not supposed to be your one-stop-shop for Social Media. It’s a tool to help you navigate the expansive terrain of the Internet. And don’t be afraid to register, try it out for a few minutes, an hour, a week, etc. and leave and never come back. It’s just a new flavor of ice cream. Try it and then you know what you like/don’t like about that particular discovery engine.
(L’Opera Shmopera–design changes from last week: added logo png and work-in-progress photographic header)
Responsive Design is Responsible Design. Sounds catchy, right? This is the kind of thing that’s embroidered on the pillows of Web Design superstars. People no longer say that this is a trend. What is Responsive Design?
It’s when your website says “whoa, you’re using a phone to look at this? … wait, let me get the phone layout for you… ahhh. Much better.” Or a tablet. (Try making the window smaller now and you’ll notice this blog is responsive.) I’m still reeling a bit about what tablet devices really mean for web design. Retina displays are an entirely different matter. I won’t be getting into that for a while. More on that here.
So, yes. I made my L’opera Shmopera Website responsive. Not to tablets, yet. I haven’t gotten that hooked up. But, it is “phone-ready” (as phone-ready as a fake website can be.) How do you know? Make the window smaller and it should lock into a phone-size at a certain point. Between full size and phone size however you can see my pictures floating for a bit. That’s where the tablet layout comes into place, but I haven’t written the script for that, yet.
Pretty cool, though. I added lines of code and attached another CSS (Cascading style sheets) file to tell the boxes and stuff what to do when the window gets smaller and there you have it. I’m still new at this game. It is difficult to design websites when you don’t name your tags/classes etc. It will get complicated and fast. I’m glad Erik Fadiman instructed us on code commenting. That is very helpful. Web Design with DreamWeaver is like being a puppeteer, your code are the strings. In my case, the strings are tangled because I keep pulling the wrong ones until they are tangled. Using an ID or a class instead of a tag is a good way to tangle your code.
Another trick is to use the browser to edit your website. Using the code inspector in the Web Dev tool bar, you can make changes and see them in real time in the browser. A good web design work station has two to three monitors, mac and windows and a lot of multitasking going on.
Some brief instruction on CSS sprites. It’s intriguing mostly because of the name. Sounds fun. It sorta is. A CSS sprites’ origins comes from “a graphic object blended with a 2-D or 3-D scene through graphics hardware” (-Smashing Magazine). It’s a way to have multiple states of the same item saved in a master grid. Then depending on the circumstance, you can call up one of the images within the grid—aligning the images is crucial!
Things I would stitch onto my pillows (in my mansion of web design love):
Systematic naming makes a happy home.
God Bless Web Dev Toolbar.
You can’t spell cuss, without CSS.
Code comments are the flowers that bloom in God’s Garden.
map of downtown seattle adobe– illustrator screenshot
As a task for a brochure that my company is making, I created this map in illustrator. When my supervisor told me to make the dark rectangle look more like railroad tracks, I knew it was a job for the brush tool. I made a brush for railroad tracks. It made me think about my first quarter at Seattle Central Creative Academy and Linda Lapping, my Adobe Illustrator teacher who guided our class through the intricacies of Adobe and the wonders of Illustrator. Making this map was a breeze. I named my layers!
