Exclamatory Foolishness

Day 31

0 comments By strachey Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with camera, distractions, lifesaver, rangefinder, shortcut, web browser February 25th, 2011 @ 7:37 pm

Today marks a day in history when I chanced up one of the MOST important shortcuts for Firefox and Chrome and the general web browsing experience ever. Have you accidently closed a tab while browsing the internet or closed it and realized that the information you copied in fact hadn’t copied from said tab in your web browser? This shortcut is a life saver, just push COMMAND/APPLE + SHIFT + T and it will restore the last tab closed, and perhaps other tabs that you closed before that. Try it out and you will wonder how you ever lived without using this shortcut.

Watched Pecker with Edward Furlong the other day. It was hard for me to get into the movie and I didn’t feel like I could connect with the characters till the end of the movie. The movie is a comment on photography and questions it. Pecker photographs many of his friends and family in a small town. The whole movie he is clicking the shutter and throwing back the film winder. When he has an exhibition at the burger joint he works at he runs into a women who wants to sell his photographs and put them in an exhibition. Things become tangled up though when people get angry about the photographs. Things take a turn when the art lovers become art themselves. I was a bit tired when I watched this movie so probably didn’t get all of the points but it certainly makes you think.

I have been distracted by photography the past couple of days. Looking at some equipment that would allow me to focus on my clients easier. Perhaps my eyesight is getting worse but have had a hard time focussing correctly for a long time. This phenomenon always has been a problem with my dim lit dslr viewfinder. I haven’t been able to secure a good focussing mat to help. With my small film slr I am able to focus much easier as its 100 time brighter and 50 percent bigger and the assisted focussing mat that cuts the image in two unless you have it in focus is a life saver. Still though once in a while even that fails. Supposedly Rangefinders have the brightest viewfinders around and are what the famous reporter photographers Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Brenson used. Have been researching Rangefinders and some seem to die by them and others hate them. I love how much smaller they are then dslr’s. The most intruigeing part of the Rangefinder system is

You see your client the whole time when taking the picture and there is no blackout when the picture is taken
Most rangefinders are a lot quieter and smaller
The lenses are designed differently and enable the lense housing to be closer to the film, enabling better quality photos
Huge bright viewfinder

Continuing to read about and learn Word Press…

Day 25

0 comments By strachey Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with Crowed Favorite, hiring, job, lynda.com, Smashing Word Press Beyond the Blog February 19th, 2011 @ 4:09 am

Viewed some tutorials on Lynda.com (free through my schools subscription) for using Word Press and I got some things out of it. Especially in the more complicated subjects that just writing about on a blog does not cut it. It seems much faster to learn by video in these cases then reading for me.

Ironically though I broke down and bought a book to get deeper into Word Press cause there where things that where just not being answered for me online and it sure is convenient having it all (most) there right in front of you. I went for Smashing Word Press Beyond the Blog. Already it has proven very valuable. Later I will go into more depth on how helpful the book has been.

Ran into this insane Word Press development team Crowed Favorite and they seem to be hiring, doesn’t get much better then Denver, CO.

Day 22

0 comments By strachey Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with credit, CSS, Open Source, web tools February 16th, 2011 @ 2:56 pm

While torso deep in CSS code I came across this link to the Blueprint CSS Framework.

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

Have to look at this a bit more in depth but it looks promising and definitely useful. CSS for printing is a whole world that I have to discover. I think this illustrates the importance of writing down the tools that you use for those who come after you (especially in the Open Source fields) to know what you built on and most importantly give thanks/credit where credit is due. Of course I don’t mean to say that you indicate using Adobe Dreamweaver when you code a CSS file as that seems ridiculous but this CSS Framework was created by a team of people for you to use and it seems that you should let people know that this framework was what you created your CSS out of. A bit like recommending a good mason to your neighbor, I appreciate it.

Day 20

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with chrome, firefox, home page, sub domain, web browser, web tools February 14th, 2011 @ 11:39 am

A sad day for me today as I have decided to switch to using Chrome as my go to browser. When I am designing with Word Press and in general I have a shit ton of browsers open. Unfortunately my beloved Firefox as a Ram hog and am not able to work in it as quickly as Chrome. The funny thing though is that I do notice that Chrome uses a service called Google Chrome Renderer that uses about the same memory as the actual Google Chrome application when you look in the Activity Monitor which makes me think that it may not save all that much Ram but it certainly is more responsive than Firefox. Another thing that sold me was the insanely useful right click Inspect Element feature of Chrome that makes it unbelievably easy to dissect Word Press themes and modify CSS. Firefox has a great Web Developer addon that is almost the same and don’t forget Firebug which is very powerful as well. You can do this in both browsers but I love the ability to edit the CSS properties of the page to see what could happen. You can also add new classes or ids as well as edit the HTML of the page within these web tools. I blame/thank Philip Kobernick.

Anyway on to less geeky subjects which actually involve my project… I am somewhat satisfied with what I was able to turn up for my own portfolio site. The biggest problem is that I don’t have anything for the home page!!!! AHAHAH Ya that is a huge problem. So this is the story, I am using the tags feature for my menu items and changing the actual text link the user clicks on to something far more interesting and dynamic then a bland artistic tool of photography. I changed it to, get this, to photographer. Wow isn’t that a revolutionary much more interesting reference to a person then to a boring action, photography. Because of the nature of the links I can’t add this content to the home page, I could just forget about the home page and go right to an info page that would give an introduction to the site and myself. Usually though this isn’t very interesting for me when I go to other peoples portfolio sites. I just skip it and go to the work. I could just put the Photographer section as the home page as well, go straight to my work. What I really want to do though is have separate sub domains for photography and webdesign and could modify the sites accordingly. With the new Word Press I am able to create as many virtual sub domains as I want VERY easily so I would like to test that out and use it. So I would create a photographer.evantheurer.com and a webdesigner.evantheurer.com which may or may not feature different themes, then off course I would have the blog.evantheurer.com which unfortunately I am using blogger for right now. Soon I will import all these blog entries on blogger into my own Word Press run blog but for now this works.

Day 19

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized Tagged with portfolio-press, Tags, theme problems February 13th, 2011 @ 10:17 pm

So I am modifying the theme Portfolio Press by Devin Price and got stuck on how to use his Custom Taxonomy of type Portolio. Fortunately there is help and within this post is a link to a great video on using it.

The idea is that you create a new Portfolio page with a featured image. The option to set an image as a Featured Image is within the image Upload/Insert option. Pick an image from your gallery perhaps or upload one from your computer. Once you set it as featured though if you are using Word Press 3.1 it will not come in the regular editing interface that anything happened for some reason. In earlier versions there was actually a box to the left that allowed you to pick a featured image but maybe the theme needs to be updated. Type in a title for the Portfolio page and save it. Then when you go back to all the Portfolio items you will see that there is a picture on the new Portfolio item you created. Now you can go into quick edit to put tags that best describe the image.

Once you have multiple images with similar tags you can go to Appearance and then to Menu. This is where the magic happens. First of all to make things easier look up to the top of the page where it says Howdy, (your name). Just under this is a pull down box that says Screen Options. Within this you will see all these checkbox under Show on Screen. Please check the Portfolio tags” option and a new box will appear further down then you can see, we will come back to this later. Now we want to create new navigation menu based on the Portfolio Tags. We do this by in Menu Name enter a new menu name. Right next to this is a box called theme locations and you will click the drop down box to select your newly name menu. Click save. Now scoll down till you see the Portolio Tags box and Click all the tags that you want to appear on the menu of you site and they will appear now at the top of the page under the place where you named your site initially. You can click on the name, reorder them and even by pulling them a bit to the right create a quick submenu. Now when you go to your site you will see the old menu is gone and replaced by yours. When you click this tag menu now in place it will take you to a page with all the images that have this tag in a thumbnail format. Really kick ass and powerful! The below image is a screenshot of the tag black and white. Now I just have to figure out how to make the 10 image thumbnail limit larger.

Tagged images of type "black and white"

In so many ways this tool is insanely useful cause I wanted to create an area on my site for photography and for webdesign. Within this area I would be able to have a list of thumbnail images that a user could click on and it would go into somewhat of a slideshow mode. You can see the next image by clicking on its title with an arrow just below the picture or you could click on a property tag that the picture was given such as people, which would then whisk you away to a dynamic page of thumbnail images having this property tag “people”. So amazing useful and really gives power to the user to see the content that they want to see. Perhaps though it would even more powerful if I included these property tags at the top of the page which the user could click in order to see exactly the images he wanted such as images with the property of “black and white” and “people” and “italy”. This pin point ability to see exactly what you came to see in my photography is so powerful and quick instead of going through all these images that don’t pertain to the users interests.

Day 17

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized February 11th, 2011 @ 7:43 pm

I looked for some themes that might work well for a portfolio site in terms of a reference to start from. Starting is always a problem for me because I always think of the intimidating scope of the project and everything that must in turn take place because of this starting action.

The simple site of Tim Van Damme inspired me a lot in the vain of a very effective tool for people to use to get in contact with you. His interface design skills are ridiculous!

I chanced on the theme Portfolio Press by Devin Price and immediately liked its “simplicity” but as I found out there is much more then meets the eye.

Portfolio Press

I began by hacking my way around what I knew concerning modifying themes by creating a new folding within

/wordpress/wp-content/themes/

my folder is called portfolio-press-child. Within this folder I have a style.css which I put the following info in the header of the file so as to point it to the original css file within the portfolio-press folder.

/*Theme Name: Portfolio Press Child

Description: Child theme for the portfolio-press

Author: Evan Theurer

Template: portfolio-press*/

@import url(“../portfolio-press/style.css”);

@import url(“css/reset.css”);

underneath this I put all the css code that I want to modify. I didn’t want the sidebar anymore on the pages so I set the width to zero

/* Sidebar*/

#sidebar { overflow:hidden;

float:left;

width:0px; /* original value 240px;*/

}

this is BAD way to go about it. But I was fooling around and wanted quick results. I was working with this themes Custom Taxonomies of type Portolio and because of this it allows you to created tagged or categorized on the fly content. If I had been working with Pages and I wanted a quick one column layout without the sidebar I would just go within Pages go add new and on the left you will see a ”Page Attributes” box, if you don’t see this look up to the top of the page where it says “Howdy, (your name)”. Just under this is a pull down box that says “Screen Options”. Within this you will see the option to see ”Page Attributes”. Check it and now when you pull it down it should give you available page layouts of one or two columns, which would get rid of the side bar. If you don’t like the side bar right now go to “Appearance” and then down to “Widgets” and you are able to add whatever sidebar configurations you want. When you add your own the current default sidebar display will automatically disappear.

Then I also wanted to modify aspects of the page itself so I brought in the specific .php pages that I wanted to change.

Below are some history of the edits.

edited the name and menu of portfolio press

Portfolio Press Menu Edit

edited the background color of portfolio press

Background color edit

Day 14

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized February 8th, 2011 @ 4:04 pm

So at this point I am overwhelmed with all the cools and glitz of Word Press. It is BY FAR the most easy to use and user friendly interface that I have ever used in the entire span of my twenty plus years of living. Here are some screen shots of the interface where most of the magic happens. The big red glaring banner is in reference to a plug in that I haven’t yet put in the time to configure. The design is so pleasing to the eyes.

Dashboard

Blogging Editor

Day 11

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized February 5th, 2011 @ 1:05 am

Started to play around with Word Press on my Mac OS X machine using a local installation through Mamp. I guess there are some different tools you have to accomplish the same thing and there are PLENTY of tutorial on doing this for free. Here are the resources I used:

After I followed these instructions I couldn’t figure out how to actually get to the local Word Press website in my browser when Mamp was running. If you left your MySQL Host: localhost on Port:3306 and Apache Port:80 you shouldn’t have to type in the port name so I found after I unpacked my Word Press installation in the /Applications/Mamp/htdocs directory my Word Press installation could be found at

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-login.php

at which point you do the quick five minute installation to set things up and you should be good to go!

Day 8

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized February 2nd, 2011 @ 4:39 am

My Senior Project has shifted clearly into focus: learn WordPress, create themes that others can use or perhaps buy for their WordPress site, harness the CMS capabilities of WordPress to create sites that potential clients can easily edit and create their own content from. At the same time I am learning this I will create a site for Jason(and myself).

Today Pontuti spoke about demo reels for video and animation. A lot of the same principle of web portfolios applied but the idea to keep them below two minutes.

I received my domain name today evantheurer.com, can’t wait to get started. Actually I think I will redirect this blog right now to blog.evantheurer.com. See you there. I made the mistake of first creating a subdomain on my website before I went through the process and startyourwebpages.com helped me to untangle the mess by deleting my existing subdomain and then going in and creating a CNAME record which points to my blog with google. The only caveat is that I can’t have images bigger than 400px now on my blog because I am pointing to my domain name (terms by google) but supposedly if my thumbnail is around 400px it still will link to a much larger image.

Day 7

0 comments By evan Filed in Uncategorized February 1st, 2011 @ 7:26 am

Monday…. it was difficult to get back into the swing of things but most of today was spent reading about WordPress and photography subjects.

Insane web portfolio I ran into bratn.com and przewozny.com.

Also a great blog role from Sean Gallagher through livebooks concerning how he went about applying for a Pulizter Travel Grant to cover photographically the desertification of China. He speaks about the story process, long term photojournalism projects in general, and ideation.

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Exclamatory Foolishness process musings of a senior project