Brief: Carbonetworks asked me to design their 2010 greeNews Monthly newsletter, basing the design on the current 2010 website design while utilizing the back end management tools and template interface of Constant Contact.

Project: Because the client knew exactly what they wanted, gave a crystal clear brief and included existing design files this project ran smooth as silk. Using Photoshop, I took their existing website header and edited the image for content, cropping the existing image for size and then font matching the logo for the newsletter header, in this case Century Gothic with height/width and letter spread adjustments. I then used the DigitalColor Meter app in Mac OSX to match the font/background/TOC header colors to the existing website colors and finally tweaked the padding and margin entry’s to best utilize the 600px width recommendations for email newsletters.

Lessons Learned: Working with businesses and corporations is always fun for me for several reasons. More often than not they have a clear vision, a well defined timeline and they recognize what your time is worth. In addition, they like everything in writing which seriously cuts down on miscommunications, which I know is every designers bugaboo. There’s nothing worse than miscommunication and unrealized expectations. In this case, lines were open like Niagara Falls and the project was delivered in no time and exceeded the client’s expectations. Now that’s what I like to hear.

Tools Used: CSS scripting & Constant Contact.

Challenges: Constant Contact does a nice job of providing front end interface tools for novice designers to make tweaks to Constant Contact’s existing template selections. However, if you have a deeper understanding of css scripting and want to really hack away at your newsletter template, the Constant Contact interface gets clumsy real quick. It’s not that you can’t do what you want, but it does mean a lot of back and forth page reloads, and constant ‘save & preview’ requests. All this could be tied up so nicely in a smooth as silk ajax interface, but I guess there’s just not a whole lot of money in newsletter management. Best solution for the moment, would be for constant contact to break the editing tools out into their own window entirely so the advanced users don’t have to keep switching back and forth to make tweaks.

Project Brief: Design and develop a online portfolio to promote existing work, with an easy to manage back end. Tate Create did the design and development for the project utilizing the power of the WordPress CMS infrastructure & Graph Paper Press for design code.

Background: www.lawarehouses.com had no online presence for it’s real estate listings and wanted to have an easy way to post new listings and manage existing listings.

Project Brief: Design and develop an easy to navigate and maintain website for the commercial real estate market. Design concepts were made available by the client and Tate Create did the development for the project utilizing the power of the WordPress CMS infrastructure.

Background: www.lapremierleague.com is the online face of the Los Angeles Premier League. However the existing site was built on older html tech and did nothing to facilitate easy league statistical tools and schedule maintenance. All scheduling, rosters and stats were handled with rusty Excel and all work was left in the hands of one very tired volunteer. What the LAPL website needed, was a complete overhaul. Tate Create came to the call.

Project Brief: Design and develop an entirely new online league management website for the League. Provide a clean online site that represents the league’s semi-professional aspirations, while providing an easy to maintain backend with comprehensive league management tools for the maintenance of schedules, team rosters, standings and player statistics.

My wireless signal won’t go through my walls.

Now this wouldn’t be a problem in a new house with an open floor plan. I’ve lived in houses where I get signal out on the street sitting in my car and that was running of a 802.11 G router 5 years ago, so I understand my situation is unique.

Here is my current setup.

1. Airport Extreme 802.11N – Main Router
2. Airport Express 802.11N – Extender
3. Airport Express 802.11G – Extender w/ USB Printer

My current wireless clients are as follows

1. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2007)
2. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2006)
3. iphone 3G
4. iphone 3Gs
5. PC Server 802.11N

So I toiled and strained for days trying to get the mixture right. And because I’ve got different classes working with each other it was truly a matter of getting the right device to initialize in the correct sequence. So know this Paduan. If you too are trying to setup a new wireless network, using your Airport Expresses as Wireless Extenders, do the following.

Reset everything and unplug everything. Start in sequence.

1. Plug in your Modem (Cable/DSL)
2. Attach your main wireless router (Airport Extreme 802.11N) to your modem via ethernet.
3. Register to the Airport Extreme 802.11N’s network on your main client laptop.
4. Open Airport Utility on your laptop.
5. Run through the assisted setup.
6. Make sure to check the box that reads Allow this network to be extended
7. Once this is completed and the router has reset to a solid green state, plug in the wireless device (in my case, an Airport Express 802.11N)
8. Using the same laptop, you should now see the second device show up in the Airport Utility window.
9. Select the device and run through it’s setup. (it will ask you to “switch” networks)
10. You are setting up the Airport Express to join the existing network and “extend” it’s range. Any other setup will screw everything up so make sure to check the box when you’re asked.
11. Once you’ve got the green status light a glowing on the second Airport Express, you can check on your overall network health under the Advanced > Statistics Tab in the Airport Utility application.
12. At the bottom of the window you’ll see a Logs and Statistics button. Select that to bring up a real time graph of all the wireless traffic on your network.

The most important thing to remember is to reset EVERYTHING FIRST and work in sequence to make it perfect. If you skip a step or get a little lazy, I swear to you you’ll end up spending days trying to get the mixture right.

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I hate opening attachments.
I hate downloading attachments.
I hate how people use attachments and most of the time don’t know how to resize or compress anything so you end up getting a ginormous 12 mb email stuffed full of crap that you didn’t want or need to see anyway.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if that stuff didn’t bulk up your inbox?
Wouldn’t it be great if an entire project could be housed at one location so anyone who needs to can find anything related to that project anytime can do so with no special software, just the browser?

Google Wave
Well it looks like Google is in the hunt for just such a product with their brand spanking new Google Wave product, however we plebs out here won’t get to see inside that crystal palace till the end of the year so instead, we still gotta make do with what’s out there now.

UPDATE : 10/21/2009

I just scored a beta invite to Google Wave. Very excited to try it out.

UPDATE: 10/28/2009

Google Wave is incredibly powerful. Stacks of how to’s out there and I’m honestly just too busy to sit and sing it’s praises for 20 pages when so many greats have already gone before. I will say this, there is one major downfall with Google Wave that can only be corrected by time.

It’s a completely closed system, you can only use Google Wave with other Google Wave members and there ain’t nobody in there with you. I knew 2 people who were beta members and though it was fun to play around with a collaborative story time experiment. It really won’t flex it’s muscles till it is touting the user base of a gmail or facebook. More to come.

UPDATE: 12/01/2009

Google just announced they have opened the beta of Google Wave to 1 million members. Plus I just got a couple of invites in my Google Wave box to play around with. Hmmm who shall I invite?

Now we are really going to begin to see the dawn of online collaborative tools. Google Wave is massively extensible so really, the sky is the limit. Only thing stopping us now is that pesky learning curve.

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Bad Request Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Well don’t fret, coz it’s an easy fix…

Step 1. Log in to your wordpress dashboard.

Step 2. Go to Settings > Permalinks >

Step 3. Set Permalinks to something non custom like the date and title structure.

Step 4. Save Changes

Step 5. Refresh your blog.

All fixed. Now get out there and start having fun again…

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But how do you find out what your credit score is?
There are three major services that collect and provide this information based on your total financial profile. Generally mapped through your Social Security Number. They are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
But to retrieve your score from any of their websites costs money. So what do you do if you want it for free?

Go to freecreditreport.com. You know the commercial. The long haired loser friends singing stories of how their credit got screwed up so they went to freecreditreport.com to find out what their score was?

So I signed up today, and within 10 minutes had a beautifully layed out presentation of all my credit history, accounts, lease holdings and investments. Pretty scary but there I was, ink on paper.

Yes you have to give them your credit card, but here’s the trick. You call them immediately (within 7-9 days) and tell the CS Rep you want to cancel your membership. Yes you want to cancel. No you don’t want the extra service or discounted rate, you just want to cancel. They put you on hold for 2 minutes and then come back with those lovely words, “you are all set Mr. Schweinhowzer. Your membership has been cancelled. You are free to go.”

Nice.

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Bookgoo is an interactive web-based tool for highlighting, annotating and sharing documents . The idea is pretty much the same as Google Docs. Although unlike Google Docs, you don’t create your documents on the Bookgoo site, but upload them instead from your PC. And unlike Google doc which limits you to textual editing of documents shared between different collaborators, Bookgoo stretch online document editing even more by letting you highlight some parts, write annotations explaining why you highlighted that part of the document, and share them with friends or to whoever you may want to share it. Your friends can edit your documents as well, should you give them access to your documents in Bookgoo.

asically, by allowing document collaboration, Bookgoo is promoting social networking among online users, but this time over a common purpose of developing ideas about the documents uploaded in Bookgoo.

Bookgoo does not work only with MS Word documents, but it also supports MS Excel, URL, PDF, HTML, gif and jpeg file formats. Hopefully, it includes PowerPoint presentation files as well.

via Highlight, Annotate and Share Your Documents at Bookgoo.

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So I found the only way to correct the issue was to boot from the Install DVD. Create a new ADMIN user account and get rid of the old one.

Only problem was, when you delete a user account that has created all your folders and files, unless you create a user account with the same shortname, you will be kicked to the curb with nothing on but a pair of socks and your files laughing at you from the upstairs window. This has never happened to me in real life but I imagine it’s tantamount to the same thing… Ahem.

Here’s what you do to fix it. Change file Permissions.

2 ways you can do this. The beaatch way, which would be go to every single Get Info window and change them one by one, deleting the offending _unknown user and installing your own account with read & write permissions or, get a bazooka and do the lot all at once.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going for the bazooka every time. My bazooka? FileXaminer. First time I’ve danced with this lovely lady and we’ll see how many times she steps on my toes.

Well that was breathtaking! What would have taken me probably the rest of the weekend one by one took me about 2 minutes to complete. And that was lagging. If I had to “do it again”, 30 seconds max to change the User & Group Permissions & the Owner, Creation Date, Preview Icon… the lot. Amazing piece of software and as your Bazooka salesman, I highly recommend this fantastic piece of software which you can download from the lovely people over at Gideon Software. Or just click http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/releases/fex-leopard.dmg to download the software right away.

So now my permissions are all fixed. Hope you find this useful.

_theSheik

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