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.

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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TORRENTS
    Def: BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.
    Basically, if you want to share a movie, you would do better to break it up into little pieces and send them individually through multiple connections, rather than trying to wedge the big sucker through the single pipe. Kind of like putting potato peels into the insinkerator. Better in pieces right?

To get into Torrents your first going to need to know where to find them. Essentialy, the online equivalent of a library. And there are tons of places to go. But as a Mac user, you’ll do best at Mac friendly places, ie: they carry Mac software. I’ve found the best places to start are…

1. http://isohunt.com/
2. http://www.mininova.org
3. http://www.piratebay.org
4. http://www.bittorrent.com

IsoHunt is by far and away my favorite. It has the largest selection and the most amount of active users.
Now users are important, you want to have a lot of people in the Torrent community because the more people that are maintaining active connections, the faster the file will download and the less time you will have to wait. However let me make this part clear, the Torrent community is a very bitchy place. Don’t expect to just come in and take what you want and leave. By this I mean, users are broken up into two different groups. Seeders & Leechers. Seeders are the users who are providing access to their files. They are the ones who you are downloading that file from. Leechers are those that are doing the downloading. Much better to be an active Seeder/Leecher than solely a LEECH. There’s a reason for the name and people have little tolerance for selfish behavior. So give just as much as you take.

So now that you’ve found the best library selection for you, and you’ve located the file you were looking for, you’ll now need software to help you do all this seeding and leeching. I recommend Azureus by far as the best software available. It’s free and incredibly customizable. You can set your up and download speeds which is critical if you hope to do anything else while you are downloading. You can download a copy for Mac OS X here at www.azureus.com.

So you’ve got the library, you’ve got the software and you are off and running. Enjoy. There’s a whole world of content out there just waiting to be Torrented. Remember to play nicely.

As a sidenote, in no way do I condone the downloading of illegal or copyright protected content. There is plenty of legal content available out there for BitTorrent download.

_The Sheik

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There is a mod_security rule on our servers that denies requests to the xmlrpc.php module.This has been implemented as an additional security measure, because xmlrpc.php is a common target for hackers who scan for outdated and flawed versions of the XMLRPC module.To solve the problem, please add the following lines to a .htaccess file in the folder that contains the xmlrpc.php file:<IfModule mod_security.c>SecFilterRemove 114</IfModule>The above lines disable only the mod_security rule which filters requests to xmlrpc.php. This way, you will be able to use your blogging application. Please also make sure that your xmlrpc.php module is updated to the latest version.      

And there you have it. Simply implement the above and all will be well.Just a note, your SecFilterRemove XXX may be a different value. You should check with your Host to be sure you are freeing up the correct security filter.Oh, and by the way, make sure to check out my comparison review of Blog Editors for OS X.

_The Sheik

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