by Matt | Oct 28, 2009 | Web, Work
I’m having a bit of a time trying to wrap my head around a request I’ve received for functionality in WordPress. I even asked the WP community to no avail.
It seems that after finally convincing my superiors that WordPress is the way to go for our corporate website, they’ve asked for something that WordPress is going to have a hard time delivering on.
The problem is that the people requesting things are looking at websites designed in Flash, my arch-nemesis. In Flash you can obviously make a little Flash object do whatever you want if you hard code it’s behavior. The trouble is that in the real world, content is dynamic and fluid, a principal that WordPress opperates under, and that creating things with equal intricate relationships is a bit harder.
Essentially, I’m looking for a way to display related material to the page I’m on, at the bottom of the page, with excerpts and images, in some sort of navigational slideshow/widget/slider thingy. Basically, at the bottom of the page, instead of a list of related pages (determined either by the author or by variables such as keywords or hierarchy relationship) they want a little interactive thingy where you can see a bunch of related material, just one at a time in some sort of slideshow fashion (not automated). I honestly don’t see what’s wrong with a list, but this is my dilemma.
Here’s my problem. I can do bits and pieces of this as a solution but I can’t seem to figure out a way to combine them. I can list related pages, that’s a built in function of WordPress. Downside is that you have to create a loop (ie: code) and use it in the page template itself. I can’t use ‘shortcode’ to put it into a single particular page. I also create and use excerpts from pages/posts, but with the same problem, no shortcode. You have to use the “the_excerpt()” tag in the code. I can create images of the related materials and use some sort of slideshow, but this is neither dynamic nor search engine friendly. Also, most slideshow widgets are designed for sidebar use and the only a few can be used in pages. The most obvious one to use is NextGen Gallery, but it doesn’t have any navigational features outside the lightbox AND uses the JWPlayer as a slideshow component and it embeds it’s logo, bigger than snot, in the middle of the images. You also can’t link images in the slideshow. Not cool.
So, that’s where I am. I need something, widget, plugin or otherwise, to display changing information on a PAGE. It can’t be embedded in the template, because I only need it on 2 or 3 pages.
Any ideas from anyone?
by Matt | Oct 7, 2009 | Culture, Personal, Work
Seriously? We’ve completely lost a month. I have no idea what happened. Things have been universally crazy around the ranch for quite some time now. We’re helping Lauren’s family as much as we can, we’re helping my family as much as we can, and as a result we’re slowly getting run down ourselves. Both of us have started to feel under the weather lately and I don’t really think it’s any coincidence.
Work is going pretty well for the both of us. We’re keeping busy and with the super awesome job market out there, you can’t really complain when you’re busy. I’ve been plugging away on multiple websites for a while now. One of them is fixing to go live in about a week, the other two will hopefully be wrapped up around Christmas or New Years. I’ve managed to convince co-workers and bosses that our old out-dated CMS needs to go and that we should be trying to develop a new site in WordPress for all our next project. They seem very receptive to the idea and I’m working on just such a WordPress design as we speak. I’ve already created a site in plain HTML, as a contingency plan, in case it doesn’t work out, but I think I should be able to pull it off. What parts of WordPress I’ve yet to understand fully, I’ve been able to hack and slash my way through or borrow similar code from other designs and pick it apart to see how it works.
Our fantasy baseball league has wrapped up for the year, and congrats to Nagle for pulling off the complete and total domination of everyone else in the league, lol. I really had a good time with it and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year. Also, speaking of baseball, it’s my favorite time of the year. The playoffs start tonight and I get to watch a full month of the best baseball of the year. I love October.
Game wise, if you’ve been paying attention to the gamer-tag in the corner, you can see it’s mostly Halo and CoD. I picked up ODST via preorder from Amazon (saved $10 and got free shipping) and I’ve been enjoying that for a week or two now. Good solid single player campaign, although it’s a little on the short side. I played through on “Heroic” just to length it’s challenge a little bit. The “Fire-Fight” multiplayer survival mode is great, but I can’t get anyone to play with me. It’s one gigantic glarring omition is that it doesn’t have XBL matchmaking, meaning you can’t play with random online people. You’re forced to only play with people from your friends list.
That’s of little importance however since Modern Warfare 2 is dropping at the beginning of November, so I really only need to wait it out another month. Since every other game (literally) that was supposed to be released this winter has been frightened off by MW2, there’s really only one thing I’ll be playing, not like that’s a bad thing.
Caught a couple movies here and there. I watched Zombieland last weekend and really enjoyed it. I think I actually liked it better than Shaun of the Dead, which I’ve always enjoyed. I’m normally not a fan of Woody Harrelson at all, but he did a really great job in this one. I think so far this year my only solid DVD purchases will be Zombieland, Up and Star Trek. Seriously.
That’s about it. Sorry to be gone so long, everyone has just been super busy, but busy is good right?
Matt out.
by Matt | Jun 26, 2009 | Personal, Travel, Work
Wow, this week has flown by. It’s been two days since I updated and most of it was a blur. I actually intended to write about my experience yesterday but I was so tired I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Thursday was the first day of intense breakout sessions. There were twice as many as the day before and it was even harder to choose what to attend. I was able to see “Making Ideas Happen in the Creative World” with Scott Belsky, “Good vs. Great Design” with one of my personal favorites Cameron Moll, “Everything I know I learned from Video Games” with Dave Werner and “Variations on a Rectangle” (magazine design) with DJ Stout.
Probably the most helpful, especially in terms of design and inspiration was Cameron. It was a really great session with lots of insight on pushing your ideas to the next level. The video game session with Dave Werner was also interesting from a software standpoint. They’ve developed a great product in Atmosphir that’s essentially a “create your own game” platform. It looks very slick and I hope they succeed with their product.
We also had the chance to visit the exhibitions themselves and pick up some schwag. When I say some, I mean 6 bags full. I actually beat my previous record of “free t-shirts” from a computer conference in high-school with a resounding 9 shirts. A couple hats, toys, books and even a messenger bag are all mixed in there along with all the brochures and info sheets about various products. There was actually quite a number of paper companies, which I found rather odd. I was always under the impression that designers usually found and then used a printer that suited their needs and that the decision for a specific brand of paper was usually up to that printer. I guess a designer could ask for Monadnock paper instead of Mohawk, but I doubt a printer is going to go find, buy and ship in a special paper from some unknown paper company just for a certain job. More likely they’ll just suggest something similar from what stock they have. Who knows.
Paper is something that both facinates me from a strictly product standpoint as well as is a non-issue for me unless we’re talking about photo papers. Regardless, it was interesting to talk to people about their various products.
Thursday I decided to take it easy and just chill at the hotel. These sessions are hours long and we’re walking everywhere so I was pretty tired. My coworkers and I go some food and called it a night early.
Today I got up early and went to the “Early Morning Photoshop Show” presented by Adobe. It was probably the best session from the entire conference. I got more out that hour and a half than most anything so far. There are literally hundreds of little, tiny updates and changes to the CS4 Suite that I hadn’t figured out yet. It was very interesting to see how and why Adobe has updated what they did. By the way, if you have CS4, you’re going to want to check out the Configurator app. Trust me.
After that there were a couple less memorable sessions and a couple pretty good ones, including “Web Strategy that Works” with Mark O’Brian. The main focus of that was web clarity, marketing, search engine strategies and other random tips but the real focus was on creating and maintaining a creative writing schedule, something I’ve struggled with from time to time. There were a few good tips on staying true to your content, how to get over writers block, that sort of thing. Very helpful.
That’s about it for today. Lauren is driving up from Houston to join me for the weekend and I’m really excited about that. We haven’t been able to get away for quite a while and I think we’re way overdue. I’ve got a couple more classes first thing tomorrow, but after lunch we’ll be on our own and we plan on exploring Austin a little bit. I haven’t had a chance to go see the capital yet, so that’s definitely on my to-do list. I’ll try and share some pictures when we get back.
Matt out.
by Matt | Jun 22, 2009 | Personal, Travel, Work
This time tomorrow I’ll be gathering my things and heading off to the 2009 HOW Design Conference in Austin, TX. Since it was so close this year I’ll be driving up with a colleague. I’m pretty excited. HOW is the largest design conference in the country. It’s like MacWorld or E3, but just for designers and artists. Adobe will be showing off CS4 and beta versions of features for CS5, designers and pundits like Cameron Moll and DJ Stout will be there along with Photoshop experts like the grand-master Scott Kelby.
It should be pretty awesome. I’m hoping that the Austin Convention Center will have wifi, but I’m not holding my breath. If it does, I’ll probably be live-blogging some of the talks, just for note-taking purposes. If it doesn’t, I’ll try and recap in the evenings back at the hotel.
If nothing else, I’ll at least replenish my supply of crappy trade-show grade t-shirts. You can never have too many t-shirts you can paint in, lol.
by Matt | Jun 1, 2009 | Games, Personal, Reviews, Web, Work
No. I’m not at E3. I wish I was. Nope, just a guy watching all the press conferences and reading as much news as possible. I’m now post-live-blogging the Microsoft press conference. Post-live meaning that I’m watching it on my DVR after it’s happened. Here we go. Of course, to follow along, you should probably be watching it as well, or at least checking out clips of the afor-mentioned games. They should be everywhere by the time I post this.
Update: Just because I like you guys, I’ve gone back and tried to link to videos whenever possible.
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by Matt | May 12, 2009 | Aggravation, Work
I was just asked to change the font on all the brochures I designed from the always awesome, and completely contempory, clean and visible Gotham to Imprint MT Shadow. I’ll give you a minute to check those links.
The reason? They liked the “font shape” of Imprint better.
Every time I make these changes, I die a little inside.
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