Feed | David A. Windham

Facebook

Mar 3, 2008

gotta love it.. i was dragging this morning.. opened my email at 6:30am and sure enough there was my high school prom picture (thats me in on the far left with the strange expression) staring me in the face some 15 years later. (how about this one – with some sort of blasé 80’s attitiude) Nostalgic.. yes and cool for the fact that it’s so easy to network with anyone nowadays. I get emails from the most random people just google-‘ing’ my name and for the most part my brother always accuses me over researching into prospective clients ‘files’. But I think it’s good to keep everything in the open as it makes everyone accountable for who they really are and have been… it’s always the transient types that sketch me out, or the LLC that has was just created by a guy who’s had twenty of them in various states. I like being able to find out about a persons past and i think most people will agree.. just remember that if you put it online.. it may go down in your “permanent record” as i like to tell people. I have a great respect for a master craftsman of any trade and it really shows when someone has been focused and successful with only one thing for years. That’s all i need to know about a person. And what is networking anyway? I got a note under my wiper blade on my windshield after work one afternoon that said something to the tune of “former scad alunmi.. call me we’ll network” .. what is that? is that like being business friends or something.. network. I don’t want business to ever dictate who my friends are and i say to myself…self “my friends are just progressive.. ahead of the curve, it’s just a matter of time before fishing, gardening, art, bicycles, woodworking, organic farming and teaching really will stand a chance of being as profitable as legal, health care, insurance, hedge funds, ceo, lobbyist, stock option having, oil money, banks, developers, agencies, offshore manufacturers, investment groups, and box franchisees suck us dry”… then i wake up and smell the coffee…and read my emails.. and remember that ‘social networking’ site as folks like to call facebook is no different than the “who you know, not what you know” adage of days past.. I think i’m going to dig through my old photos and move them all online just for fun… so i’ll go ahead and take the glory on my teenage looks with this one before i put up everyone elses pictures… and for those of you who actually need to get some work done online… try this link

REST and FBML (facebook markup language) has me a bit taken aback .. i’ll try to make the time.

and for those of you skeptics about facebook… here’s a quote from yesterday’s Business Week.

These edges are fertile with innovation because participation requires such a small investment in time and money. Last fall, psychologist B. J. Fogg taught a class at Stanford University in which he assigned students to develop Facebook applications. During the 10 weeks of the class, 73 students developed applications such as Kiss Me, Oregon Trail, and Secret Admirer, that have since resulted in 25 million installs and, by the end of the class, were attracting about 1 million daily, active users. These applications have generated more than $500,000 in ad revenue since September. At least three companies were formed by students in the class.

see also: 11/11/2015 – Facebook Weirdness – https://davidwindham.com/facebook-weirdness/
Native Orleanian

Mar 2, 2008

Jerry Moran is a photographer in New Orleans that i had met while in a gallery there. He takes a lot of images of musicians from in and around norleans. he contacted me after we had left new orleans because he was in need a of new website and i was happy to help as he had given us some great advice about what to see while we were in town.

and viola – case study… and this is pretty typical of my work.

problems
1) a way to design and build a website without any knowledge of programming or code or hosting.
2) a way to showcase his photography and keep up with gallery shows.
3) a way to retail items on his site and control the images including downloadable stock imagery.
4) a way to keep up with all of the content himself in an easy way.
5) a site that is excellent with search engines and works properly and easily.
6) a way to keep it and modify it long term without worrying about me.

solution:
1) jerry emailed me a photo of a pencil sketch of what he wanted as a website. gave me the colors (#e1b500) and fonts (teckton Pro BoldExt). We talked on the phone three times in a week discussing some advice and options and we just published a moment ago.
2) i copied the old website, moved to gs hosting at mediatemple, renamed his dns to point to new server. i added a new directory where i put up the new site and he could preview and learn to use the content management tools.
3) i added a content management suite for images, video, audio, design, content, pages, private urls (to share downloads and proof sheets with clients), and with all of the content from his old site. I added an e-commmerce solution that is highly configurable with images including exporting reports to quickbooks.
4) i customized portions of each content management solution (slideshowpro director, google apps and wordpress) to work with one another peacefully and included the some security measures and only the most effective and useful add-ons.
5) i added sitemaps, submitted to search engines, set up analytics, used friendly code and urls.
6) and since the site is already there and running on his own hosting.. any half-wit of a developer will be able to work with or modify the existing design or code. I keep it up and running for a $200/yr retainer and i only bill out $35/hr for any associated elective work.

The Results:
http://nativeorleanian.com

The Timeline:
2/22/08 – 2/29/08
exactly 1 week from start to finish

The Cost:
$1200 = 30/hrs @ $40/hr or 40/hrs @ $30/hr or 35/hrs @ $35/hr.. (which is actually $12 more).. but either way.. to field the calls handle the request, setup hosting, move domain, go through several edits, explain how to use it, setup email, install databases, install apps, customize.. voila. approx 35hrs. I can do the whole thing in a single sitting (day) if you don’t need any help with the design aspects or any additional features or flash design..but it usually takes me 2 weeks to get it all right and the client another month of questions until they’ll feel entirely comfortable using the site to it’s potential.
Web Design SC

Feb 29, 2008

Over the last three years working with the web, designers, and developers (interactive agencies or what ever you want to call yourself….i’ve made mental notes on some of the best web development and design firms in South Carolina and some of the best practices of those developers or agencies (as far as i can tell) trying to be as impartial as possible and taking into account that it’s not just valid code and design on a page that works online publishing work …what makes me qualified to make such a statement? a firm knowledge of hosting, seo, web standards, search engines, effective sites, flash, mysql, javascript, design, email, etc.. a background in media, the arts, and two years in the pits.. business experience. Considering every company or person may have differing needs. And many companies may underestimate the potential for using the web (for instance a small company may not think that they could put all of their forms online for clients to prepare before the meeting or purchase..and some people and companies may overestimate the importance of the web (for instance a company or person may spend thousands of dollars into building a website that will almost never generate a valuable lead or any good branding image or spend tens of thousands of dollars on internet enabled software or applications that are sketchy at best).. and don’t underestimate the value of a full service ad agency to manage all of your marketing assets with one point of contact. What i’ve found is that quality and price certainly don’t reflect one another from agency to agency and typically you find the real talent for programming, hosting, seo, and design working behind the scenes.
(in no particular order so don’t email me and tell me that you should be number 1)
1. Fuzzco – Charleston
2. OrangeCoat – Greenville
3. Blue Ion – Charleston
4. Metatation – Charleston
5. Brains on Fire – Greenville
6. Scully Group – Asheville
7. Fuel Interactive – Myrtle Beach
8. Web Station – Charlotte
9. Period Three – Columbia
10. Josh Skidmore – Charleston
11. Perrin Hall Brunson – Columbia
12. True Matter – Columbia

1. always own your domains
– you may always move your domain to any host and work with any company at any time.
– there will be strings attached to your web developer or hosting company.
2. consider very economical solution options before employing a developer/consultant
– get a free typepad or wordpress website.
– consider doing it yourself with help from your kids or someone elses
– yahoo small biz hosting, google sites, godaddy shared hosting – site builder.
3. there is no “make money now” button and you will get out of it what efforts are put into it.
– adding more content, making the site valid, and accessable via search engines doesn’t happen overnight
– you or your agency will have to devise and implement methods to drive traffic to your website.
4. there is no one size fits all and prefab solutions are not the way to go for 90% of you.
5. make sure that you developer is accessible and accountable to support your website
6. know what your hosting arrangements are and consider getting your own hosting
7. use existing dependable solutions for email. (ie.. google apps) for your domain.
8. fancy is not always better – consider usability and simplicity
9. keep all of digital assets and marketing materials in one place.
10. use dependable content management solutions that can be upgraded

worth a mention
1. sciway.net – almost as much traffic as major newspapers on a good day.. a value for effective online ads.
3. swampfox.ws – one of the most impressive and coordiated marketing and communications websites around.

if you can give me some compelling reasons to change any of this info.. please email me.
Saint John Coltrane

Feb 26, 2008

i’ll be… ginny got me a really cool shirt since i have expressed on a number of occasions that ‘lush life’ by john coltrane would be my favorite album of all time if i had one. Anyway.. i opened the mail today and i saw.. 1286 Filmore, San Francisco as the return address.. The Saint John Coltrane Church is really a church.. and they have some interesting swag to boot.. they were featured in Time Magazine as the hippest church in America. I’ll give a hallelujah to that.
FITC Amsterdam How Boston

Feb 24, 2008

i’ll take a moment of silence to wish that i was in amsterdam starting tomorrow for the FITC conference.
wiki leaks

Feb 23, 2008

i had read this on friday in the nytimes and did some follow up.. wiki leaks is ordered to be shut off.. the judge orders the domain registrar.. they comply and thousands of people like me immediately begin posting this link.. http://88.80.13.160/ so in return it got more press articles like this from CBS news.

“Last week, under pressure from a Swiss bank which said a disgruntled ex-employee had posted stolen documents on the site, Wikileak’s San Mateo, Calif.-based hosting company, Dynadot, agreed to turn off the site and prevent Wikileaks from transferring its domain name to another host.
The Zurich-based Bank Julius Baer & Co. claimed in court papers that a former executive stole the documents, and in some cases altered some of them, though it gave no details. It said the documents were illegally posted to www.wikileaks.org.
The papers allegedly point to money laundering and tax evasion schemes at the bank’s Cayman Islands branch. According to Wikileaks, they refer to “extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive” clients from the U.S., Europe, China and South America.”

What i find most interesting is the fact that it is very easy to offshore servers in France, the Cayman Islands, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere and it is also very easy to mirror these sites with multiple domains registered in multiple countries, so any organization that is publishing materials from another country will certainly have some blurred legal boundaries here in the states. However, our courts could always decide to regulate the network providers. Since Reagan deregulated the FCC in the 80’s I don’t think we’ll see that sort of thing here. If anyones running the show there, I think it’ll be the providers and I think they’ll self regulate and tax certain networks and servers differently.

And to think we don’t have little popup characters like they do in china to tell you when your looking at something they don’t want you to see…
binary data portability

Feb 23, 2008

i’m doing this logo for a contest because i believe in the cause and there’s a free iphone to boot.. (i’m always on ginny’s and i just installed a decent plugin for mobile editing of this site).. seems that Red Hat recently sent a Cease and Desist claiming that the DataPortability logo was too similar to their Fedora Logo.
… while i was working on it kris sends me this.

it’s what happens when your working with illustrator too long… and actually the binary code got me to thinking of some great ideas for the logo and i got a cool link to this encoder from paul schou

i was researching design firms yesterday thinking about the logo and noticed that now..they’re selling rental space on 2008 web trend map from information architect
audiovisual actionscript

Feb 22, 2008
Popforge is an Actionscript 3 code sandbox started by Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert…. it’s hosted at google code…. they did the roland909 and 8bitboy – the amiga sound emulator….

and they’ve also got this great cubic vr processor for flashplayer9… and it’s one of the very few free non javascript dependent vr scripts..nice work all around… and they’ve got something to do with hobnox which looks like some serious business.

[kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/org/first.swf” height=”550″ width=”800″ /]
speaking of digital audio.. that’s a composition written and played by my bro you’re listening to.
```
var s:Sound = new Sound();
var sc:SoundChannel;
var ba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var array:Array;
s.load(new URLRequest("jazz_sax.mp3"));
sc = s.play(0,1000);
this.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, spectrum);
var a:Number = 0;
function spectrum(event:Event)
	{ a = 0;

	graphics.clear();

    SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(ba,true,0);

    for(var i=0; i &lt; 556; i=i+3)

    {

    a = ba.readFloat();

    var num:Number = a*360;

    graphics.lineStyle(num/19,0x999999|(num &lt;&lt; 5));

    graphics.drawCircle(stage.stageWidth/2.5,stage.stageHeight/2.5,i);

              }

              }
```
Ruby

Feb 22, 2008

…my niece Ruby in binary form.

dynamic flash using ssp director

Feb 19, 2008

ssp array

hey thanks.. imagemagick and todd dominey..who actually did all of the really hard work on this one.. dominey knows what he’s doing.. smart move licensing director per domain..it’s worth it..i’ll gladly pay for it…. and i can customize and use it now pretty seamlessly..almost anywhere to manage video, audio, text, html, and imagery.. including the entire layout and dynamic text /html with css attached inside of flash based pages…. which i would embed in this page (click image above for files) but it seams that kimili flash embed won’t support (bc the swf is dependent on other imported .swfs) an absolute src path from a url that is dynamic.. as this one is generated….. i’ll have to work on this in the near future.. i’m just glad that i can now begin to build so many more dynamic sites using director to manage the media files, layout and text in swfs.

ssp fla
i’ll add more parameters to it.. as i use it for other projects.. and thks in particular for the original array goes to Shannon Jensen a talented photographer as well.

//modified from ssp user forums. http://slideshowpro.net by https://davidwindham.com
var totalImgs:Number;
var currentImgNumber:Number;
var theArr:Array;
var menublisten:Object = new Object;
menublisten.galleryData = function(eventObject):Void {
    theArr = eventObject.data;
    var menu_mc:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip("menu_mc",350);
    var nexty:Number = 0;
    for (i=0; i&lt;thearr.length; i++)="" {="" var="" mb:movieclip="menu_mc.attachMovie("mb","mb_"+i,50+i," {_x:0,_y:nexty});="" mb.txt.text="theArr[i][0].title;" nexty="" +="mb._height;" mb.onrelease="function()" albumnum:number="Number(this._name.split("_")[1]);" ssp1.loadalbum(albumnum);="" sspt1.loadalbum(albumnum);="" }="" ssp1.addeventlistener("gallerydata",="" ssplistener);="" adata="new" object();="" adata.onalbumdata="function(eventObject):Void" t_txt.html="true;" t_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.title;" t2_txt.html="true;" t2_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.description;" totalimgs="eventObject.data.totalImages;" ssp1.addeventlistener("onalbumdata",="" adata);="" sspt1.addeventlistener("onalbumdata",="" idata="new" idata.onimagedata="function(eventObject):Void" t3_txt.html="true;" t3_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.caption;" t4_txt.html="true;" t4_txt.htmltext="eventObject.data.title;" currentimgnumber="eventObject.data.number;" ssp1.addeventlistener("onimagedata",="" idata);="" sspt1.addeventlistener("onimagedata",="" function="" nextimage()="" if="" (currentimgnumber="" &lt;="" totalimgs)="" ssp1.nextimage();="" sspt1.nextimage();="" else="" ssp1.loadimagenumber(0);="" sspt1.loadimagenumber(0);="" previmage()=""&gt;= 2) {
		ssp1.previousImage();
		sspt1.previousImage();
	} else {
		ssp1.loadImageNumber(totalImgs-1);
		sspt1.loadImageNumber(totalImgs-1);
	}
}
nextImage_bttn.onRelease = function() {
	nextImage();
}
nextImage_bttn2.onRelease = function() {
	nextImage();
}
prevImage_bttn.onRelease = function() {
	prevImage();
}
var stylie:TextField.StyleSheet = new TextField.StyleSheet();
stylie.onLoad = function(success:Boolean) {
	if (success) {
	//nada
	}
};

stylie.load("stylie.css");
t2_txt.styleSheet = stylie;
stop();
&lt;/thearr.length;&gt;