Finally upped some of my musical photography to flickr, in hopes of impressing the SXSW guys. I signed up to volunteer, and am hoping for either Photography or New Media, I’m not really looking for a free pass into the festival, I just want to work and offer my skills and knowledge to the betterment of this festival…I’ve always liked what those guys are all about, and would love to work with anyone that offers what they do, even if it’s free work. There was a saying that came up on tumblr the other day, work for free or full price, never for cheap, so I’m more than happy to work for free for a festie such as SXSW.
edit: didn’t make the cut this year, but did receive a helpful pdf with tips and pointers for shooting live events…which I will share with you all right here : Tips_Tricks_for_SXSW_Photo_Crew
And 2009 is finally over, was it a weird year for you too?
With the welcoming of 2010, I have left my employers and new friends in CA, and have moved to Austin, TX. A better opportunity had presented itself to me in the time of searching, and I couldn’t resist, in fact, an overwhelming sense of purpose led me to my move, and keeps me excited and enthusiastic about the future of my being, and the future of my work.
To all of those at Impulse One and 15 Rose, I hope for the best, and know you will do well with what you’re trying to do, and I am always available for help if you ever need it.
Stay tuned for more, now reporting from Austin, TX, in the year 2010…and beyond.
I use WordPress a lot, I usually recommend it to my clients for any site as it’s easy to use, easy to manage, and very easy to set up. Whenever I set up a new install of WordPress I also install a small collection of plug-ins that I’ve found to be essential in my work.
I use flickr for photo sharing just because of the sheer amount of people on flickr, and it easily syncs with most other services, and especially with this plug in. It allows you to set and organize all your photos on flickr, and then those changes can be seen on your blog.
If you have a google account, then you should be using analytics on your site, with this plug in you can simply enter your anayltics tracking code and you’re done, everything else is taken care of.
If you twitter, and this really only applies if you do, you can tweet from your blog, or blog from your twitter, a lot of features makes this handy for tweetheads.
Simplest way to set a site up for mobile browsers, it can detect and change the CSS depending on the user’s browser, and comes with a collection of mobile ready themes.
Let me know if there’s any plug-ins your WP blog can’t live without.
We finally closed the deal on http:/ineed.headshotenergyshot.com, we’ve been liquidating our own product online at 80% off the retail price, and it almost worked, we had some good momentum, but then we failed to delivery…literally. Shipping problems on top of the inventory problem that put us in this mess in the first place made these last 6 months a very tiring liquidation campaign, and now we are finally done with that.
And I breathe a sigh of relief, but only for a moment, I’ll feel great when they’re all shipped and accounted for, and I won’t get another, “I ordered sometime in july, just wondering wtf?” We’re still going through lost orders and backtracking all the shipments to make sure everyone gets their package, but we’re no longer taking any more orders, surprisingly enough we managed to get rid of them all(through several different efforts).
We dropped off a few pallets here at the 15 Rose for awhile, and that turned into an interesting experiment. Leaving them out, then encouraging people to take as much as they want, worked well for the first round of pallets. Three pallets sat in our breezeway for one month before they were taken by the locals willing to grab a few, we ordered three more pallets and they lasted only 4 days, I don’t really know how that happened.
Dogtown now has a new park, and it is siiiiick. Opening day was a madhouse, but it was awesome to see how much this place meant to all the skaters in the area, they really respected the place and each other. It’s comforting to see how well people thrive when placed in an environment where they can be themselves without judgment from society, I guess that’s just the way all of Venice is.
I managed to shoot a bit of random footage throughout the day/night, and did remember to record at least one song all the way through, allowing me to make a music video of the event! Reminded me of the lake video, and makes me think I should make more music videos of party footage, they’re might be a niche market for that somewhere.
and this is for you jimmy:
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One of the things that I consistently enjoy about living here in Venice is the art that is living around me. And one of the most dynamic and evolving pieces is the Venice Art Walls. These are a few panoramas I’ve put together, and I really liked how they turned out, photomerge in photoshop can easily put these together, for anyone wondering how to.
Finally got around to fixing some of the graphical/style elements of the HeadShot Blog and our Impulse One Blog. Both were in need of some tweaking, so check ‘em out and let me know what you think of the progress so far.
I’m now in the process of learning adsense, because we don’t actually have any money to pay for adwords, so let’s see if there’s anything to placing unobtrusive text ads on our blogs. I’ve started by testing a few banners on iNeed while it’s still operating. Next I’ll learn to start placing it unobtrusively on all of our blogs, and then to any other blog that I make in the future that may need it, seems to be the thing to do these days.
Currently testing out a few adsense plug-ins, but nothing’s really standing out as a useful solution yet, maybe I’ll find it out there, and then actually post that plug-in article I’ve been working on, but that’s all in the future, unless your reading this now, then it may be in the present or past, or may not have happened at all, the unknown has yet to decide, or has it already been done….ooooeeeeeooooeeeeeeeuuuuu…..
When I ordered my latest pair of Pirate Sandals, Kevin threw in a few CardHippie business cards as well, and I thought it was an awesome idea when I saw it, after a little more searching, I found this helpful DIY thanks to Eco Etsy. So I went about the following steps sand now have a fresh new recycled card, I feel good about using my trash for something useful, I have a hard time throwing anything away, so it helps if I can make use of some of the things I keep around.
Step 1: Make Design
Obviously you need to start with you design, you want to remember that you’re making a stamp, so you can focus on clearer letters, thicker lines, making sure it’s a very clean and legible, because the stamp can leave a thick blob of ink on too fine of a design, smudging your design and leaving you upset.
Step 2: Order Stamp
You can do your own research if you want, I went with Ideal 300 from Rubber Stamp Champ because for some reason or another I thought I needed a self inking stamp, upon receiving my stamp and making my first round of cards, I can say that I will order a HandStamp once this one dries up on me, the self inking is nice for doing a lot of cards at once, but its hard to control the precision of the stamp and how much ink is being transfered, also you can’t change the color of the ink. So I would recommend going with a traditional hand stamp for something that will last longer, then again, if you plan on changing you card design every so often then it doesn’t really matter either way, order what you think is easiest for what you have in mind.
Step 3:Draw, Stamp, Cut
Draw your outlines, stamp within those outlines, and cut according to those outlines.
You’re done, in 3 steps you have a never ending supply of business cards(as long as you have some form of thin cardboard material lying around).
Let me know how it works for you, and if you know any place I should be ordering my stamps from.
Some minor visual fixes and suddenly a site can turn feel so much better. I finally got back to cleaning up the visual flaws that were bothering me on 15roseave.com, and added some new functionality as well.
Re-worked the header,
added a global translation plug-in,
polished the social sidebar and now it includes the recent tweets,
Made the reservation button a fixed tab, and easy to understand,
and did a complete overall to the Rooms & Rates page, as well as the room pages themselves.
The wall is getting some action,
and I was finally able to write a few posts for the experiences.
And using the wonderful Twitter Tools plugin I have a tweet digest reporting all the tweets of the day, which is actually quite useful as I’m using the 15 rose twitter to RT any and all awesome things happening in the Venice/Santa Monica Area, so follow us if that’s your thing.
Head over and check out 15roseave.com sometime, let me know what you think. And if your looking for a place to stay in California, well, you know where you can go…
A small touch up, made the ‘1′ more like a ‘1′, fattened some of the limbs, and took away the “ave” in place of a rose. The change came about when making Scotty’s business card, and he asked if I could change the logo and make the ‘1′ look more like a ‘1′…
So, we made another product site for Chompers Pet Snacks. The thing about our “sites”, is that they’re more of online brochures. I’ve always felt we needed something a little more dynamic, and a little more up-to-datable, and something for all of our brands. So I did what any other person of the internet would do, made a new sub-domain, installed a fresh copy wordpress, found an appropriate theme, & modified it. Now we have blog.impulse-one.com as our repository of updates for Impulse One. We’ve always needed a news section, or a place for press releases for all of our products, and this site should act as that.
Still plenty of work to do on it, but the framework is in place, and that’s what matters at the moment, the graphical fixes and extended features will come in time, but for now I’m focusing on the filling it with some content.
Thought we were just a beverage company supplying you with ENERGY and health? WRONG! We also love dogs, so much so that we’re making the best dog snacks available. Chompers is our newest product line with a certain demographic in mind…dogs. So are you a dog, then you just try Chompers, if you have a dog, then you should get it some Chompers. We’re working to get the product into stores now, check the updates on Impulse One to find out the latest information on any and all of our products.
I wrote the html and css for the site, and used LivePipe, a handy little javascript/css solution for the rollover tabs on the “Products” page.
