Having visited the royal academy to see the David Hockney exhibition I have been lured into buying a brand new iPad. Delivered on the 16th by a grumpy delivery man bemoaning his 50 extra deliveries that day, it’s delights are becoming more and more apparent.
It was bought in response to inspiration found at hockneys show and I quickly downloaded the brushes app to rekindle my art flow. My head has been so stuck in business the last 2 years no art has been produced, but my love of the digital and the light and beauty achieved by hockneys iPad drawings has got me going. Next step is to regularly find time to draw then try printing some of my iPad drawings with my big printer.
The other show that has inspired me is imaging in focus at the nec in Birmingham. Since having my stall at Shrewsbury market I have been regularly asked to take photos of new traders for press releases. For this I invested in a decent flash that can be pointed up and bounced to give good lighting. I have always been interested in lighting without ever finding a good source of learning material to inspire me. As soon as I walked in to the focus exhibition a flash American photographer with a beautiful model was explaining the principals of split, butterfly and Rembrandt lighting techniques. Just hearing this language has helped my google searching and found some great blogs that have made me get my lights out and do some still life and portrait photography. I haven’t much room at home so I took the opportunity when asked to take my flash lights to Shrewsbury school theatre and demonstrated the various lighting techniques to a group of boys. Some of the portrait photos using the lights are stunning and I am planning to do more if I can find the space to do it. Another plan is to develop my outdoor lighting kit range. Let us see where these new toys will land me!
Teased into the world of ipad and a flash of inspiration
Using my Android HTC Desire’s internet connection with my powerbook
When staying in Travel lodge type hotels while transporting my kids to far flung universities I was always annoyed by the gateway charges they apply to internet connections. I thought naively that going back to BT at home would give me loads of free roaming access on BT openzone but so far although I can access it at home wherever I have stopped on my travels there have been no openzones in sight for my mac to latch on to.
Since getting my first smart phone with with bells and whistles all you can eat data I could access the internet on it but hankered after my expensive mac connecting too.
One alone stay in a hotel in Bournemouth with too much time to kill and suffering extreme internet connect frustration I started googling on my phone things like “How do I use my HTC Desire’s web connection with my mac”. With useful google searches like this it took me a lot of ‘going round the houses’ on the small screen on my phone to get anywhere.
But I am a google rottweiller and a patient one at that on a mobile phone. After a few blind alleys I found PdaNET – a free download that I downloaded to my phone. I tethered it to my mac as a disc drive to my mac and copied the software across and installed on mac and phone. Joy oh joy the connection worked and my frustration collapsed as iplayer worked seamlessly on my mac. No dodgy dongle subscription, no rip off hotel fee and no bt openzone, the PdaNET software icon waits patiently next to skype status symbol in the top right of the screen for the next time I plug my phone into my mac.
Javascript slide shows to replace flash on cms site
As a visual man of a certain age I have grown up with flash – the visual side and not programming. I approached actionscript like that red kite I remember not wanting to come and be photographed (kicking and screaming (with claws!)). However in times past I did have to write a little action script – an interactive cd demanded buttons that knew where to go when pressed and when to play this movie or that. I also remember batch files and msdos, so thinking about it, I have touched a programming of a sort.
When I was asked to build a cms website I was lucky as I was working in the voluntary sector and someone else was asked to do it with me. Google had been invented as well! The other chap was very keen at the start and came up with a variety of options. We agreed Drupal was a headache, companies were wanting £1000′s for cms and blogs not customisable enough. He found a Microsoft open source codeplex project and the downloadable my web pages starter kit which has a very custom able skin file that accepts html I understand and style is controlled by cms, which is easy. Because of the drip drip effect of my past programming experience I could get my head around this, while the other chap found himself too busy to spend the time needed to get any sain head round this kind of stuff.
As I have said before I have developed many websites using this cms system and was able to adapt it to include membership logins and connect it to a members database, (www.vanetwork.co.uk) and all clever things like that. Not much programming from me though but a lot of google, reading and copy and paste. The skill is knowing what to copy and paste and where.
Artists have asked for fading slide shows on their pages and I have resorted to my old friend called flash to implement them like this at www.sculpturelogic.co.uk.
Now that is ok until the customer wants to change the images. They don’t have a flash editor or the skills to create a new slide show. The main idea of cms is that once designed I can leave the customer in control of the content and pics. So now I’ve been playing with getting javascript to work with the cms and be easily editable by the end user (with a little training) and no software except access to the website needed.
I knew I could copy and past some javascript into html blocks in the cms – I did it for the members page at the www.vanetwork.co.uk site. This was a self contained block of code that I was able to cut and paste into the right parts so it worked well enough.
Recently looking for simple slide show examples the best ones had code blocks that referred to external javascript files. I could not get this system to work at all. I tryed to place the files in this place or that but the page code wouldn’t or couldn’t find them. Then I tried pasting the code from each of the 3 files into 1 html black and hey it worked — cool and am now trialing it on www.jleventon.co.uk site so she can easily upload images in the cms and then easily add links to the image in the html block.
A Brand New Digitor Web Start
WordPress tells me to start to blog – it is a blog I want – I reallised that after downloading and installing Joomla last night and going through various web headaches and dark alleyways! Iam getting too old to learn new stuff and I like things simple but can’t resist a web challenge. I’ve got the hang of basic html and copy and pasting clever javascript that tart up a html page up. Just look at www.getthepicture.so (not somalia but something else or sodit or (whatever!)) and see a basic html page with some clever menu stuff and slide show got from google searching. Also I’ve got the hang of designing a cms site using another free download – see www.jleventon.co.uk , www.benchart.org.uk and www.sculpturelogic.co.uk this lets the website owners edit there site themselves but also get the website look they want. Anyway I have settled on WordPress for a bloggy website and now its up to me to post post post!
Posted in Musings, Web thoughts
Tagged cms, html, javascript, joomla, Websites, wordpress
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