Donaleen Saul – editor, writer, teacher and all around lovely person – just went live with her web site!

www.donaleensaul.com

It’s a custom WordPress site that Donaleen will be able to update herself. Isn’t it beautiful?

Donaleen has a lot of videos on her site and to get the videos on the site, Donaleen created a YouTube account, then uploaded a variety of videos she had. YouTube compressed them for the web, then I went and grabbed the “embed” code (which is so handily generated by YouTube), placed them on her site and Wa-La! Media page completed! Easy peasy.

And the other cool thing about Donaleen having a YouTube account is that since Google purchased YouTube in 2006 it’s been making videos easier to find and makes having videos on your site more “relevant”. Have you noticed more videos popping up in search engine results? That’s why. So having videos on her site, makes her more “visible” on the web and gives her better ranking possibilities.

We just launched Boyd Sugiki’s web site!

http://www.boydsugiki.com

This completes the Boyd, Lisa, Two Tone Studio trinity
Pam did the Splash page fader in javascript and the sliders are CSS with the main images in iframes.

Boyd, Lisa and Two Tone all have distinct individual graphic layouts, but similar structural features. Pam & I put together a “package” with artists in mind to be able to showcase their work. Basically, there are 5 rotating images on the Splash/Opening page, then a Portfolio section that is broken down into 3 sub-sections with 10 images in each section. The text pages are Bio, Galleries, Calendar and Contact. The client can update the text pages themselves, but we edit the slide shows. Of course, we’ll modify the basic “package” to suit individual needs.

Everyone has been really happy with the results and it’s nice to have a bit of a formula to offer our clients.

Last week we launched the web site for Seattle glass artist, Lisa Zerkowitz, www.lisazerkowitz.com

Lisa’s portfolio section has slide shows of her beautiful work, there are also Gallery, About, and Calendar sections.

Pam custom coded the site and the sliders are CSS with the main images in iframes.

Ritama Design also created the web site for the production studio Lisa and her husband Boyd own, Two Tone Studios, and we currently finishing up the solo site for Boyd.

Lisa & Boyd have a lovely sense of uncluttered design in their creations and all of their web sites reflect that. They are also a gigantic pleasure to work with.

The pictures the iPhone takes are pretty amazing, I just wish there was a flash!

The phone takes a printable 7 x 5 high-res image – not bad when you remember those first smeary pics a phone would take.

My friend Tom gave me some Turkish hazelnuts fresh off his tree (he is in Clear Lake, WA, not in Turkey!) and these things reminded me of tribbles (remember the tribbles from Star Trek – the original? The Trouble with Tribbles? Of course you do..)

Anyhoo, these hazelnuts are gorgeous before they are harvested. They look dangerous, but the spikes are soft. I took a pic of them from about a foot away and it was, as expected, clear:

Then I got about an inch away for a detail, thinking the image would get fuzzy, but no! It’s completely in focus:

I’m impressed. Are you impressed? I’m impressed.
And those hazelnuts were yummy.

Well, you can! Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, John Mueller and many more Google Engineers check this forum:

http://moderator.appspot.com/#16/e=c9

Ask a Google engineer
This is your chance to interview us! Feel free to ask anything from “How many cafeterias are there?” to “How would you sort 1 million 32-bit integers in 2MB of RAM?”

This is the link I went to first:

http://twitter.com/JohnMu/statuses/933682726