Mallard Ice Cream, a mainstay of Bellingham, WA, has a sparklie new web site!

www.mallardicecream.com

For the design, I used elements from the shop; metal siding and wood paneling are on the walls, the blue “splooch” is splattered on the front door, and the header mimics the outside signage. Overall, the site has a very distinctive look and ambiance, which, come to think of it, is a lot like Mallard.

Pam set up the site in Joomla, she created a blog for customers and is waiting for the web-cam to be set up (any day now!) so she can add it to the Menu page. Mallard has new flavors every day, so the web-cam will be of the Menu board so people can check to see what’s new in the shop before they come down. It’s also just fun to have a web-cam.

“The country of my affection lies just to the east…
I walk in the desert seeking a semblance of peace and always get that primal recognition that less is more.”
Jim Witty

My friend Jim Witty’s book just came out!
Meet Me In The Badlands – Exploring Central Oregon with Jim Witty

If you are in Oregon – you gotta get it! If you are traveling to/through Oregon, you gotta get it! Basically, you gotta get it – get it? Tons of trails and wonderful stories to go along with.

It’s just beautiful and I am so proud of him and his amazing family and friends for getting it finished. Jim died suddenly last year and didn’t get a chance to complete the book he had started. Close to a year after he left this planet, his book came out – it’s quite an accomplishment for his friends and family.

Go here to get the book: http://jimwitty.com/

Here’s some more info about Jim from the book’s web site:

Jim Witty wrote the Outings column for The Bulletin in Bend Oregon. In his articles, he took you with him on the trails, lakes, rivers and mountains of central Oregon. Jim’s unique writing style won him many fans. He wrote like he was: friendly, outgoing, enthusiastic and humorous. No wonder his readers felt like they knew him, even though they never met him.

After Jim’s untimely death in 2008, family and friends took it upon themselves to finish a project he was working on for years… to publish a book of his articles. With the help of The Bulletin and countless volunteers, this dream is a reality.

Jim wrote, “The country of my affection lies to the east…”

Meet Me In The Badlands is titled to give tribute to Jim’s favorite area in central Oregon. His spirit lives on in the Badlands.

Jim Witty was a son, brother, husband, father, friend, writer, musician, singer, lover of rock n’ roll, but most of all, a free spirit and a loving soul.

Drum roll pa-leeeeeze!

I finally finished the FAQ page for my site AND an additional page with all sorts of info about WordPress -  explaining the difference between wordpress.com & wordpress.org

Whoo-hoo!

Check ‘em out:

FAQ

WordPress.com & WordPress.org

This article is also on my FAQ page – but posting it here as a lot of people check out my blog for WordPress info.

WordPress.COM & WordPress.ORG

WordPress made its name as a blogging software. But WordPress has morphed into much more than that and along the way it has created some confusion as to what sort of features it offers and which WordPress is for the casual user and which WordPress  is for the web developer. Hopefully this article will help explain the differences between these two WordPress options.

With WordPress, you can just have a blog, or a web site, or, you have a WEB SITE with a BLOG on it, like my site does.

Since I don’t have all day to go into the difference betwixt a blog and a web site, go to these sites for further illumination if you desire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_site

True fact: a blog IS a web site – as it is a site on the web, see? But a blog is usually set up so the owner can update the content themselves on a frequent basis.

Having a blog on your web site will help keep the content fresh – notice how I post new info on mine every week or so? And Search Engines like seeing fresh content and will give your web site higher placement if you keep your blog updated, which will make it easier to find you on the internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

I love it!