A lot of web designers and developers have really wanted to test out this neat little script newly released and have been slightly irritable they can’t demo it right from the site or download a trial copy. The download is about 1.24 mb, the script is sleek and tiny and made for people who seriously develop web sites.

Everything I love about this script points a big arrow at what I and many colleagues truly hate about most CMS scripts. Content Management Systems usually come along with a lot of bulky “Wiki” stuff. Every time I go to a site and there are a billion unused boxes waiting for content and it looks like crap, I go, “wow what another lovely Joomla (insert Wiki here – worst – PHP Nuke) installation.”

Joomla and a lot of Wiki’s are hard to keep updated especially by an uninformed client, worse some of them completely lose their formatting after an update and you have to go back in and try to remember all the settings it had before (shudders at Word Press).

Then there is hacking. Word Press and Joomla have been heavily hacked which lead one hosting provider tell me, “You’re site has been hacked – oh’ are you using Joomla? That gets hacked all the time.”

There are expensive CMS solutions like Adobe Contribute which installs on the clients computer and allows them access. I’ve used this extensively as my last employer bought fifty copies of it for staff. I spent a lot more time fixing pages that had been mangled by Contribute then time saved because people were able to update their own content.

Contribute produced more waste code then Front Page and eventually the page would just break because of the junk and we would go in and clean the page code. Still though, from an SEO standpoint and being a clean code freak – I hated Contribute.

I bought Perch a little worried – I couldn’t try it out first.

First Installation of Perch. You have to be able to create a blank database and assign a user to that database. This isn’t so simple for everyone. New people might not know what localhost is or how to setup the empty database.

I thought the explanation of how to do this pretty sparse in the directions.

Over all the support documents have lots of photos.

When you first log in it will probably give you a warning <!> After you enter your key it doesn’t recognize it and for a heart stopping moment you think it’s all gone wrong.

Go to Perch.com and after logging into their web site you have to register the site that will be using the key. Afterwards it works just fine.

2. How it works

Perch works a little differently than the CMS solutions I’ve used. I needed a form where staff entered weather information. They needed to post if the campus was open or closed, if all the campuses were closed or just a few and finally they wanted a box they could post comments in.

Locally in Dreamweaver I opened the templates folder then content and renamed a random template to “weather.html”. The template is in basic html, put the stuff you want perch to make fields for in <perch> tags. And everything else just as you normally would. So in my template I have

<p class=”date”><perch:content id=”date” type=”date” label=”Date” format=”d M Y” required=”true” /></p>

This date staff can edit it is in a perch tag.

But I also wanted some elements that the staff could not see like a snowflake image and a heading that read “Weather Alert”. Those I put in regular vanilla HTML. When staff go into perch they can only see fields indicated with perch tags – nothing else.

Here is the final result: (IMG) It shows the image and my heading that were hidden from the staff.

It is very easy to set up other users and customize Perch by changing out the Perch Logo with your own. It comes with many templates to look at so you can build your own. (The makers of Perch assume you will make your own – and the templates are meant to be examples).

Here are some extra code snipets you may find useful:

http://allinthehead.com/retro/342/five-interesting-ways-to-publish-with-perch

(Note: I am not affiliated with the authors of Perch in any way – in fact I’m in a different country. This is simply my opinion so please don’t sue me or send me hate mail. – thx)

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It started with a few table scraps and watching local felines. I first befriended a large black tom cat we called Tesla. he was a big loner with lots of charisma - which explained the black kittens that sprinkled the neighborhood. One day however a really wild bobbed tail cat delivered a batch of weened kittens at my door step and looked thoughtfully at me like she was trying to sum up whether or not I would look after her babies.

I probably have that “I’m a sucker” tattooed to my forehead.

Her kittens were black, two were siamese (seal point and regular), grey and tabby. They were very wild. A couple of girls arrived to round out the group. They were both Russian Grey.

The Russian grays were interesting, obviously sisters one was handicapped severely. I called them dumb and dumber. Dumber is severely cross eyed, she has trouble with hearing and smelling and is most likely infertile. Her sister leads her to food and basically cares for her.

As the year wore on the males of the group, a black kitten and a siamese kept themselves further and further from the colony eventually leaving altogether. I noted that only the females remained. Also I noted that occasionally other cats would attempt to join the colony and be run out. They also defended their territory.

Dumb (or dummy as we call her) was totally wild - but she liked it when I talked to her and she would roll on her back and purr. Eventually she let me pet her and then she showed off to the rest of the colony how special she was! Dumb is having kittens tonight, and I know how people go on about how wild cats are evil etc. etc. I can’t help but be excited.

I am hoping the kittens will be kept close enough that we can tame them down and find them homes.

The cats act cooperatively and really aren’t “loners” the way a lot of people think of them. They have a very distinguished social order within the colony.

Back where I used to live I had several stray cats hanging around which I trapped and had spayed/neutered. I would do that with these but they are really way too wild except for Dummy - She’ll probably be getting spayed if she hangs around.

photos soon!

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Something helpful to think about if you’re a beginner to any sort of design process is to have a destination in mind when you start. Starting out try to build and create projects for yourself. The point where you can make “a lot of money” is when you’ve done it for years for free and stumbled through and learned your own tricks and become proficient, fast and always have reliable professional results.

Identify what you’re saying.

Design is either a Verb, an Adjective, or a Noun. What are you designing? In photography you’re either capturing something in the moment, an event, i.e. a VERB, or maybe a feeling - happy, beautiful, serene, or maybe a Noun - ‘this is a photograph of my basement.’

I personally divide up web pages into two different categories. Brochure and Informational. That may sound like a contradiction - I mean isn’t a brochure there to inform? Most brochure’s act as a hook or elaborated upon ad - not normally as fully functional information systems. I usually design college web pages - and usually the people looking through them want an answer to a specific question. They don’t want to know our mission statement or how it’s cool we do so much with alternative energy — they want Dr.So & So’s phone number so they can get some paperwork in the mail or what is on the Fall schedule.

On a lot of those, “What not to do with web pages sites” like sites that suck and so forth - they leave out the main idea — WHAT is the purpose of the webpage they’re ripping apart. Sure it takes more than four seconds to load but it’s SELLING a product, trying to entice, making the person on the other end feel something. when I put together nice brochure type web pages I use a lot of photographs, imagery and often link out to even whole photo albums, video, slide shows, photosynths - etc. Even in my text for those type of pages I’ll put dashed lines underneath keywords I have a photo of. So if I say we have a 300ft barn - there will be a photo of that particular barn when they click that key word.

http://www.crowder.edu/SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY/agriculture/index.htm
http://www.crowder.edu/SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY/agriculture/vet-tech/index.htm

I typically try to deliver a feeling whether I’m taking a photograph or developing any other sort of graphic design. There are a lot of different approaches and looking back through your own work and asking if you’re a Verb, Noun or Adjective will help you discover where your design strengths are.

“So what makes you think you’re so great stupid?”

I’ve gotten that - usually overheard it or you know - found people saying it the hard way…. but I have a good answer for it.

I do it.

And so can you. I go out and I take a lot of photographs. I wear my camera into odd places where it’s horribly unfashionable and at all times of most of the day/night and I’m usually never without it. With my curly unruly hair and no fashion sense when I dress - people stare at me anyway so eh’ who cares. I read the manual when I’m waiting on dental appointments. I built web sites for free for years for people.

peace - 7

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I walked to the bookstore today with my heart hammering in my chest. It was one of those moments I KNEW would change my life forever. A moment that I didn’t think would ever come. A time that I had prepared for, practiced and studied for and there it was - I was going to pick up a Canon 50D with two outstanding lenses.

[Note to non-geeks... Canon XSI which I have been shooting with is a premium best selling DSLR (which means the lenses come off and are sold separately - the 'D' in DSLR is for Digital) The 50 D is a higher model, more expensive and used by professional photographers (sometimes)]

It’s a bit crazy but true - I’ve known for a couple of months that the Canon 50D was arriving after lobbying for a college camera - and I didn’t feel quite worthy of just THAT much camera. After all I had once scorned rich horrible people who could carelessly wrap a 50D around their neck and not even take the time to read the manual and say something like, “yeah I guess it takes okay photographs.” *SCORN. *HORROR.

My friend Norm Pixel could make a camera out of a shoe box and take gorgeous photographs - because HE is a photographer - for real. In a few decades if I practice everyday - maybe I might come close to that expertise - but for now I’ll have to make do with reading magazine articles and Internet tutorials.

So after the 50D was properly charged, strap put into place and I had read the first part of the manual it was time to try it out. For a real test I wanted to see how it held up against my old true blue EOS XSI 12 Megapixel model.

The Lenses:
Sigma Macro on Both
The 50D is equipped with a Sigma 1.4f, 30mm
The EOS XSI is equipped with a Sigma 2.8f 50mm
Both cameras are set to full auto - they both meter relatively the same. F-stops for the images were coming in around 3.5. Both image modes for color were set to “faithful” (i.e. Canon’s word for boring.)
So without boring you with more…

For all photos visit my Flickr Set

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Let me start out by saying that everyone I know apparently has swine flue. We’re fighting the pandemic with mass panic apparently. I didn’t know anything about the flue (I definitely don’t watch the news) and kept hearing people complaining of contracting or knowing people who had contracted swine flue 1918 style.

Arriving at the YMCA they are taking every precaution so I’m trying to run and some idiot is spraying his treadmill down with acid. The fan blows it back on everybody. The stuff is so toxic it says - do not get on skin, do not get near eyes - causes immediate blindness, fatal if swallowed. Personally I rather get the flue then poisoned but that’s just me.

It was a rough week as dental incompetence has been taking a toll on my good nature. Discovering several holes in my aching tooth AFTER I had it filled, I went to a new dentist to fill said holes — he said he thought they could have been there previously for, “who knows how long.” Okay - it could have been the idiot that worked on my tooth two months ago who I had specifically paid to fill that tooth - or the last time I had a filling which was 26 years ago. Somehow my dental hygienist miss the two gaping massively painful holes in my tooth for years. Let me think it over. The tooth after having been filled now TWICE still hurts. I’m sure something still has been missed.

I get sick with the numbing stuff they use and it doesn’t work right on me so they have to use horse sized amounts of it. They didn’t listen so I ended up getting three rounds of shots and still feeling them drilling out my tooth. Ouch. I was sick the rest of the day and they said they would need to use something different in the future that it didn’t work (really? Cause it seems like I SAID that when I went in….)

On the plus side someone sent me expresso truffles this week at work and they are GOOD.

With my federal return money I did something novel and bought a couple of camera lenses (how predictable.) I have been studying “bokeh” in photography - making the negative space sparkle and have nifty circular aberrations. I discovered that ‘bokeh’ usually doesn’t happen with really GOOD lenses, it’s an optical flaw - I needed some lenses with issues.

Also Benji left a comment that he was photographing with a tilt-shift lens which I found fascinating and I wanted to try. So with a limited budget ($300 for all) and wanting Bokeh and really sweet tight clear shooting I ordered two very inexpensive lenses:

Lens Baby EF 2.0 with the wide angle lens set and the macro lens set
Lens baby is a tilt-shift lens - so it’s a bit like slinky, you can manually push it in different directions, to the side, up, down. It has one spot of clear focus and everything else tends to be blurry. I ordered the mount ($75) and two lens sets Macro & Wide Angle (about $150). Lenses don’t come with the mount so to use it - one has to buy lenses separate.

As I understand it they have a new model now and I bought the old obsolete one - meh.

Canon 50mm 1.8f (around $100.00)

This lens makes the foreground REALLY super sharp and ultra focused while making the background blurry and soft focused. In Macro mode for flowers or something you can get within 1.5 foot but it’s more of a portrait lens and used a lot for weddings.

A note about lens price - it’s usually all about the glass. Canon has an SL series that is coveted for sharpness and quality for images. It uses premium optics.

The lenses I bought are pretty much crap by most “real” photography standards.

They have aberrations, the Canon 1.8f is housed in a cheap plastic flimsy body it had a ton of bad comments about it on Amazon as people said it wouldn’t focus right - I knew it was a 50/50 chance of getting a decent lens when I ordered this one. It has no ‘zoom’ or auto stabilization. On the Lens-Baby, forget auto focus, you have to know what you’re doing to get this lens system to work. You figure out your own f stop and drop an aperture into place. I know you photographers reading this are going, “WHAT? drop an aperture into place?” I’ll explain further below. Over all though - even though the quality on these may be questionable - they are just a heck of a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I’ve had shooting in a long time and I might just go as far to say that these will no doubt become staple lenses used more than my monster SL lens.

My sample photographs here were taken on a very windy rainy horrible day. They have not been touched up or had the exposure tweaked in Photoshop. These are as is shots and not cropped, not altered in any way. A few are mine - a few Highlander. He also said the Lens Baby was a lot of fun to shoot with.

First Lens - the Lens-Baby 2.0

You push on the accordion body of the Lens-Baby to achieve focus. I used a live view finder for this - but ultimately returned to looking through the view finder window to get an accurate idea of sharp focus. Below is the wide angle attachment. HIghlander took this shot with the background crisp and clear and the foreground blown out.

Now lets look at the little plastic bodied Canon lens and how well it shot. I was frankly dubious about this lens - it’s light weight - a bad sign for a good glass lens. It’s flimsy and plastic and luckily I had bought the UV protector because cleaning the recessed glass would have been problematic. BUT — it takes some nice shots.

Using my Canon EOS I set my dial to AV - that allows me to set my aperture manually. I set it to the f1.8 which is why I bought the darn thing so I wasn’t about to shoot at any other f-stop. With the camera set on AV it calculates the speed itself.

I liked the photos I had from this lens, it was shooting black and white really nicely. So next I wanted to try color and push it a bit, in the camera settings I set a custom mode, upped the sharpness, upped contrast, upped saturation and pushed the color tone over a bunch. I frankly had no idea what I would get! Above is the result, I like the sharpness and the bright colors. No Photoshop!

Back to Lens-Baby

The Lens Baby really makes a person think, it’s very old school and at first I was groaning thinking - am I ever going to get this to actually work? My first couple of shots were miserable. But then slept on it and realized what I was doing wrong. The next day I started out with my Canon 1.8f lens. Shot it on completely automatic mode, it was coming in at f5.6 speed 500. That determined the settings I would use for the Lens Baby.

The lens baby requires you to drop in the aperture. They’re like black bits of heavy paper dropped into the lens mount. They are magnetic so you can get them out again. When I realized I manually had to put the aperture in the mount, screw the lens on, then auto focus the hole thing after having figured the speed and f-stop — I was a bit dismayed but it turned out not to be so difficult. I set the f-stop and speed from my auto settings like I stated above, put in the corresponding aperture to my f-stop (they’re labeled clearly according to f-stop) and pushed around on the accordion lens mount for focus.

Below are some shots with the Lens Baby on both Macro and the Wide Angle:

This isn’t the best photo - too many grays and the contrast isn’t great but look at the negative space - getting my beautiful bokeh which is what I wanted in this lens.

Next Thursday I get in my Canon 50D at work for taking web site photos. As a full time webmaster now I don’t usually have time to work on this site or too many of my side projects but I’ll still post in every so often. I hope to provide a review of my work equipment when it arrives.

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It has been a busy week - first off I have a new computer thanks to Highlander. So I am now mobile on a new Macintosh laptop.

I started my very first 365 project of Crowder College. Each day of work I’m challenging myself to take a decent photograph. I am taking various challenges and suggestions. This next week I will be working with filters. While working on this project I came across a really talented photographer.

http://benjhaisch.com/blog/

His photography rules and I loved the timelessness he created by choosing smart focal points and using motion blur. Additionally they don’t look over touched up and the people are people colored, not green or yellow or some sad inbetween that I’ve suffered through looking at “professional” photographers portfolios of late.

I thought I would try to recreate some of his effect and was lucky enough to get snowed on in abundance on Saturday. We had a LAN part for ‘ Left 4 Dead’ a first person zombie shooter, the night previous and Highlander’s brother stayed over so I thrust him and Highlander outside and took a couple of shots from the doorway.

From Portraits

Highlander was super good to me this week so hats off to Highlander. He orchestrated a really successful LAN party here at the house and set it up himself. His brother and best friend showed up and they turned out to be very cool and everyone was nice enough to let my youngest son play the LAN game too and the fact they included him, even though he was little, meant a lot to me. It meant a lot to him too.

Then he let me sleep in Sunday morning and when I got up and meandered to the kitchen I found out it was clean, dishes going and he was teaching the little guy how to play a Star Trek card game. I was totally impressed!

Highlander hats off to you - you rule.

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Jazz hosted a Jurassic Party Saturday night that included “meat lovers” pizza and other meat eating reptile themes. It was her first ‘invite a friend over for a sleep over’ - wow she’s getting all grown up.

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Highlander surprised me with this really gorgeous diamond encrusted heart necklace this week Can you believe I’ve been bugging him for a whole year now? Time flies. <3

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We also took little guy fishing this weekend. It was nice and warm but windy. No fish yet - but we’re not giving up. Maybe next week we’ll find a better fishing spot.

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A new Photoshop clone hit the net today that can be used — get this — from your web browser.  Aviary.com emerged from one of my very favorite sites on the planet worth1000.com.  Aviary offers not just a Photoshop clone but many other nifty applications with others in development.   Photoshop and it’s associated applications can set a person back $2,000.   There are two other free Photoshop clones that aren’t bad Gimp and Paint.Net jump to mind but with the ease of use of simply visiting the site with a browser I think Aviary.com will be hard to beat.

With Google Applications and now this - who needs a hard drive full of applications?

The change for me started at work where I chose not to have a large desktop computer.  Instead of have a thin notebook computer with 4gb of RAM running Windows 7  (Yup, I like Windows 7 better then Vista and will cry when my copy expires).  I can take my notebook everywhere - if I want to - but I have all my files easily at hand no matter where I am at thanks to my Windows Home Server.

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Full Map
Highlander and I made a fast five mile hike today in Joplin. The weather - despite dire predictions - was nice and we even had a little bit of sunshine.

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Highlander and I have a new technology blog. We will be doing a wide number of things. Highlander will review technology products, software, and games. I am going to post quite a few tutorials.

This week we are on vacation but will be back soon

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