Wordcamp LA 2011 — September 12th

Looking forward to great talks at Wordcamp LA this year. Here are some of the sessions:

• The Third WordPress
• BuddyPress 101
• Information Architecture
• Mobile Theme Checklist
• WordPress Multisite
• Theming for the Massses
• Anatomy of a high volume, cloud-based WordPress architecture
• Design, SEO and Selling WordPress
• 170 Radio Stations: WordPress at Scale

WordCamp San Francisco 2011

Looking forward to a weekend of WordPress!

WordCamp San Francisco was awesome. Word…

WordCamp San Francisco was awesome. WordPress 3.0 looks great and TwentyTen seems to be a beautiful theme to replace Kubrick. Wp-commerce, intense debate, and other useful plugins were presented and there was a session on plugin security. Nice!

Put your wordpress blog on a flash drive with xampp

Of all the good things we can do with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drive, I think running a website is one of them. This is a perfect solution for web designers who need to cart along a whole bunch of designs to show potential clients.

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Running a website or blog on a USB flash drive – http://www.modernstreet.com

Drupal Education and E-learning from Packt Publishing

What I am reading now? Drupal Education and E-learning from Packt Publishing. This book is very detailed. I am working my way through it right now and able to implement my application step by step with the information from this book. My review will follow soon!!

UCLA Marching Band White Rabbit Rehearsal

Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus

Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus

I had the opportunity to hear Lance Loveday speak at Web Design World in Seattle. I am very interested in learning how to present hard numbers which support the role of web design. Last December, I created an HTML email which linked to a branded microsite containing success stories and a quiet request for donations. The return that year was 40% above the previous year. I went back to study the campaign from the previous year and compared it to what we did in December of 2007. I had alot of data but did not know how to interpret it until I read this book. I learned from Lance how important it is to have branded landing pages, simple targeted navigation and limit choices for the website visitor (in our case, the donor). Now that I have the words and strategies to explain the success to upper managment, I can also see the areas of the campaign I can improve even more, such as redesigning our form on our donation page and targeting the metrics that truly matter. This book also provides information for understanding web analytics and how they tie into business objectives. The book is well organized and the color screenshots are helpful to visual learners. The best part is now I have business language to sell the importance of what I do that adds value to online campaigns, whereas before all I had was intuition and luck.

Expression Engine Book by Packt Publishing

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

I have been looking at Content Management systems for the last year and love wordpress as a blogging platform and CMS. After reading blogs from other web designers who use WordPress for small sites, they mentioned using Expression Engine for larger, more complex projects. I became very interested in this platform and searched for a book to help me learn how to install it, administer and design for it. This book turned out to be the answer! The book is well organized with lots of screenshots, code examples, and sidenotes. The book is highly detailed with step by step instructions. It is targeted at web designers and marketing professionals so I felt that it gave me the right amount of information for the my level of experience. The book answered many questions that come to the surface such as what are the server requirements and how much space my site going will take up. The CSS presented was basic and enough to get me started to style the site with my company’s branding. The book covers the tasks necessary to back up my website and how to upgrade when the time comes. The last part of the book contains exercises that helped me dig in and actually test out the code. I highly recommend this book.

Building Websites with Expression Engine 1.6

The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/arts/music/13horn.html?ex=1376280000&en=03cc17333a91881e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.