My Little Impressions makes a replica of a child’s unique hand and footprints. These precious statues are then mounted in a choice of a shadow box or on granite. I redesigned and rebuilt this website using Wordpress so that the pages and pictures can be easily added and edited. Below you can see the before and after screenshots of the website design. I’m not that great of a designer (I think I just don’t have the patience for it), however I still think this turned out pretty good and it’s a huge step up from what it was before!

BEFORE

AFTER

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One is definitely blogging, I’m going to do my best to keep it up as often as possible again. The other is mostly just skills in everything I know how to do. I’m keeping up with things by finally finishing a site I did for my sister, which should hopefully be launching this week sometime if I can get all the new hosting figured out (her old host’s website was copyright 2002 and has a max of 40MB storage space… EEK).

Of course, my other side project would be updating this website, perhaps doing a design of my own and getting rid of this old creeky thing. I love how illustrations look and I think it would be cool to be do an illustration of myself to put somewhere in the new design. Unfortunately for me, my patience needs a little more work to take on a project that large – illustration is so time consuming! Perhaps I should just try an hour a day to start out and see where that gets me…

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I for one, though, will not take internet metering lying down.

The CRTC just decided to let your Internet Service Provider put a meter on your Internet.

Bell Canada and other big telecom companies can now freely impose usage-based billing on independent Internet Service Providers (indie ISPs) and regular consumers. Big Telecom companies are obviously trying to gouge consumers, control the Internet market, and ensure that consumers continue to subscribe to their television services.

This means we’re looking at a future where ISPs will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay more for less Internet.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO STOP INTERNET METERING

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I went to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Music of the Night performance on Friday night and was that ever amazing! If you’re in Vancouver, or are from Vancouver, and you’ve never been to a VSO performance, you are missing out! It’s unbelievable that you can get tickets for $25 a seat (and the sound quality is just as amazing as it would be from the $150 seats) and witness that kind of talent. It was definitely a time that I was thankful for my sense of hearing.

On Tuesday I finally got the rest of the pictures for one of the freelance projects I’ve been doing. Once I make some more last minute tweaks and add the new photos, then prepare to be amazed by the photography of Brendan Robinson! My other freelance project which consists of my first attempt at theming Wordpress, should be up soon too – so stay tuned!

This weekend I was house-sitting/dog-sitting for some people I know that live in the Dunbar area of Vancouver. Last time I stayed at their house in June I discovered something seriously cool and I forgot about it until today when I happened to drive by it again. I give you the darn coolest looking elementary school I’ve ever seen. Who WOULDN’T want to go to school when it looks like this?!

Okay so, the orange pylons kinda take away from the whole ambiance, but still pretty darn cool right? I’d go to that school! I didn’t get a good photo of the playground, however it looked pretty awesome too. That was until I discovered what made this whole thing not so cool. Deal-breaker = no swing set and no merry-go-round. WTF?! Why are playgrounds so boring and “safe” these days? Lame.

As a side note, I was gonna do this whole awesome post about the new Google Street View here in Canada, but then I got too busy and the rest of the blogosphere beat me to it. So instead, enjoy this cool post on things spotted in Toronto with Google Street View.

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This upcoming week at Toastmasters we have our Club Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contest. Originally it was so hard to get people to sign up as contestants and I even threw myself in as a contestant hoping to get the ball rolling. So now I am participating in the Table Topics contest and we have over 14 contestants between the two contests. Oh, of course some may drop out as they realize there’s no time to prepare a speech and such, but overall that’s still a good number!

I also need to get going on my regular speech projects again as I’ve only completed three and I’ve told myself I will have my CC and CL status by the end of the executive year. That means I have to do at least seven more speeches to get the CC and a few other projects for the CL as well. Writing a speech isn’t really a big deal for me, not really. It’s more about the topic to choose – what can I write a speech about that will keep others interested?

On the web side of things, I’m doing another set of demos for our hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. The downside is I’m terribly equipped in the audio department, so my next mission is to excellently equip myself and do those demos again, with better audio. I’d also like to find a way to make them more interesting, cause they’re pretty boring to watch. There’s got to be a way of doing them in a more captivating and fun way.

With the return of Autumn, comes the return of more time indoors – meaning that hopefully more work will get done. Despite the increased time indoors, I really do love Fall. Today I went for a bike ride around Stanley Park and what a lovely Autumn day it was. With that, I leave you with a photo of Siwash Rock along the Stanley Park Seawall.

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So firstly, with Google in the world, you could just smash the keyboard and not know how to spell anything and it would say “did you mean?” and you would say “why yes, I did mean that!”. No wonder all the young kids these days spell everything with 1-3 letters, they don’t need to know how to spell because Google is all-knowing!

Secondly, Google has added this feature that auto-suggests what you might be searching for, I’m assuming based on the most common things searched for under what you’ve typed in so far. So when I began typing “how to” it was interesting to see what North Americans are asking Google how to do. It’s also interesting to see the difference between what you get in the auto-suggest on google.com and google.ca.

Google.com
Americans #3 – how to get pregnant… you mean you don’t know?! REALLY???

Google.ca
Canadians #10 – how to roll a joint. Classic.

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As for Toastmasters, my first month as Club President has been okay however since it is summer we have some difficulties filling all the roles every meeting since many members go on vacation or would probably rather be outside in the nice weather. Once September hits I think the club activity will pick up again, which will be nice – and then I can really start pushing our goal for President’s Distinguished Club.

If you live on the internet as I do most of the time, you may have heard that web developers and designers of all kinds are finally fed up and cannot stay quiet anymore on the subject of Internet Explorer 6. Enough is enough!!! If you agree I suggest you join the campaign by adding an anti-IE6 icon to your online profile pictures in the very least (I’ve used mine on my twitter account). Here is an anti-IE6 image for your convenience in a large size so that you can scale it down to the size needed for your image.

Also, see below my example:

– Rebekah

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Photos from this year’s banquet can be found on the Burrard Toastmasters website.

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– Rebekah

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I finished the flash book Leigh had ordered for me, and the satisfying part of it is that I knew about 98% of what it taught. My first project is going to be a Netgenetix social photo gallery which Leigh wants me to treat as a real project with a project brief, a timeline, and deliverables. That should be interesting in terms of the timeline/deliverables, only because I’ll be working on it in my free time, not on a daily basis like a client project. Who knows what client work may fill up my time in the coming weeks?

I’ve come across some awesome design/development articles and pages in the past week that I’d like to share. Take a gander, I’m sure you’ll find at least one of them useful or inspiring!

• • Create an Image Rotator with CSS/jQuery
• • 40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icons
• • 26 Horizontal Websites for Inspiration
• • 20+ Brilliant List Styling Techniques
• • Meagan Fisher – An Inspiring Designer
• • The World’s Largest Free Textures Site
• • Run Several Versions of IE on your PC

… and you can see more of my cool website discoveries by following me on Delicious.

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When I prompted for advice or tips, a friend of mine asked me “what do you want it to do?”. So thinking of it from a functionality point of view, and then once that is decided, moving onto how it should look.

When I was in school, our portfolio class instructors told us our site should express our personalities, who we are, and what our strengths are. Thinking of it from this point of view I’m unsure of what I could design that would have “Rebekah” written all over it, short of the literal interpretation of that phrase.

So putting these two pieces of advice together I’m still working on it, and still at square one. My impatience with design doesn’t help me either. If anyone has any suggestions what-so-ever, PLEASE let me know! I’ll take any advice and tips I can get!

-Rebekah

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This means that the navigation on your website can now have dropdowns and flashy effects without sacrificing SEO. A good example of this is the Monitronics website. About a month ago they launched a new site built with DotNetNuke and the Solpart version 1.7.2 menu system. DotNetNuke’s Solpart menu system relies on JavaScript to run. In the past, this would have been strongly discouraged as with scripting disabled no menu items are visible, which equals bad for SEO. However, now that Google has spidered the new JavaScript menus they will appear in the Google cache and count toward SEO value for the site.

Yahoo’s cache is a little different in this case though. The main menu text is visible however without the drop downs. Yahoo has successfully cached the text rendered by the JavaScript but failed to read the JavaScript code itself therefore failing to spider the drop down menus and the menu links.

Even though Google spiders can now index JavaScript, this level of accomplishment is yet to be seen for Yahoo. Considering Google is Yahoo’s closest competitor I don’t see this being the case for long. In July 2006 a study showed that 43.7% of web users search with Google versus Yahoo at 28.8% of web users. This means we aren’t home free with JavaScript and SEO quite yet but it does mean a very large step in the right direction and good start to 2009.

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Now those of you who may not be familiar with Adobe Illustrator, have no fear my friends, for if you like these icons just the way they are then here you go, in png format.

Note: I’ve provided them in 128×128 and 32×32, including the drop shadow.

Download AI file
Download images

Enjoy!

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