Rebekah Renford [New Media] » Development

Brendan Robinson Photography

Rebekah — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:02:51 +0000

Another freelance site has launched! Experience the breathtaking photography of Brendan Robinson, based in Chilliwack, BC.

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Thanksgiving Weekend

Rebekah — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:25:36 +0000

I guess to start off today’s entry, I’ve got to say happy day of thanks (you know, cause its Thanksgiving, here in Canada). Although my 3-day weekend started out pretty good, it didn’t end the way I would have liked. It seems I ended up working 2 half days out of my 3 day weekend and I feel like I’ve been running around like a turkey with its head cut off. Lots of work to do and so little time to do it in!

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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The Return of Autumn

Rebekah — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:48:45 +0000

Wow! It has felt crazy busy the last few weeks not only with freelance projects and Toastmasters, but with the social side of life too. It’s time to get blogging again though, especially now that sweet, sweet, Autumn has returned.

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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How to Google

Rebekah — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:00:42 +0000

I happened to be “Googling”, as it were, the other day and something interesting came to mind.

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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Freelance and Toast and IE6 – oh my!

Rebekah — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:19:11 +0000

It seems as though my blogging has taken a steep dive for amount of posts as of the last month eh? I’ve been working on a couple of freelance projects as well as trying to get the ball rolling for the Toastmasters year ahead. One of my freelance projects for an old acquaintance who is an excellent photographer now, will be up shortly – we’re just putting the finishing touches on it and getting his portfolio optimized for the website. The other freelance project is still very much a work in progress as far as the development goes. The design is finished and looks pretty darn good if you ask me, however I’m a little rusty and not all that experienced at building Wordpress themes so it’s taking me a bit longer than usual to pump it out.

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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Summer Banquet

Rebekah — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:34:37 +0000

Two nights ago was our annual Summer Awards Banquet for Toastmasters. Somebody I know made a comment about it being on a Friday night, as if it seemed stupid because people must have better things to do on a Friday night. In my opinion, this is far from the truth. I’m in a place now where I truly enjoy Toastmasters and public speaking – and the environment with the club is so warm and supportive. I look forward to our club meetings every week and it seems like craziness to miss a regular meeting nevermind the Summer Banquet. Plus, the cheesecake was amazing!

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

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Dismal Numbers of Attendence

Rebekah — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:56:10 +0000

Toastmasters tonight was, I’m not gonna lie, a little sad. Mostly because there were very few members there. I swear more than half the club couldn’t make it to the meeting this week. Oh well, I guess this means the beginning of the summer! I did my second speech tonight, titled “Reasons to Exercise” and I’ve posted it on my speeches page for your reading pleasure. It went fairly well, actually, and the only things I wish I could have done were make it a little longer and to have memorized it rather than using notes. All in all, I’m definitely improving – yay! Next week is the club executive elections when I’ll be running for club president. Strangely enough, I’m not worried about it one bit. I’m confident I was a born leader (and I say that as modestly as possible).

– Rebekah

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Running for President

Rebekah — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:02:44 +0000

This week Jess let me chair the meeting again at Toastmasters. It’s good practice for sure and I’ve made up my mind that I’m definitely running for president in the club executive elections on May 27th. On my way to Toastmasters I even thought of a good argument for why they should vote for me. I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you (or bring down your website). I’m saving it for the actual election speech. I’m actually really excited about it and I feel myself opening up more and becoming a lot more comfortable with Toastmasters, speaking, and being myself around strangers in general.

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!

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

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Sounds About Right.

Rebekah — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:00:23 +0000

This looks about right. Although I think a section of this pie should include something along the lines of “testing mother-f*#$%@ code in this piece of s*#! browser”.

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Redesign Suggestions

Rebekah — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:40:05 +0000

I mentioned I was going to redesign this website last November. Well, 4 months have gone by and many versions have come and gone in my mind and I feel like I’m still at square one.

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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JavaScript Menus and SEO

Rebekah — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:52:47 +0000

In the past, several search engine optimizers have heavily discouraged fancy navigation menu systems; rather recommending using search engine friendly menus based on HTML and styled with CSS. Up until now the primary language understood by search engines has been HTML; however Google has unleashed the ability for its spiders to crawl and read JavaScript.

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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Free Stuff! Yes… seriously.

Rebekah — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:25:59 +0000

So I’m in the process of redesigning this website and was on the search of some good web 2.0 social networking icons. Truth be told there are a lot of different places to get them and a lot of different shapes and sizes that they come in now. This is great however I failed to find one in a format that I could play with and make my own without starting from scratch. So here I provide you with 12 icons to use yourself and edit them how you like.

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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Project Managing Yourself

Rebekah — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:24:37 +0000

With a little bit of graphic design assistance from Justin, and the authentication and upload from a couple of developers, I completed a small project yesterday. Netgenetix updated an online customer management system used by travel agencies for a company called Pro File Client. My project was making software demos to make learning the system easier for its users. There are three demos, one for an agent level login, one for an admin level login, and one for sales and marketing purposes. Over the span of about two weeks I managed to re-write the scripts, learn to use Adobe Captivate, code the new html pages (from an old template though, so not difficult), create pretty buttons for the videos, record all the audio and put it all together for upload. I was so hoping for a lauch on the deadline before noon. Unfortunately due to other projects being launched and other daily distractions I was unable to have it uploaded until nearly 5:30pm at the end of the day. This means all the QA things I noticed which couldn’t have been tested until it was live will have to wait until Monday to be fixed.

Despite the annoyance and frustration this project brought me, I actually probably had the most fun working on it than I have in the past few months on other projects. I learned so many things working on this one project alone as well. From simple coding tricks and some design tips to dealing with difficult audio. I can’t even begin to list all the techniques I tried to make the audio for these demos usable. Everything from making home-made sponges for overtop of the mic to making full on tents around myself to keep the sound confined and adding blankets and material to absorb the sound in an extremely boomy and echo-ey conference room. I spent hours trying to make the audio usable for these demos.

Considering the majority of this project was done myself it was also an experience in project managing myself. I’ve never really done any freelance projects and building your own website doesn’t really have much of a deadline unless you want it to. In order to make this deadline I pulled my first all nighter since college – and it actually wasn’t too bad – I managed to stay awake and still be productive at work the next day. People say to me, “why? why are you doing extra work you don’t get paid for?”. And the answer is, because I want to. I guess I’m exceptionally dedicated and caring when it comes to work than most people – but I’m not about to let a project go out past deadline or looking like crap if I can help it – especially if its a project I did all myself. It’s about the pride in the work and the reputation you get from it. I want people to look back on it thinking “Rebekah did an amazing job on that project” not look back on it thinking “We can do this project well as long as Rebekah isn’t involved”. It’s about pride and dignity, dedication, and the feeling it brings you when it’s done.

As for those demos, well, two of them are password protected but you can see the sales demo if you want. However I’ll warn you its probably pretty boring – its a software demo. Those of you who want to provide tips or criticism feel free to do so.

Thanks!
Rebekah

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Blogging for Business

Rebekah — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:36:55 +0000

The following is a post I wrote for Citrus SEO on blogging for businesses.

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To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for. Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content – a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care – rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

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And this time… I mean it.

Rebekah — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:57:35 +0000

A while back I mentioned I was going to re-design this website. Well things got busy, I got a job in the industry, and I moved into my first apartment. But this time I’m serious. I feel like I’m in the mode to re-do the entire thing from the ground up. Originally I was just going to re-design it but now I’ve decided I’m going to re-develop it as well and get to know Wordpress even better. I’d love to be a Wordpress Whiz like Brad.

I love the city theme, I really do – however it may have to go. We’ll see how the design mockups go in the near future. If anyone has any suggestions or tips I’d be super grateful for them. Send them to rebekah at midnight lights dot com.

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