It’s been a little over a month since I’ve posted an update or really talked much about anything, so now I say… be prepared, because I have been up to a lot, to say the very least. I have lots of updates about school, work, things I’ve been working on and whatnot.
School has been keeping me busy more than ever even though I’m currently only in 3 classes. CIS 480, the capstone class for the Computer Information Systems major at UWSP, has been keeping me the most busy as of late. In case I haven’t mentioned it in the past, I am working on a project with 3 other people on a suite of applications called the Wisconsin Lake Modeling Suite (WiLMS). Our primary tasks include updating the the program by converting the application from the Delphi programming language to C# .NET. Along with the code conversion, we are also fixing some of the bugs that are in the current version and adding some additional features to make the application easier to use for new and seasoned users alike. In short, this program is getting a facelift… 21st century style 
For WDMD 345, we’ve been discussing a lot some of the new things Adobe has to offer with their new creative suite coming out in May. I’m very excited for the new suite and have already signed up for quite a few webinars and hands on training that Adobe is providing. This time around, I want to be up to date with the latest applications that make help make the web a powerful and fun place. Furthermore, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at location based applications and services. For our final project, we are supposed to create something that can be used for education, and preferrably something that utilizes GPS and location features in a mobile device. I’m thinking of just finishing up my Periodic Table of Elements program and calling it good, but I’m not sure how i’d include location features. I have a few other ideas I’ve thought about, though, that don’t revolve around school, but that I’d like to play around with. More on that in the future, though. I want to keep these updates short, simple, and to the point 
With recent changes in my schedule this semester, I was under the impression that I wouldn’t have been able to finish my major in Religious Studies, but with a few discussions from my advisor, it is still a possibility to have all 3 of my majors done by December. It’s going to require a lot of work, and I must enroll in my capstone class for the Web and Digital Media Development major I’m nearly finished with. I already have a project in the works, and Anthony Ellertson will be the professor I report to for the project come summer. I still have to put together a nice proposal and establish some realistic goals for the project, but I know this for sure: it’s going to be a continuation of my biblical Hebrew studies a few summers ago. I want to take some of the things I’ve learned and create a digital learning environment for this language. All of my training was done with books. I love books, but I want to try to educate from a digital and interactive perspective.
In the past few months, I’ve also given a few presentations on Social Media and some of the tools and strategies I use. One is a general presentation on Social Media, Social Networks, and services that enrich both. The second is a presentation that Renee Haas and I put together for WDMD 345 on TweetDeck (my favorite Twitter application, hands down). The first presentation will be available for download with only audio, seeing as there wasn’t much of a powerpoint assembled for the presentation, while the TweetDeck presentation will come fully loaded with audio and slides. Be on the lookout for it.
Since my last update, my employment opportunities have completely transformed. I’m still at Planet Label and love every minute of it. I’ve also been hired to work at the Stevens Point Brewery as their Social Media, Web, Marketing, and whatever else tech related person. A lot of what I apply has been learned from my past experiences with Planet Label, but I’ve learned that every business speaks and translates differently on the web than others. Planet Label, for example is still a fairly new company and is still in its infancy of building a brand and brand loyalty. They’re dominant on Twitter more than Facebook and have more targeted and segmented markets. The Stevens Point Brewery, on the other hand, is opposite in nearly everything I’ve mentioned about Planet Label. The brewery has been around for over 150 years, has a very strong loyalty among consumers and has a very general market. Because of this loyalty, they do extremely well on Facebook and have been doing fairly well on Twitter. When I started, the Fan Page was at around 1,350 fans. Right now, while I am writing this, they currently have 9,111, which is a tremendous increase in the course of two months. The nature and personality each company takes is quite remarkable, too, but I’ll let you observe that on your own watch.
I’ve also taken a step into a different career direction. I’ve realized that much of my experience is web and marketing driven, and that I’ve neglected the development and programming side of computing, which makes up the majority of my education at UWSP. I’ve recently taken up a programming job at Sentry where I can safely say I am getting some great experience with .NET, particularly Visual Basic (VB). I’ve always felt that my experience with the .NET framework has never been up to par with the other languages I use regularly, but with programming a capstone project in C#, and working with VB extensively, I feel like that my experiences in programming have gone through a revival. I plan on continuing to work with Planet Label and the Stevens Point Brewery while I work at Sentry. I have, though, decided to leave my position as a faculty assistant and lab monitor at UWSP. The experience with working one on one with classmates, problem solving, and teamwork are those that I will continue to apply in any career I go into in the future.
Aside from the norms of school and work, I’ve tried to have a little bit of fun here and there. I recently saw the Stone Temple Pilots in concert, ordered my tickets for FlashBelt in June, plan on seeing the Deftones in late May, and ordered Lollapalooza tickets. This will be my last summer as a student, so I want to make the best of it! Also, Jeff Nehlsen, Joe Motacek and myself recently attended the PlayExpo that was held at UW-Whitewater. While we weren’t the most pleased with the event, we got a good grasp on some great technologies and ideas out there in the world of gaming. As for our game, Nanobot Extreme, I’m not exactly sure as to what will become of it. I’d like to see a finished product, but we’ve been keen on tapping into the power of the Unreal Engine in the summer to see what we can put together and create. Again, these are some grey areas, and I won’t know more until after the semester is over.
That’s about it for now. Expect to see another post with the presentation material mentioned earler.
Hello Everyone!
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted something, but I just wanted to let all of you know that I am alive and well, even though semester just started. Lots of work to follow, that’s for sure. Anyway, I’ve made a few changes to the site recently. I removed the About Me page and moved it over to the sidebar on the site. I’ve replaced it with my umm… Portfolio? Yeah, we’ll call it that. It was something I put together last year over a day or two and have modified a little recently, but it needs work. Lots of it. I plan re-vamping it to show off and highlight some of my work at Planet Label, but right now it’s not a top priority to update since I’d like to re-build it from scratch. It will likely be constructed in Adobe Flex again, but with a little more organization and consistency. I’d say, though, that it is a good start to something with potential, and lots of it.
Other than updating the site, I’ve been busy getting back into the groove of academic life and putting tutorials together for WDMD 302, a course that introduces our students to Adobe Flex. I’ve decided that I will be putting up videos with code for both Flex 3 and FlashBuilder 4, seeing we are at a transitional phase in the Adobe world. I will also be recording both lectures I will be giving weekly on the material to give people who visit the site an understanding of what the code is doing, rather than just viewing code captured in Captivate. The plan is that there will be two sections of one hour lectures a week where students can dive into what the tutorials are trying to convey, and to observe the big picture of the project. Both lectures each week will be recorded even though they will cover the same content.
As for Planet Label, things are going great, as always, but seeing that the release of Adobe CS5 is drawing near, I feel hesitant posting content on the blog that relates to Adobe CS4 material. Maybe I can spend more time and posting resources for designers or focus more on the label and sticker industry, we’ll see come Tuesday. As usual, here’s the list of posts I’ve written for the blog since last update:
Furthermore, I’ve been expanding the web presence for Planet Label by reviving the Plurk account; setting up Tumblr, ArtFire, SocialURL, and Flavors.me accounts; and bringing more people to our Twitter account. It’s been nothing short of a fantastic experience. The people are wonderful, and it’s one of the reasons why I love the job so much.
Anyway, it’s time for me to head out. It’s a bit late and I still have some work to get done for class later today. Take care!
This is the second part of my optimization series for WordPress sites which focuses on what administrators can do in order to speed up load times for the sites they manage. Part 2 focuses exclusively on some of the coding changes I’ve made to a few sites I manage in order to speed up WordPress. Part 1 of the series can be found here.
One of the great things with nearly any web content management system is its use of themes and templates. In order to make themes and templates simple and easy to use without having to change much of the code, PHP functions are used excessively so that the admin doesn’t have to do much coding (in most cases, no coding at all) in order for the template to work with the system it was designed for. With WordPress for example, simple things such as the site’s title and css file locations are dynamically called using PHP. If you plan on keeping your theme for awhile, or have designed a theme exclusive to your site, much of the dynamic PHP calls that can slow down load times can be eliminated entirely, especially with information from a theme’s header.php file.
For all of the code snippets, Planet Label has allowed me to used code snippets from their blog to use for my examples. Below are snippets of the original code and the changes I made so that less dynamic calls are made to the server.
Site Title
Original Code:
That seems like a massive amount of code for just the title of a page. Not that I also added additional formatting to make the code appear clearer and easier to read. While code like this may be necessary for dynamically rendering a site name on the fly for any site that installs it, does your site really need it now that it’s installed and that the theme will likely be used for an extended period of time or rotated seasonally? Let’s give the title a little more of a static flair instead.
Static Code
Short, simple, to the point, and one less dynamic request made to the server.
Pingback URL
Original Code
As you can see, the link for the pingback URL is also called dynamically in themes. Not sure what a pingback is? Check out the the WordPress Codex.
Static Code
RSS and Atom Feeds
Original Code
So much work for the server when it can be handled like this…
Static Code
Language Attributes
Original Code
Static Code
Content-Type Attributes
Original Code
Static Code
JavaScript
Original Code
Static Code
Stylesheets
Original Code
Static Code
You’ll notice in some of the examples that making the code static causes more code than the original code snippets. Length of code is essentially something we’re not looking into for the results, but rather the fact that less calls to the server are being made. The less the server has to work, the faster your WordPress site can deliver content to your audience. Furthermore, these changes should be made if you intend on keeping your theme for a long time or rotating it with other themes throughout the year. Finally, if you are designing a theme to release for download, it is imperative that you keep the PHP server requests in the header.php file otherwise chances are good that the theme won’t work for the other person trying to use it. Let them do the tweaking and optimizing.
Are there any other code tweaks that you recommend for speeding up a WordPress site? Feel free to drop a comment with your thoughts, opinions and suggestions. The more the better! Happy coding. 
I’ve noticed that it’s been awhile since I’ve updated the blog and actually wrote about some of the things I have been up to the past few months. Most of my posts lately have revolved around the Religious Studies adjunct I have been leading throughout the semester. While this is fine and dandy, I’ve been up to plenty with Planet Label and a video game that me, Jeff Nehlsen, and Joe Motacek have been working on for a flash course at UWSP that focuses specifically on video game development and storyline. I’ll post screen captures of the game in an upcoming post and will have a link to the game when we have a fully working version of it.
As always, my time spent working with Planet Label has been nothing short of wonderful. I’ve been able to publish more content for them in the past few months than I did in September and October. I’ve put together a number of posts where people can find resources for projects that use Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other desktop publishing and design software. Here’s a list of the posts I’ve written:
As you can see, that’s a fair amount of content worth checking out, especially the brush and Adobe CS5 posts!
I’ve also been continuing work on a few websites for Joseph Waligore. Joseph has been absolutely a wonderful client to work with and his sites are coming along wonderfully. There’s still some design tweaks that need to be done on his sites, but he wanted something simple. All of his sites are very content driven and contain bountiful amounts of readings worth looking into if you have a knack for philosophy and mysticism. His sites are as follows:
The Stevens Point Skate Park website is also up and running. After a brief technological battle with the hosting site, I was able to get everything up and running for Lars and the gang. The site uses a similar container as Waligore’s sites, but i find the sheet and approach to be very effective for this site, as well. The organization behind the effort is very pleased with the ease of use and functionality of the site, which always comes first, in my opinion. As for making it look appealing, I tend to stick to what works for the general audience. Also, they have an awesome Fan Page on Facebook. Check it out.
Last but not least, me and the others at Erge Creative have done a site re-design for a local Sushi Bar in the area called Matsu-Ya. The site was created using Joomla, whereas all of the other sites mentioned in this post have been created with WordPress. Both are wonderful content management systems and provide ease of use so that the client can have the independence of updating their own website without depending on the designer/developer on a constant basis.
That’s about it for now, other than the small alterations I have made on my site. I usually don’t post as many links to sites and pages as I have in this post, but really has been a hectic few month! Check back soon!
Hello everyone!
September has already been a busy month for me with school starting and making time for the jobs I work and some social time. In any case, I’m still working at Planet Label and have been trying to find ways to incorporate the work I do for them into my class activities. So far, I have been very successful in the attempt. My marketing class is allowing me to use Planet Label as my local company to “consult”. The goal I want to set is to be able to look back at past attempts, evaluate successes and failures, improve on the successes, correct the failures, and come up with some new ideas. So far, it’s breathed life into old ideas.
Aside from all of that, this month was my birthday. I got to spend the day with a Buddhist monk by the name of Khenpo Kalsang Gyaltsen, who serves as Vice President of Tsechen Kunchab Ling, Temple of All-Encompassing Great Compassion. This is the U.S. headquarters of the Sakya Order of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a very kind and intelligent man to which I am grateful for spending the day with. I typically don’t celebrate my birthday, but this added a unique zest to the day.
