emmabalitski.ca is live!

Hello World! I know the phrase is, well, used a lot but it’s very appropriate. I am now, officially finished my Internet Production program at Vancouver Island University and am heading out into the world!

My portfolio is now online at www.emmabalitski.ca and I am accepting new clients.

End of the Semester

Well, it’s finally here. The end of the semester and the end of my days at VIU. But of course, this doesn’t mean the end of my learning opportunities. While classes may be over as of the 9th of this month, my propeller is going at full throttle to keep myself moving forward and learning new things. I’ve even signed up for a digital illustration class (some might call me driven, I just call it a last ditch attempt at staying on the Island!). I have subscribed to a web design magazine from the UK (“.net”), as well as some digital magazine sites (Smashing Magazine, Website Magazine) for inspiration and education. I have joined some discussion groups (Designer Talk on LinkedIn, ZU on Facebook), and crowdSPRING blog/freelance site for further inspiration, education, and networking opportunities. Once I get “settled”, I will be joining some professional organizations as well to further my networking.

Winding up or down?

This week has been rather hectic. It’s become really evident that the semester is nearly over and the “OMG” feeling has kicked in.

I didn’t spend as much time on further optimizing the Bears Matter site as I would have liked to. I spent 4 hours working on that and trying to further reduce the load time. I’m still not 100% satisfied on that. I have been working on getting a publishing application that will allow the client to publish with minimal fuss to her other social networking accounts (Facebook Page, Twitter, and LinkedIn). I originally had some automatic publishers that would run in the background of the blog but those had a significant impact on the load time of the pages and they were also a little “buggy”. I have since downloaded a Ping.fm extension for Joomla! and have configured the Ping.fm account to link to the different networks. Now I need to get the Joomla! extension linked into the Ping.fm account to facilitate the distribution of the blog posts. Fingers crossed that this will go fairly smoothly and this week I can finalize the optimization of the site.

The majority of this week has been spent working on the PHP project, and to lesser extent the CSS project. I’m troubled with the PHP project. Fortunately, I have a little bit more time on that one in order to get it done. So I’m not going to panic on that one just yet!

Well short posting this week; my mind is pushing me to do some coding rather than reflecting on my past week. I will endeavor to have a better post next week!

Optimizing & Live

On Monday (Mar 15) the group had a 3 hour meeting with the client to get some information sorted out for the e-commerce portion of the website.  As of the writing of this posting, we are still waiting for financial information to be confirmed in order to go ahead with the Paypal account.  So the store is still offline and will not be up and running before Tuesday (Mar 23rd) as we had hoped.  But we did get the site launched live on schedule and the client has already (as of that day) started to make postings in the blog portion of the site.  We also received approval on a logo and have added that to the website banner.

So Close!

I haven’t done a very good job of keeping track of the time spent on the site for the last two weeks.  I know I’ve spent a lot of time, just not exact…  I’ve been so focused on getting the blog entries edited, and finding and uploading the photos to complete the articles.  But around 11:45 pm last night the last entries were completed – yay!

In our presentation, I took note of suggestions made by classmates and have made changes to the site accordingly.  The letter spacing of the font has been adjusted so things aren’t so squished.  I’ve added padding to the content area to align the text with the slider module.  I have increased the timing on the slider module to make it less distracting, however; I can’t make the module loop.  I finally found the CSS for the slider module to adjust the background colour of the module so it is the same as the wrapper colour (this took a LONG time!).  I’ve also lightened up the header so it is not so dark and heavy.

Reading break update

Reading break has not been the “Party Central” that it seems to be down in the States; not that I expected it to be, lol!

This past week I have spent nearly 15 hours working on getting the Bears Matter site set up with the template I purchased.  The site does look a bit different from our composite but not really significantly.  The functionality and navigation is the same, just the appearance of some aspects are different.  All of the blog entries from the old site have now been migrated over, 63 of them manually (yay C!) but there is still some editing to be done and images inserted to their corresponding articles.  I have half of the rotating images edited and uploaded for testing purposes and after some fiddling around, I have the slider module working (and appearing) as I wanted.

Playing with the Big Boys

I’m catching up on my blog posting.  I missed publishing last week (wrote it, saved the draft and forgot to come back and publish).  So this posting is actually a bit of the last two weeks…

Migrating databases.  Apparently if you can do that, you can “play with the Big Boys” in the industry.  So far, I’ve spent about 10 hours over the past two weeks on this task alone and it will definitely be time well spent.  The old site contains 242 blog entries along with the associated comments so if we can migrate the database into the new one, we’ll save ourselves a lot of time from cutting and pasting.  Granted we may still have to do some but any little help is good.  I did manage to migrate about two thirds of the entries and some of it is garbage (i.e. miss entered fields, etc.) but that’s a decent start.  At this point, the group has decided to just go ahead and cut and paste the rest.  We don’t want to spend any more time fiddling with code but to proceed with getting the site going.

Insert interesting title “here”

Okay, so I’m not up on the creative titling today.  Must be the weather.

Well I’ve spent another 4h 8 m researching extensions for the Bears Matter website and another 3 hours analyzing on paper WHY each would be suitable (or not) for the site.  In the end, I think we’re going to have to do a little experimenting to see what will work when it’s actually implemented.  It’s a bit difficult to tell how easy or difficult something is going to be to set up and/or use just from the developer’s notes.  Most extensions have demo sites of the front-end and some sites have screen shots of the back-end but so far, in my experience, until you actually try to apply something the experience can be a totally different kettle of fish.

Extensions, Modules, and Components – oh my!

I’m still in research mode to figure out what Joomla! template will be the best starting point for the Bears Matter website.  I *think* I have it narrowed down…  I hope…  I need a template that will allow a drop down navigation in the top of the page (above the header).  I need a template with the options for multiple modules and a RIGHT hand side column.  I need a template that can support 1 – 3 columns of content…  I think I’ve got it.

I’ve also been madly investigating what plugins we will need in order to give all the functionality and features that our client wants.  We need to figure out how to rotate images in the header without using flash and make it easy to use so she can change the images herself.  We need to find a way to export or feed her blog postings to her Facebook and Twitter accounts.  

Things are rolling merrily along!

Well it’s hard to believe that we’ve already been in class for two weeks, but we have.  It really is hard to believe!  But this semester, I feel more organized and I’m working to get ahead in some areas just in case I run into issues down the road.

I’ve already done my first lab for DIGI 320, so I’m very happy about that.  I’ll start working on the next lab right away and I need to start thinking about what I want to do for the Techniques project and my final project.  Maybe I’ll have a chat with a friend to see if she’s interested in having me do a site for her.  Oh and I found a great little calculator for figuring out font sizes (calculating ems), it’s a little bit more instantaneous if you can’t figure out how to put the numbers into a regular calculator!  :)