JasonCypret.com » web 2.0

Geek Week – jQuery, PHP, WordPress, Design, CSS

Jason Cypret — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:44:26 +0000

I’m coming off my long hiatus since, well Christmas. I’ve been crazy busy lately, but I have recently been able to catch my breath and check out some great tutorials, blogs, and design inspiration found all around the interwebs.

jQuery

I’ve got a lot of jQuery links for ya. I’ve been doing quite a bit of jQuery work lately.

CSS & XHTML

Here’s some fun and usefull CSS tuts, and tricks.

PHP

Roll your own MySQL and PHP powered CMS.

WordPress

More wordpress tidbits to improve yoru wordpress site.

Design

I’ve been doing a good amout of vector work lately. Check out these great tuts.

Misc

Since the economy is crap right now, unemployement is on the rise. Here’s a great list of jobs sites for web designers and developers.

Jobs for Designers and Developers

Animoto – Web 2.0 Meets Photo SlideShows

Jason Cypret — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:13:02 +0000

Posted in Reviews

I just listened to episode 49 of net@night with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. This week they had Brad Jefferson on the show. Brad is the co-founder of Animoto. I really got excited when I heard what Animoto is and how easy it is to use the service.

I have been creating video slide shows for years now. I used to build the entire slide show in Final Cut Pro and manually set the ken burns effect by hand. Over the years it is getting easier and easier to build high quality slide shows that look amazing with little effort.

I am currently making a slide show using iPhoto for my father in laws 60th birthday. I found it really easy to quickly create awesome slide shows in minutes with little effort. However, these slide shows look a lot like some of my first slide shows I ever created. They look good, but do not have very much depth and emphasis to match the music, and highlight certain photos. To do this I would need to go into Motion and spend an afternoon using 3D effects, transitions, and motion effects to make the slide show look truly amazing. Who has that kind of time though, and we are just talking about a photo slide show here.

Enter Animoto. Animoto allows me to create the types of videos I mentioned with roughly no effort on my part. Simply upload your photos to Animoto, or choose existing photos online (Flickr). Select a song from their music library, or upload your own. Animoto will analyze the song’s tempo and emotion, and add motion effects to match the beat. It is truly amazing. But don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself. Also check out what I quickly made in 5 minutes.

I really would like to use this for my photography business, however Animoto is really not set up for commercial use at the moment. Brad mentioned they are looking at a commercial version for professional use in the near future. When that comes out I will adopt Animoto for all of my slide show projects.

New Design & What I Have Been Up to Lately

Jason Cypret — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 06:01:43 +0000

Posted in Web Design

Click image for a large preview.

I been busy, as I always say. I have really been working hard to get jcphotographydallas.com off the ground. However, I have been getting more and more business through both of my company sites that it has slowed my down with all the fun. I also gotta say blogging each week on 3 sites is hard. I don’t see how everyone finds the time. Well enough of that.

I have been busy at my real job (believe it or not). I created a new toolkit for the Hilton content creative team. I also got to give props to Chad Scott for several of the documents on the page as well. I would like to show you a screen of the working page. Since it is an internal page I can’t provide the link. This page turned out really good as it is much improved from its text only design. I used some standard web 2.0 elements. Now the page has a flash gallery that allows the client to choose their design from a large list of pre configured design created by yours truly. This has been a big hit and has already helped improve our submission process.

Site redesign. I have started to bust out a basic new look for this site. I have decided to start from scratch. I really have learned so much about WordPress, Web Standards, and CSS since first designing this site that I gotta start fresh. This will take me a long time to complete because I am so picky when it comes to sites I design for myself, and also that I have to re input every blog post and all the content. It will be a process. Anyway look for changes and a design sneak peek coming soon.

Sneak Peek of Cypret Custom Homes & Other Recent Projects

Jason Cypret — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:55:16 +0000

Posted in Web Design

It seems like all I have been doing lately in my free time is launch websites. Even though my last post raved on about Halo 3 and The Orange Box I have not been able to play lately. I wanted to give you a little preview of what I have been working on and also what I’ve completed recently.

First off here is a quick little sneak peek of the all new Cypret Custom Homes website. This is another WordPress powered site, but thank goodness it is not as many pages as some of my other sites. This site will contain two sections that will be frequently updated. These sections are a blog/ news section, and a current project section. Cypret Custom Homes (of which I am very fond of) wanted a web site to drive interested parties to. Basically the house they are building now is next to a busy road in a very trendy part of town. They wanted to have a website that they could give further details about the house and be an online salesman of sort. The site will be finished soon. in the meantime you can visit the site and get an see a fresh WordPress install waiting for me to mold into greatness, or at least something pretty cool.

I also recently completed a simple landing page for the Hilton Toronto and The Canadian Opera Company (click here for live link). They partnered to create and awesome promotion which includes hotel stay, first class dining, and tickets to the Opera. They wanted kind of a modern art deco feel with vibrant colors. We they were happy with what I gave them, so if they are happy, I am happy.

Sneak Peek of the all new JCPhotographyDallas.com Site.

Jason Cypret — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:51:53 +0000

Posted in Web Design

Click Image for a large view

I am very excited to be almost complete with with the full design and implementation of jcphotographydallas.com.

There are a couple of reasons I am glowing at the moment. First and foremost is the fact that this site is built front to back on WordPress. I have been talking about it for sometime and I finally took the plunge. This is the first time I will have one of my sites fully dynamic without having to use crazy hacks. Secondly I have grown a bit. No not in the waistline (my wife would argue with me) but in screen resolution. I have designed this site for much larger screen resolutions. While all of my sites expand nicely on larger screens this is the first one is specifically meant for larger screen resolutions. No more 800×600 designs for me. Plus the photos will look good at the large size.

If you go to the site now you will find that it is down. I am in the process of moving hosting for the site. The entire site has been built offline and is ready to go live with the push of a button. I can’t wait to start re building all my other sites using WordPress. It is a great CMS and I have loved using it. I will try to do a post over my WordPress experience soon.

New Landing Page Design Templates

Jason Cypret — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 05:48:00 +0000

Posted in Web Design

Needless to say I have been extremely busy lately. I have not been able to blog on either one of my sites. Let me fill you in on what I’ve been up to. In my day job have had too many projects to breathe. In my personal life I have been busy with wedding videos and designing my new site. However, I do have some updates as I have completed two new template designs for Hilton.com the creative team to use. I am very excited about these and I think they will make a huge impact.

First let me talk about the stripes design/theme. The stripes design came into existence due to the type of requests we get from hotels. Typically hotels submit a small amount of text with about one image for each paragraph. With this type of content I thought that it would look great if each line was a slightly different color/contrast, thus creating the stripe effect. It is a very simple design, but will roll out to all of our hotels easily and beautifully.

Second is the rounded design/theme. Both of these templates are coded in valid CSS and adhere to all web standards. Since I am using CSS I decided to use a web 2.0 look and add incorporate it in a theme. I use standard 2.0 cliché’s: gradients, rounded corners, and a star badge. I wanted this to look fun and exciting. These pages will work well with our attraction pages, and many of other themes.

I added both of these to my portfolio section. I will be adding more one off pages soon as well as designing more template designs for business/meetings, relaxing (spa), dining, and holiday type pages. I will continue to post work as it is completed.

Do you Pownce?

Jason Cypret — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 05:44:52 +0000

Posted in Apple Reviews

I started using Pownce several weeks ago and I got to say I am loving it more and more everyday. On the surface it looks a lot like Twitter. Before I get into the differences let me first explain what Pownce is.

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

Like I mentioned Pownce is a lot like Twitter. I use Twitter like a mini blog, to tell people what I am up to throughout the day. Twitter however really falls short when you want to carrying on a conversation. Pownce allows you to have deep conversations if you like. It also allows you to post more than just text. You can post a message, to the public or an individual, you can post a link (i.e. check out this YouTube video), you can post a file that is will be hosted by Pownce, or you can set up an event (haven’t tried this one yet). Right now I am updating both at the same time as I haven’t quite given up Twitter. Wait and see how the battle turns out.

There are two primary ways to use Pownce you can post from the Pownce website or you can download a desktop app to keep track of you and your friends postings. Posting form the Pownce website is not that bad. Pownce provides great themes for you to customize you page out of the box, and I’m sore more are on their way. The desktop app is really nice as well. It is built on Adobe’s new AIR application. It is beautifully built and has worked perfect for me out of the gate. Note that Pownce is still in Alpha so your experience may not be the same as mine. Here’s a little about AIR.

The software runs using the new Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). What the heck? AIR works like Flash if you’re familiar with that. You install a little piece of code on your computer and then you can run any piece of software written for it.

I am super excited for more web apps to be built using AIR. Another big plus is Pownce works for Mac and PC users. They are also working on a bringing it to Linux users. They also just built a Facebook app to display you public Pownce notes. I do have a couple of Pownce invites left, so email me if you’re interested. If you do sign up be sure and drop a line to me.

New Web Design Work Added to Portfolio

Jason Cypret — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:38:38 +0000

Posted in Web Design

I just finished up some recent web projects and added to the web portfolio section. I will continue to update each portfolio section as new content becomes available. I am in the process of completely re-coding the Dallas Wedding Videos site as well as adding several new wedding video samples to the site. I will also have new videos online on both sites shortly.