I had a great time at CMS Expo! I learned quite a bit and met some really great, talented people!

I have been allowing myself some time to digest all of the information... it had my brain in overload, but I was able to immediately incorporate some of the tips/techniques/advice from many of the speakers into my current work.

If there is one thing I would like to highlight from my experience at CMS Expo that would be all of the amazing speakers! Lots of knowledge in one place is a great thing - especially when you can ask questions face to face. There were a few speakers that I learned quite a bit from - though all of them gave so many great tidbits it was hard to pack it all in 3 very short days. Here is a short list of a few of the speakers' sites. [I would also recommend following their twitter feeds as many of them continue to post bits of wisdom]

Jen Kramer - a professor at Marlboro College and Joomla genius...she had a ton of great tips & tricks!!

Jonathan Shroyer - had some mad CSS skillz and shared them with us all... he is co-owner of 'corePHP'

Kyle Ledbetter - shared some very practical web design tips and showed off some great components from his company Pixel Praise [I would highly recommend checking out Project Fork]

and last but not least...

Barb Ackemann - stressed the importance of planning a website and making sure you are really 'hearing' what your clients need... she also showed us how to create templates for Joomla...

Takeaways: going to the conference was definitely worth it... I can't say that I am now a pro CSS developer, but at least I now know where I can start improving. I also know a few more people to turn to that have the answers I am looking for.

Thanks for stopping by!

-jp

The other day I looked at my site in response to a friend asking me about Joomla! and noticed that I hadn't updated since Thanksgiving! Yikes!

My new client is keeping me busy - which is a great thing in this economy. Still very thankful for that! I am continuing to learn so much about what it means to be healthy. Can't really help it when you work for a natural supplement company... Just last week I made vegetarian spaghetti + meatballs which, outside of the yogurt I used in the sauce, could have passed for a vegan dish. Makes me feel like such a health nerd :D

Currently I am creating animation to accompany a voice over. The style takes some qualities from traditional hand-drawn animation. I really couldn't accomplish the look without stumbling across this tip from Shadowplay studio:

[quoting a user from flickr]'...to make non-static titles, have you written them twice or more (the same name etc.)?'

Shadowplay Studio says:

We'd actually write them 4 times to get the non-static look. That's enough frames to make it not look like a loop. Then I believe they were interpreted in After Effects at 4 frames per second, so you end up with a one second loop. Hope this helps!

Found it while looking at their flickr set for the Juno title sequence. [ see it here ] I had never thought about accomplishing that look using that technique. It has been fun!

I will post some newer work within the next week or so from products that are now live. The hand drawn project will be up after its product goes live. Definitely check back :).

Oh- and I hope you aren't buried up to your eyeballs in snow!!! If you are, be safe and drink lots of hot chocolate :) Thankfully the days are starting to get longer! Spring isn't too far away! [I can only hope!!]

Thanks for stopping by!

-jp