Archive for November, 2009

Why I use WordPress for nearly every install I make

Friday, November 27th, 2009

I was feed up with re-doing the same things time and time again

By using wordpress external site I am able to remove a bunch of my standard work like adding content , setting up the head section or configuring my layout areas.  They are now all pre-configured inside my own hand made made theme, and from there on in I just change the CSS and made wordpress theme changes as needed by the client.  Most likely it saves me 5 hours on each install.

And to be honest, I hope the ease of wordpress to use will enable a site to grow quickly, even if it is just a 1 page advert. Possibly the most sucessful wordpress install that I have made so far would be The Commonwealth Conversation external site.  This site has had over 30,000 visitors and 1000 comments anf got to page rank 7 in about 4 months, not many sites can say that.

Why we do so much work for advertising agencies and communications beuros

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Advertising work, yes please

I get lots of requests from Advertising agencies and communcations beuros to perform coding work for them.  This for me is great work as I get chance to show off my skills, but also for the agency it is great as…

  • I have no ambition to become an art director
  • They usually cannot afford to employ a web coder full time
  • They get to pull on my RGB (screen) skills as they are use to a CMYK (print) world
  • The only staff that they can get to work in house on web things tend to have a maximum of 2 years web experience in very small situations. Not 15 years working for some of the largest corporations in the world.
  • I work to my own agenda, which can mean turning round 40hours of work in a 3 days or working at weekends.

And it does not stop with just the web coding, I can also advise or install any kind of supporting hardware or software infrastructure.

In short, it works out great for all.

here’s an example of one of the projects recently completed  McCann Erickson Amsterdam.

The who v. fatboy slim

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I was insipred the other day and decided it was time to make my first audio mashup. I chose to use The Who ‘I can’t explain’ and FatBoy Slim ‘Going out of my head’.
Phat Reaction – Who me out of my brain

It’s already got some airplay, and nothing but good vibes from all DJ’s,  so I am dead happy.

Want to be able to play video content on your PS3 without getting DLNA errors?

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Being the techie fool that I am, it was a breeze for me to setup my latop with a massive external hard disk that manages all of my video content.  The only problem I found almost instantly was that playstation3 uses DLNA to talk between the media server and the it.  DLNA is crappy at the best of times and when used on my playstation in tune with TVersity I found it was all kinds of  wrong, loosing audio and video all over the place and often crashing.

Check out the full instructions I made with you tube videos on how to do it.  It even covers converting from most formats into a playstation playable one.

Here’s a quick process overview

  1. Install IIS7 on the computer
  2. Configure a movies virtual directory
  3. Setup mp4, m2ts and mts mime type
  4. Convert mkv (HD content) files to m2ts with tsMuxeR for playstation 3
  5. Convert MOV (quicktime) files to mp4 h.264 with Yamb for playstation 3
  6. Playing content with PS3 internet browser
  7. Recomendations, tips and tricks
  8. The downsides to the solution
  9. Other benefits