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The Value of Feeling Appreciated as an Employee in... Whether you’re a new employee or the vice president of the company, everyone wants to feel valued, even appreciated, in the workplace. Not only does it improve morale and make the workplace a more pleasant...

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The difference between classic and motion tweens in... Here it is: If you're used to doing things "the cs3 way" then you can continue to do so with the classic tween tool. It works the same way as you remember, using key frames as normal, but you cannot...

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PHP: If (equal to AND not equal) - eliminate form spam... Just learned a great function of PHP thats already made my forms a lot better. A while back I wrote an article about eliminating form spam without captchas by using css to hide a text input box for bots...

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Drop Downs, Fly Outs, and Accordion Site Navigation: This last week I was in a meeting discussing a client site. It was a typical business meeting that was going into overtime on a Friday afternoon, and then things turned for the worst... someone suggested...

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The Future for Night Clubs Twitter

Category : Social, Technology

Fliers cost money and everyone throws them out. Myspace and Facebook take too long and you have to know a college kid with enough time to do nothing other than friend 8000 people on each service and then spam them day and night with messages, comments, and bulletins every time you throw an event.

Twitter is the next step. It’s like word of mouth with instant gratification and all the linkable goodness the web provides. Event pictures, videos, and reviews are all done via text message style communication and from the promoter’s prospective it’s even better because it’s public.

Spris in Hartford is already on this trend, but I think they can go further. You don’t have a lot of options to customize your account’s appearance in Twitter, but you can customize the background a little bit to add some function in there, like contact info for bottle service, emails for djs to send a demo, the flier for the month’s party, etc.

I see this going a lot of different ways. Makes me think that the next hot wave of ideas will be ways for people with huge Twitter lists to make better use of their lists and manage them it ways that makes sense.

Who blogs near you? Find out with Placeblogger

Category : Around The Office, Around West Hartford, Cool Web Programs

This is a neat concept. You enter a location and it displays a list of blogs that are published in that area. You can also cue the blogs into a single feed and get all the selected posts from a given area.

I can see this as having a professional use for journalists, politically minded people, law enforcement, marketing/PR peopl, and anyone who wants to keep tabs on the pulse of a geographic community. The main drawback being that some people simply wont post their blog because they enjoy the curtain of privacy the internet provides.

On the otherhand, if I was going on vacation in Tokyo and wanted to find some really cool clubs, I could do a survey of blogs in Tokyo and see what the people are saying without ever going there. As an added plus, Id avoid the “top 10″ clubs in the city and hopefully find a comfy dive within walking distance of my hotel.

http://www.placeblogger.com/

Finally on Twitter

Category : Around The Office, Social, Technology

Getting to this now feels really late. I should have been on Twitter ages ago. I might have bypassed it entirely at this point but I’ve got to learn it for some client work, and so now here I am.

Add me –> http://twitter.com/SteveYanicke

and maybe use this link to give me a tweet.

Mohawk Paper Breakfast with the ICC

Category : Around West Hartford, Social

I just got back from a paper breakfast with the ICC (Independent Creative Club) and Lee Moody of Mohawk Paper. As a web guy I don’t typically get a lot of requests for print work – but I still like knowing what’s going on in related fields. There is some cool stuff going on with paper these days and it’s all about sustainability.

As a society we’re progressed from styrofoam boxes, to cardboard boxes and “green” packaging, but now print advertising going even further. Companies in the past used to call themselves green because they added “to help reduce office waste please do not print this page” to the bottom of their email. A modern day green company looks like this: Maintain and care for your own forest and natural resources, produce everything with wind energy, minimize waste, and inform your consumers about making impactful choices. That’s pretty green.

The Mohawk reps talked about different papers on different digital printers. I guess it’s a new thing for paper companies to offer digital papers, but with the cost of digital coming down more and more, the window for cost effective printing is getting larger so more people are taking advantage of it.

And the breakfast was great too. Thanks Lee!
For more information on local CT design events, check out the ICC on Meetup.com

Teaching at University of Hartford and Tunxis Community College

Category : Around The Office, Around West Hartford, Social

Classes begin this week. Im teaching a flash class at Tunxis and a Photoshop/design class at University of Hartford. Im looking forward to both of em.

Wish me luck. This is going to be a hell of a lot of work to keep on top of what I already have. If I know you in real life, Im sorry ahead of time. You might not see me until May.

CCTV comes to West Hartford, CT

Category : Around West Hartford, Politics

I’m sure I’m not the only one in this town who is noticed new construction at several intersections in West Hartford. They all feature brand-new metal poles adorned with brand new traffic lights and expensive looking cameras. No doubt the hope is that these cameras will increase revenue for the town while decreasing “lawlessness”.

As reported by the Sentinel these cameras may do just the opposite. It seems the newest high school prank in towns with similar cameras is to print the valid license plate of someone who has recently offended you (like a teacher) and speed through the intersection to earn them your ticket. The owner of said license plate is then automatically mailed the ticket the following day. Contunue Reading

New Job as a Web Developer at Fathom

Category : Around The Office, Around West Hartford

Sweet!

I’ve taken a job at Fathom in Hartford doing mostly web development and cross browser css work on some of their bigger projects. I’m excited to be pushed in this direction and glad to bring my experience with SEO and graphic culture to their mix.

I started last Monday and I love it! The people are creative and friendly and the office is decked out with enmities (and a Guinness tap), but its the little things —like free parking downtown— that make me really happy to be working for a company that actually cares about the wellbeing of their employees as well their bottom line.

Certinly what goes around comes around and I work late; Im debating going in on Monday anyway even though its a holiday. I havn’t quite set it up so that I can work from home and I have to get some work done for their client.

I’m still working with all my existing clients by doing work on Monday afternoon, evening and weekends, but I’m not taking on any more clients — which is a great feeling. I’ll still be on the blog, probably more frequently as I’ll be constantly looking for new solutions and work around to the web’s many mysteries.

 PR: wait…  I: wait…  L: wait…  LD: wait…  I: wait… wait…  C: wait…  SD: wait…

A List Apart 2008 – Web Designers Survey

Category : Social, Technology

I saw this morning that A List Apart is doing their second annual web designers survey. I took part last year and am glad to take part again this year. Web business in general are run pretty differently than most other industries and this project hopes to help to decode just what sort of an industry we have made. Maybe even shed some light on where we’re going.

Last year about 33,000 people took it and its definetly worth checing back in on once they publish the results. Do you’re part and spend 5 minutes to take the survey, its easy.

itookthesurvey


New Address: Sisson Ave – Across from the Wood N Tap

Category : Around The Office, Around West Hartford, Social

Hatters Workshop is moving into Hartford. We’re growing up and moving out of the house we started in. This is a big step, which hopefully won’t end in financial ruin (kidding!). I’m excited to have my own space that I can really do anything with. I still have to arrange the furniture, put on some closet doors, and change the lights from being all fluorescent lights.

I might have the only PC only design lab in Connecticut, which might put some people off, but I still say that it saves me a conversion step with almost all my clients. They don’t use mac, the world doesn’t use mac (in general) so why should all the design work be done on a platform that is unused by the rest of the world?

I should have an Amazing intern starting once the move is complete, and the work is still rolling in. I’ve got to write two proposals by the end of the day and the phone never stops ringing. Thank goodness I don’t advertise or I’d never see light.

Thank you all for reading this, and being a witness to history.

Praise for IKEA and a review of page turning flash software

Category : General Web Info, Social, Technology

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In the process of researching another article I stumbled on a very clean and functional page turning script being used by IKEA to show their mammoth catalog. Wow! A clean interface and new functionality? ZMags, the company that provides the script and backend content controls, did an amazing job with this.

It provides a whole list of new functionality in flash applications. You can search the zine’s content, zoom in on pages with a really interesting real-time transition, and see thumbnail previews of the previous, next, or any of the preview images on the bottom. It’s a super easy interface for large catalogs with lots of scanable content.

I called to enquire about pricing and found it to be pretty reasonable, given the amount of backend support and tracking that’s built into the application. I don’t think flash can do everything that analytics can just yet, but they boasted as if it was pretty close.

Other notable mentions for clean design include JFK Magazine: a euro GQ, which has a really interesting page flip script that’s second to none at showing high res images. The zoom and pan feature is not as intuitive as maybe I’d like, but extra functionality is for me a welcome problem to overcome.

Both of the above scripts are sold as license agreements; you don’t own the script and so you can’t develop off them or use them once your contract with whoever expires. The alternative is to buy the scripts and develop the functionality yourself. PageFlip Developed by 2advanced, a sick nasty studio in their own right, is an economical package (under $30) and has everything you need to get started working with the raw component objects in a .fla file. A working knowledge of action script is all you really need as there is a thick help file, lots of commented code, and tons of examples of it working to pull apart.