Flash Workshops by Ycademy: Is the Time Right?

The Ycademy Flash Workshops starting Monday, May 10, 2010 will provide all participants with the unique opportunity to acquire basic and advanced knowledge of Flash.  Is the Time right for you to move on and to take your web site development and web design capabilities to the next level?

Ycademy Evolution

For years Ycademy has helped people to develop online skills, covering from Computer to Marketing and to Website Development and Hosting knowledge. Converting knowledge to profit and editing to successful publishing remains our goal.

In fact, Ycademy has started as an online learning center for YORGOO Subscribers, where newbies and advanced online Marketers have met and then continued to interact to build mutually beneficial relationships.

Today, Ycademy Pros have acquired a high level of know-how and can be proud to develop for their customers some of the best performing websites on the entire internet also due to the high performance semantic publishing frameworks from Semiomantics. Time has come to take advantages of more media focused publishing methods. For this reason we enter a new educational cycle starting with Flash, to move on to video clip and animated 3 D production and to the development of Applications for Desktop and Mobile Devices.

If Semiomantics calls its latest script ‘Evolution’, it is because Evolution is the first 100% Flash Framework tuned by Semiomantics and because Flash constitutes a necessary evolution to access advanced online publishing technologies. Accordingly we call the new Ycademy Cycle ‘Evolution’ as well.

What’s the Excitement all about?

It’s about being able to explore new horizons together and to share knowledge for the benefit of the entire team and ultimately of our customers. Moving to advanced editing enables us finally to express our creativity in new ways and to build rich and interactive content, making our publications more interesting.

In view of our upcoming new business project for which we seek the support and sponsorship of Microsoft, our traditional battle-cry is more true than ever:

Together we are unbeatable!

PS: The above Flash Clock will be our first little Flash project this coming week.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Border collies are known as herding dogs, especially sheep. They are excellent watch dogs, love children and they are often described as the most intelligent dogs.

According to some information, a border collie had learned 1,022 words – reacting to them when spoken! Watching our inventive hooligan’s non-stop activities all day long it doesn’t surprise me… and tons of exercise and mental stimulation they definitely need, and this on an ongoing basis. It’s really a continuous dialogue – and a very endearing one as Holly has a very attentive and loving nature.

With one of her eyes being a clear blue – due to heterochromia (multi-colored eyes) – she catches everyone’s attention anyway!

Actually, Holly from Noordhoek lives in Cape Holly Road as you can see here, taken early this morning before our walk up into the Silvermine Mountains:

She will always make sure I follow and comes back to see that I’m fine – that’s just her nature:

Definitely lots of space to run – :

That’s our favorite morning run… tanking fresh air and energies before getting back to the computer and… Web Design with Passion!

Adobe Flash Workshops and Seminar by Ycademy

A  new important Ycademy development cycle will start next week: Adobe Flash will be the focus for the next 3 weeks and beyond as the case may be.

The Ycademy May Seminar, which will take place on May 29 and 30, 2010 will concentrate on practical flash application and template modification accessible to people who have followed the flash cycle as well as for participants who have no clue about flash coding: we will work along two parallel workflows, one focused on flash editing, the second on xml editing.

Photo Yorgo Nestoridis

Flash Animated Photo Album

Here is our ambitious educational plan:

Week 1: Introduction and Graphics Creation and Animation

Week 2: Action Script 3.0, Flash Audio and Flash Video

Week 3: Interactive Flash, Project Editing and Publishing

The Great Ycademy Flash Seminar

The Program of the Seminar will be released shortly, however we already know that the Seminar will focus on productivity and using Flash to increase our service level for the benefit of our customers. Namely we will develop and implement flash based products and add them to our product range.

Pre-requisites

This cycle is for participants who have Flash CS4 or CS5 installed or who will install it shortly. The Trial Version available at Adobe will do for the time of the cycle. Please contact Bianca for more information and the best way of equipping your computer with the software.

It is recommended to follow all daily calls as from Monday, May 10, 2010 to acquire the basics; the calls will be recorded. Recordings are available for free to Ycademy Pros, and they are included in the Seminar ticket available shortly.

The Ycademy Flash Cycle is accessible to beginners and there is no need to have any special knowledge. Basic Photoshop knowledge is an asset but not necessary.

Note

The Ycademy Flash Cycle is the most Cost and Time effective way to take our online Web Design and Site Development business to the next level. Join Ycademy Pro and take advantage of permanent updates and cutting edge of technology made available to interested ordinary people wanting to do extraordinary things.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Affordable DVD Packaging

Affordable DVD Packaging was – amongst others – the topic of yesterday’s exciting Photoshop Ycademy Workshop and great Web Graphics Tutorial.

Affordable DVD Packaging

Is there a way for affordable DVD Packaging?

Well, there is the long way to elaborate all this in hundreds of little steps on Photoshop – that’s what I’ve learned and practised over quite a while based on studying the early Adobe Photoshop Bible 5 – and then there is today’s fast and spiffy way by using Actions or Action Scripts, where basically the whole process is extremely compressed into automatic processes with occasional ’stops’ to insert personalized data like a title, a name, a copyright… that deliver astonishing end products.

These Action Scripts allow even people who are no artists and who don’t intend to go that route… but who have equipped themselves properly with Photoshop and who wish to present their photos and images on Blogs and Websites in a professional and appealing way… to produce great results for say CD wrappers, attractive DVD Jewel cases and many other forms of packaging.

Of course, this is only possible because some professional Graphic Designer has gone the whole route of many little steps to create an Action Script – that basically recorded all these complex steps and wrapped it all up in a PRO Action product at a price or gives it away for ‘free’. Suddenly, anyone can get an eye-catching result at one or two mouse clicks. What’s important here is to find the real good actions between the many thousands out there on the Internet… but for this we have:

Photoshop Ycademy

Whenever working professionally, it is important to be properly equipped.

A good tool may have its price, but it’s all worth it as it saves us time and – if we know how to use it – it definitely gives us an edge over the competition.

Those Photoshop Ycademy Workshop participants who wish to reach the top – and with it a highly sophisticated clientele – have to continuously invest in high quality tools and their knowledge and skills to use them. However, this will allow them to focus on Productivity, get better results and have more music in their PayPal account at the end of the day.

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Building Apps for mobile devices becomes crucial for online success as an increasing number of web users shift to mobile devices and as the usage stats of mobile users has already passed web usage by desktop and lap-top users in many countries.

The Ycademy May Seminar will focus on App Building namely on:

Two days are a short time to become familiar with programming language and developer kits. For this reason we will be using what we believe are the two most powerful App building software packs available for Windows to build and test our Apps.

Participants can test also some of the apps directly on their mobile device.

The seminar will take place on May 26 –27, 2012 from 1 p.m. till 9 p.m. London Time on each day.

Seminar tickets are available with the usual discounts; get your discount code from bianca(at)ycademy.com.

More details during our calls and mails from Bianca.

Click to Get your Ticket

Related posts: Ycademy Online Seminar January 2012 Ycademy Online Seminar Apri 2012 Ycademy Online Seminar December 12–13, 2009 Ycademy Online Seminar March 2011 Ycademy Online Seminar May 2011

Once you know how to instal fonts on CS5 on 64bit it’s real easy!

As I had saved all my professional fonts in a folder that I had imported into a font folder on my new system, all I need to do is find the ttf file (standing for true type font) or the otf file (standing for open type font), right-click and ‘instal’.

That’s it! Go check the fonts on your Photoshop… and if it’s open, you may have to close it first and reopen it. All will be there and ready for you to use and design great stuff!

And to answer the question of where the fonts actually go now, it’s under “Appearance & Personalization” in the Control Panel. Normally, you download fonts as a zip file that you want to unzip and then navigate to the files as per above.

Where do you find many great fonts for free download?

Simply go to dafont.com and select what you like.

Once you work really professionally with fonts and especially if you prepare material for printing – say for a customer -, consider to select and buy a good font. While it may be costly in the beginning, it will pay off over time and simply gives you the professional look.

Remember: even on the internet you get what you pay for.

Having set up our basic Child Theme structure we will now proceed with the customization. But before that we will do some basic WP configuration and go through the settings. You may be used to building WordPress based sites and therefore you may have some habits in as much as settings and configuration are concerned.

Semiomantics XO Custom Magazine for WordPress

Here is what I do in the dashboard:

1. Trash and permanently delete the Hello World Post.

2. Delete the default Links.

3. Set Permalinks to: /%category%/%postname%/

4. Under Settings General enter Blog Name and Tagline; for the purpose of this exercise I use  as a Title: WordPress TTP and as a Tagline: Tips, Themes and Plugins

5. Add some content to test content display by importing an RSS feed using a plugin such as Feedwordpress. I pulled into a new category called Blog the feed from my author-blog at:

http://yorgonestoridis.com/feed

We have set up a basic child theme for the purpose of modifying and customizing the Parent Theme. Creating structural modifications such as creating Custom Posts and Taxonomies are not strictly speaking theme relevant but should apply to all themes or as the case may be, to multiple themes in a Multi-user installation.

For this reason we will lodge the file which defines the custom posts outside any specific theme folder but inside wp-contents/themes.

We create a file called posttypes.php in wp-contents/themes. This file serves to define our custom post types and the way they integrate into the WP architecture.

In order to include the new Post Types in our Child theme, we include the posttype.php using an include function. This we doby adding a new file to our child theme; this file we call functions.php.

As you know, every WP theme contains a functions.php file; when creating a child theme which needs to expand the functions existing in the parent theme, then we just add a file with the same name, ‘functions.php’ to the child theme and append the functions defined in the parent theme.

Note: functions.php of the child theme does not override existing functions in the parent theme as is the case with styles (‘style.css)!

PHP allows us easily to include files in a script with the ‘include’ function and then by adding the URL to the file you wish to include.

Our ‘functions.php’ file will look as follows:

Please note that we use the ABSPATH function to construct the URL as the normal url path

does not work here.

Save functions.php into your Child Theme Folder.

In order to set up our post types we proceed step by step:

Custom Post Types allow to separate different content from the traditional blog content. Blog content usually is edited as Posts and Pages, whereas Pages (static content) can be organized in a hierarchical way and posts are sorted by categories and tags. In order to display static content (pages) using customized layout, we can create different page templates easily.

Custom Post Types allow to sort content by Posts and Custom Post Types whereas custom post types are similar to posts but using custom taxonomies and as the case may be custom layouts or design adapted to the content. A typical example is a single product page from a shop compared to a single post page on the blog section of the website.

For the purpose of our exercise we will create 3 Custom Post Types

Setting up post types is relatively easy; while we could use plugins to create custom post types, I think hard-coding is a more solid and professional way of creating them. To create a new Custom Post Type we just need to add a few lines of code to the functions file or in our case to the abstraction file at posttypes.php which will then be included int the functions.php as per above where we have added the include function into functions.php.

We will create now the 3 Custom Post Types whereas the code used for each of them is the same except for the post type names and the function names.

To create the first post type, edit posttypes.php and paste in:

Save the file.

At the top we type a comment explaining what the following code is all about (Add new Post Type for WP Tips). Then we call the function in to WordPress with ‘add_action’ and at the bottom we register the post type. As you can see the function consists of a number of arguments which we will look into later ($args).

Check out your Dashboard now and you will see that the new post type is added to the menu just above ‘Appearance’.

To add new post types, you just need to copy and paste the above code and make simple changes to the name and labels of the post type.

The above post types work, however they are not well refined. For this reason we will add some more variables. As the new posts are still called “Post” in the editor for example we will need to relabel to display the real name of the post type. For this we will write a label variable which can take an array of labels and we thus relabel all instances of our Custom Post Type.

The variable we create with the array of labels looks as follows:

We will insert this piece of code just before our block of arguments and then change the arguments accordingly as follows:

As you can see from the two commented lines, we have changed ‘label’ to ‘labels and defined with the variable from above ‘$wordpress_tips_labels’ and we have deleted the ‘singular label’ as it is replaced wby ‘singular name’ from the label variable.

For the other new post types it’s the same game, just copy and paste and change the labels accordingly.

Save posttypes.php and check it out in your dashboard.

You will now see all labels added and your site becomes a lot more user-friendly and less confusing.

We can define the functionalities of our new post types with an array under the variable ‘supports’; basically the ‘supports’ line defines which functionalities should be supported, i.e. which content should be displayed.

In our example, the line above looks like this:

When you go to your dashboard, and add a new WP Tip you will see the editor shows the ‘title’, ‘content’ and ‘comments’ fields.

While we can go crazy on adding supported functionality, we will here just look at some standard functionalities. To add more functionality we just need to append the array in the supports variable like so:

By adding the above functionalities to the supports variable, we get something pretty close to the standard post editor, since we add the author, excerpts and custom fields as well as the featured picture functionality.

Also we can add a new variable, such as ‘has archive’ and then name the archive, in our example ‘WordPress Tips’.

This archive variable allows us to create an index page just for the WP Tips post  types.

Our Code for the WP Tips Custom Post Type is as follows:

Copy and paste with the necessary changes for the other custom post types and save the file.

Check it out from the Dashboard Menu and the Editor.

As per now, our custom posts menu in the dashboard is positioned just above appearance and below comments. As custom posts are similar to posts, we want to move the custom post tabs just below the Posts tab.

As you can see from our code above, the menu position is set to ‘null’. The value ‘null’ makes that the custom post types are added at the bottom of the first section of the dashboard menu.

Depending of where you want to position your custom posts, you will need to change the value ‘null’ to another value according to the below reference scale:

0 — at the very top
5 — below Posts
10 — below Media
15 — below Links
20 — below Pages
25 — below comments
60 — below first separator
65 — below Plugins
70 — below Users
75 — below Tools
80 — below Settings
100 — below second separator

As we aim the spot below “Posts” we will use the value ‘5’, which will result in

If you want to set a particular order, you can also use 3 different numbers, like 4,5 and 6 respectively.

Do the modification inside the arguments of each post type and save.

By repositioning the custom post type menu items , we signal priority and importance.

Check it out from the dashboard and note that our custom posts are right below ‘Posts’ now.

In order to make our custom post types stick out from the menu and to add user-friendly visual identifiers, we replace the default icons with custom icons.

There are two sizes needed, 16px and 32 px for the menu and the page title area respectively.

I have created sample icons and psd files for your convenience: please download from HERE.

Decompress the downloaded rar file and copy the image folder into wp-contents/themes (as we had done with posttypes.php, as we want to make these images available to all themes.

To add these icons we introduce a new function to posttypes.php with a function batch including some css/html code for styling purposes:

Note the incomplete php delimiter at the end which is needed to switch back to php from css/html code.

At this stage, your posttypes.php looks as follows:

Check it out from your dashboard and you should see something similar to this:

Custom Post Types with Custom Icons

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We grow through our struggles… but inbetween I just imagine myself being that happy, fat and buzzing bumble bee in my garden floating from flower to flower and living in complete bliss!

To get Web Design with Passion back on a new PC meant and still means installing each and every program from scratch. Not that this isn’t an interesting and instructive exercise nor is it the first time I do this – but it’s time-consuming and often frustrating especially when there is such a huge list to do!

However, starting out from scratch has its merits that can be compared to the annual spring clean-out: unless you are an obsessive gatherer and collector, it’s a good time to get rid of everything that’s superfluous and not absolutely necessary and becoming lean and light with lots of potential to move forward with a new and speedy lightness of being and let the creative juices flow. I’m not quite there yet as too puzzled by some mysteries noone else knew an answer to so far – but here’s my first post ‘after the storm’ and it can only get better and faster!

YEBO GOGO – this is about being a student for life!

Watermark and Copyright with Photoshop CS4

A small but important task for all creative minds: protect your work! Even considering that in certain countries, such as the USA, your images are automatically copyright protected when you publish them, you may want to make it “crystal” clear to everyone that you claim your rights on your work.

In Photoshop CS 4 it is easy to create a simple Action for the purpose of watermarking and to add a copyright notice to your picture. The watermark is the visible sign, while the copyright notice is attached to the file.

Transparent Watermark 1

Transparent Watermark 2

At tonight’s call we will create an Action in CS4 allowing you to add quickly your watermark and copyright notice to your images.

Join the workshop at 8 pm London time at yorGOtalk.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Semiomantics XO for WordPress — Custom Magazine

Like on any live site, our test site on BitNami allows us to add themes either from the Dashboard (upload the theme’s zip file) or by pasting the theme into the themes folder in wp-contents.

Access your BitNami environment using Windows Explorer and surf to the themes folder. You will see the same folders and files structure under htdocs as you are used to when accessing your WordPress folder on a server using an FTP client.

Folders on BitNamy WP Stack

In order to add Themes, we just drop theme folders into the ‘themes’ folder as per above. As you can see, I have amongst others) added my Semiomantics XO (the ‘xo’ folder under themes). XO will serve as the parent theme of the new website. Instead however of customizing XO directly, I will create a child theme which will contain all modifications. The advantage is clear: when an update or upgrade of the theme becomes available, the parent theme can be updated without destroying the child and restarting the customization job from scratch.

A WordPress child theme consists first of all of a Folder to which we add a style-sheet.

This style-sheet contains a commented header which defines the parent theme folder as well as other optional data and it usually imports the parent theme’s style-sheet with a simple line of code (no need to copy paste the whole style-sheet). Also we will add a screenshot which will serve as a thumbnail in the Themes tab of our WP Dashboard.

Style-sheet for Child Theme

As you can see above, I am editing my files using the free PSPad which is handy to edit the various files we need to develop.

1. Add a new folder to the WP Themes folder under wp-contents/themes; name it as you like your theme to be named, in my case: yorgo12

2. Create a new file called style.css using your editor and save it into the new theme folder.

3. Edit the style.css file by adding a commented section defining:

You could add other data as some authors do, such as Author’s URI and more, but that’s not necessary.

NOTE: All the above information sits between comment tags (/*.….….*/)

Next, we import the style-sheet of the parent theme with the following line of code:

I have then added a comment to remind that you should not edit above unless you know what you do.

Your style.css file reads now similar to the following:

Save the file into the new Child Theme folder.

4. Add a Thumbnail

Usually the image represents a screenshot of the new site but it can also be a brand logo or any other image. Important: the image should be called ‘screenshot’ and be in png format to fit into WP. Use image size 300px x 225px for best display.

screenshot.png

Drop the image into the Child Theme folder.

Let’s now activate our new Child Theme from the WP Dashboard under Appearance/Themes.

What you will see is an out of the box XO when looking at the front-end of the site.

Having set the base for our custom development, we will start now to adapt the site to the needs of the hypothetical customer. Continue reading the next post.

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We will therefore use most of our remaining daily Ycademy calls this month to go into advanced customization issues. But first we will start at the beginning by planning and formulating a project which will allow us to test code, functions and design.

Semiomantics XO Custom Theme for WordPress

For the purpose of this exercise, we will build plan and execute a hypothetical customer’s project.

The new website will be about WordPress, namely about WordPress Tips, Themes and Plugins. It’s a site for a WordPress developer and web designer.

The structure of the Website will be based on WordPress and include some static pages such as the About, Contact, Imprint and Privacy pages as well as structured dynamic content.  As the site will focus on 3 main topics, Tips, Themes and Plugins, we will build for each of these topics custom Posts and Taxonomies.

To build the new website in a test environment, we install BitNami and namely the WordPress stack (free download). BitNami creates an independent (Apache) server environment with MySQL server and installed WordPress, ready to use via our browser. If you are used to Firefox and Firebug, you will find it easy to customize your styles and designs.

Now we can access the WordPress Dashboard via the browser and the files using windows explorer.

We are ready to start working on our project. Please look forward to the next related post where we will start adding Semiomantics XO and start building our custom child theme.

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Media Development and Design Ycademy

Website Development has changed in recent years: while 10 years ago simple html sites with some embedded small pictures were the rule, customers ask increasingly for advanced media features, interactivity and connectivity namely with social networks.

The Path to ...

Hiod, YORGOO and Ycademy have made cutting edge technology available to a broad public and part-time site developers since 2001. We continue to develop along general trends by helping ordinary people reaching extraordinary results in an environment where by definition things become more complex and demand permanent education, be it just to allow to target marketing efforts to the ever moving target of the masses: from the PC to the Laptop, to Social Networks and to Mobile devices.

Semiomantics semantic Online Publishing Frameworks

With Semiomantics we have created a versatile WordPress based publishing platform for individuals and pros. Semiomantics scripts can handle most any content in most any format and are fully multimedia enabled; however web designers who customize the scripts need to be able to edit more demanding formats, such as multimedia requiring at least basic knowledge of flash, after effects, media encoding and such like.

Of course these tasks can be out-sourced, however as these features are in the trend, they are also the ones representing most of the added value.

Ycademy will continue to provide to Ycademy Seminar Participants scripts for personal use which can be edited without any knowledge of Flash and such like. Such scripts however are not adapted for commercial use, since they do not represent the necessary security and protection of content.

Ycademy

Ycademy remains the most cost effective access to high performance scripts and advanced technology.

... success ...

For Website Developers and Web designers Ycademy continues to offer support and step by step introduction to advanced technology.

At this point in time, we are preparing to move ahead by focusing on media related basic knowledge. This includes trainings related to programs such as Adobe Flash, After Effects, Media Encoder and more.

Over the last 3 months we have been on a very fast educational track as we needed to catch up rapidly with some missing knowledge, namely in the fields of image editing and publishing and photography.

The next step will be flash for those who are interested in being able to provide better visual effects with lower file weight. Also, Flash allows us to profit from the most recent Semiomantics developments;  Semiomantics advanced xml optimization entails high response from Search Spiders and allows for top ranking with Flash encoded sites.

I am aware that flash encoding requires the use of Adobe’s flash editor and the curriculum is therefore designed for participants who dispose of Flash Pro (at least version CS 3).

Photoshop vs. Flash

When deciding to set up our educational sessions pertaining to Photoshop, we focused already on the logical consequence: Photoshop leads to Flash.

Photoshop is a design tool developed originally for the printing industry, not the web. Photoshop is the industry standard for editing images and bitmaps, while Flash sets the standard for vector and raster graphics. In simple terms: Photoshop is for static stuff, while Flash is for animated 2 dimensional stuff. Photoshop is best for Print output, while Flash is best for Web output.

... with a vision ...

Photoshop’s image output can be easily copied and reproduced, while Flash is not easy to reproduce and is therefore more secure.

Flash has it’s own programing language called ActionScript; using ActionScript we can create applications, games, interactive content and so on. Streaming video can be easily controlled by Flash using ActionScript (see YouTube).

Flash helps to express ourselves better in the web environment, it allows for more flexibility, security and interaction. Flash leads logically to 3D and 3D animation.

Flash Ycademy

Moving on to Flash with interested participants needs some planning based on the following key factors:

1. Interest

Is there sufficient interest in a Flash Curriculum? The plan includes 2 Flash sessions per week (Tuesday and Thursday). The session will focus on Flash Basics in order to learn as quickly as possible to work with templates and to customize templates for customers’ needs.

The remaining 3 weekly sessions, (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) will focus on Marketing, Editing and Publishing using WordPress CMS, Semiomantics and improving our skills and editing by applying our knowledge of CSS, Photoshop,  Digital Photography.

The Flash Curriculum will require thorough preparation from our end and availability form participant’s side. Participants need to be properly equipped, which implies the installation of a Flash editor on the Computer.

In order to make this worth the effort, we estimate that we need at least 10 participants. Cost and arrangements will be comparable to earlier similar set-ups such as our curriculum for Office 2010 or Photoshop CS4.

... to embarke for a Journey ...

2. The Equipment

Participants must be properly equipped to profit from the sessions. We will need Flash Pro as well as Photoshop.

3. The Seminar

If we proceed with the above plan, then we will be able to hold an interesting Ycademy Seminar in May which will be interesting and open for Flash savvy participants as well as for participants who do not edit flash. The seminar will deal with Flash and xml, the latter allowing participants to build flash sites and features without editing flash, while the first will be able to embed content selectively into Flash.

In a certain way, the Seminar will be a continuation of the March Seminar where we have introduced Semiomantics Evolution. New templates will be available for different purposes, whereas some participants will edit just xml, others the fla files to come to the same visual result on the first shot applying different techniques.

Your input is needed

I would be interested to find out what you think about the above plan and get some feed-back about prevailing interest and commitment.

... as successful online editors and publishers.

Please comment here below and join tomorrow’s session where we will detail the above to give you a clear view of what we have in mind and where it will lead to.

Don’t be worried about the eventual difficulties; while we are learning Flash we will have the opportunity to profit from our existing knowledge and solidify our Photoshop, CSS, Digital Photography and xml skills. The pace will be reduced compared to the last 3 months where we have gone fast and often spent more time on a day to day bases than anticipated.

I am looking forward to your input.

Thanks!

PS: The pics have been taken yesterday and I have just pulled them through a B&W Holga Filter in Photoshop.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Fresh Fish in Vouliagmeni – Varkiza

To get away from the computer ahead of yesterday’s Ycademy online Seminar, I went for a stroll at the picturesque fishing port of Varkiza next to Vouliagmeni.

I have brought back some nice pics as well as a short clip demonstrating what we mean when we talk about fresh fish :-).

Zoom Burst on the Picture below

I have shot with a small point and shoot Leica C-Lux 3. To make it a bit more difficult for the Cam I took some distance and zoomed into the scene. The cam shoots 30 fps in HD QuickTime .mov format. I have pulled it to Windows Live Movie Maker, then to Adobe Media encoder before loading the clip to YouTube. At YouTube you can watch the clip in various formats up to 1080 p HD!

Even after YouTube compression, the result remains suprisingly good considering that the cam comes with the size of a credit card and is less thick than 1 inch.

Fresh Fish in Varkiza

While the Windows Movie has a file size of over 23 MB, the flash compression as used by YouTube reduces the size to below 1 MB, while preserving HD Quality.

See YouTube HERE.

Enjoy!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Bird sanctuary websites offer online bird watchers information and insight about the bird life found in a specific bird park or area, opening times, entry fees, special events and perhaps membership possibilities etc, but what everyone is probably most interested in are pictures and images of birds, our favourite feathered friends.

If you have a garden that’s frequented by many different birds and you love to watch and photograph them, you may consider publishing your personal birding website or blog to share your thoughts, impressions, photos, perhaps sketches and whatever you want to include, with fellow birding afficinados. You may even invite other bird watchers to join you to gain a broader and even more interesting spectrum!

Your personal bird lover website could be designed in such an attractive way that it captures the interest of like-minded bird watchers from other parts of the country if not the world! The world of birds is truly without limits!

The Internet offers us such wonderful and affordable possibilities for individual expression today where we can create something that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Why not pass on the wonder, joy and privilege of living in our magic world today?!

Well, meanwhile I know most if not all of those pictures were illusions… and that we can all achieve with some good original photo material and a little bit of Photoshop! Ha!

What you see here is definitely the full moon I photographed in that night – around 11: 45 pm – and it stood like that in the pitchblack sky. No halo, no softness – like cut out.

And this was Noordhoek Beach in the very early morning where the full moon was hardly visible – now it is!I mean it was !

The fact is, I photographed the ‘real thing’ on 24 July 2010 and wrote about it HERE. And there was no manipulation involved whatsoever – it was huge, red and definitely super and extraordinary in many ways!

While we may all have our favourite hangout spots and like to follow our friends’ suggestions when visiting a new one, Restaurant Websites help to find new places when travelling to another town or an unknown area.

For this reason, a restaurant website needs to indicate what it specializes on in terms of food (seafood, country cuisine, Thai Food etc…) and it must offer clear directions, possibly through Google Maps or good photography of the environment.

Friends, real ones and those we collect on Social Networks, suggest… but then Pictures sell the Restaurant and Menu!
It’s through the way a Restaurant Blog communicates its atmosphere, service and – of course – mouth-watering menus, wines, cocktails and specials – that we are attracted to one or another. Often these reactions are spontaneous and following our belly!

Restaurant websites and blogs serve as a brilliant, easy and fun way to be and keep in touch with the restaurant clientele, inform them of what’s new on the menu or which ‘Specials’ are on when and where, especially also around major annual festivities and events like for Christmas Dinners, New Year’s Dinners or for Valentine’s Day or linked to certain activities and festivals in the area or town, eg music concerts, sports events and the like.

Restaurants should ideally have a “Wine and Dine” Fanpage on Facebook that’s kept up-to-date with what’s happening, where questions are answered and where there’s continuous conversation.

Besides, and most importantly, a restaurant must be easily reachable on the Mobile Web. People want to see what’s on offer and hit the booking button fast – often just minutes before they arrive !

We at Web Design with Passion develop and design elegant, user-friendly and extremely Google efficient websites and blogs exclusively on WP based Semiomantics – have a look and get in touch HERE to discuss what you may be needing.

Restaurant Websites Sell!

Portrait Shooting

Based on Digital Photography Ycademy 9 we are able to plan our pictures depth of field. The only remaining problem is: you may have a camera which does not allow for A settings (manual Aperture priority settings).

Don’t worry, there is a way to at least partially compensate for this shortfall.

The below gallery can best be viewed HERE (opens new window).

Depth of Field in Portraiting with a low end Camera or Mobile Phone

Remember, we said that the depth of field is function of aperture and distance. Hence, we can use the distance trick which works with most any digital camera or mobile phone.

First we try to compose our picture in a way that the person is not glued to a background, such as leaning on a wall. Position the person at least 2 meters off the next background. Then frame clsosely from maximum 1.5 meters (without zooming). The result may be better if the background is even further away to fall out of the metered focal range (corresponding to infinity settings) which is at about 10-12 meters.

Now shoot your portrait: the autofocus will grab the face and apply the distance, which in it’s turn will trigger the aperture and shutter speed in function of that distance and light. By setting your camera presets on Portrait, the camera does this as well, whereas a narroc depth of field is forced.

In any case, you will end up with a sharp portrait and a more or less blurred background.

Portrait Post Editing

If you have taken your picture according to the above, then your post editing is a sunday walk. Just apply some of the great lightroom presets or photoshop actions. Some of these professional tools will lift the quality of your mediocre picture dramatically and clearly digg a huge canion between you and the competitors in your camera’s class.

Here an example: the below picture has been taken with my 4 years old $50 supermarket camera according to the above rule. Then I just pulled it through some professional filters such as stuff from from Kubota, Davis and onOne. This is a matter of just seconds :-).

Join tonight’s YcademyWorkshop for more tips and tricks.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

The issue here is – as discussed in my earlier article on  “iPhone Simulator”  (or ‘iPhone Emulator’ as it was called in the Ycademy Workshop) – :  how to actually see what you design when doing the mobile setup of your blog when you do not have access to an iphone or smartphone and none of the iphone simulators or emulators found on Google seem to be helpful, in other words: when you can’t see what you do.

While I enjoyed Zen Shooting with Bow & Arrow, in Web Design I prefer to see exactly what I do :)

Once you know the answer it’s always simple: when you make your website mobile without owning or having access to one of those spiffy mobile devices, the answer is to download the Safari Browser and then, at the top under DEVELOP and > USER AGENT > choose the iPhone or iPad or whatever you need to test your work!

What you see here are first results when using exclusively the settings in WP Touch Pro – no CSS stylesheet at this stage. First, I wanted to see what’s there and experiment with it, learning the lessons from trial and error and getting an understanding of what should ideally be changed or adapted and for what purpose. Our customers are all different and have other priorities. The mobile web has become crucial for attracting potential clients for those who run a business and have products and/or services to sell.

Important: Thumbnails don’t show if you leave them on “Custom Field Thumbnails” in the Dashboard (WP Touch Settings); you have to select “WP Thumbnails” as you can see on the above top example. I did not change the size nor take out the reflections.

My next excursion will be into the stylesheet… but first let’s greet another absolutely stunning day to begin a week filled with promise!

And publishing regular original content is crucial for the success of an Author Blog.

If you look at my Author Blog, you find anything related to Art, Media Design, Website Development and Design, Photography, Nature and… of course South Africa. This is where my heart and focus are and this leaves me a lot of scope for things to investigate, research, be enthusiastic about and share in form of any kind of expression that’s possible online.

While many people believe they can get away in a ‘free’ way by just using their Facebook accounts to write and express themselves, they don’t operate from a position of freedom – like if they would be owning their own website or blog where they are in full control. Social Networks work for themselves and make and change the rules, they possess your content – be it written or in form of photos – and even sell you without your consent or vote nor giving you a fair share.

If a herd mentality is what you like, this will not bother you and you gladly pay the price.

If, however, you wish to be independent and build your own reputation online, based on your name, your talents and your services and/or products, there is no way around having your own personalized Author Blog or website.

Think about it and get started – for instance on a free WordPress Blog. If you want something more sophisticated, have a look at my SHOWCASE and – if and once you’re ready for your own driver’s seat online – let’s talk!