LinkArtist Multimedia - The Blog

Whilst on the hunt for an alternative to the shiteous built-in WordPress WYSIWYG Editor, I found this little gem. I am posting from it now, in fact! It’s available for Mac OSX and Windows, which is great, because I am running Leopard on my main machine, and XP on my laptop… so I don’t need to worry about being on a certain computer to use it.

The beauty of this app is that it allows you to queue posts, draft posts and edit everything offline.

I am terrible lately at updating my blog, mostly because the mental effort (shyeah, I know…) required to open my browser, be online, save drafts, etc, becomes too cumbersome. Yeah, my life is so hard.

Anyway, check it out!

I have been going about my usual business, working my arse off, the usual, and have discovered that my host is having intermittent issues - if you consider “intermittent” to mean “no-mail-server-emails-for-2-weeks”.

It was strange, because I usually get a lot of enquiries, but this week have not received any! SO Annoying!

So, if you have tried to email via the Enquiry form, I hope you read the blog, because you can email me direct at tea@linkartist.com.au instead. In the meantime, I have been reassured that the email server will eventually be fixed and I HOPE that the queued emails get through…

And yes, I will have a non-boring, non-business related blog post later in the week

I have found that people can be surprised when quoted our price for web design, but the simple matter is that our services are worked out at $100.00 an hour which is, more or less, an industry standard. Web design, and then redesign, can greatly increase the price when you take in the fact that a page design, by itself, can take eight hours or more to create. Add together coding and all the other bells and whistles that make up a unique site and you have your price.

In the end you get a site, tailored to you and your business, which is unique. Your site becomes your front line in marketing your business and can generate you thousands upon thousand of dollars over the life of the site. Is that not worth paying for?

Two web sites, both belonging to design companies, were sent to me this morning that really show that you get what you pay for. One is in English and the other is German but both could be one and the same. The both want your business and both are cheaper than LinkArtist Multimedia, way cheaper.

I’ll talk mostly about the one in English as I can read their site but it’s not that hard to navigate the German site for reasons I will point out.

OK, example 1. Joyvill Inc.

On first impressions, Joyvill’s site is nice and clean. It’s jam packed full of all those buzz word that you expect to find from some of our competitors. Straight away you know where they are located and that they know what Search Engine Optimizations is.

The front page then goes on to things you should already expect, like a site that will impress your competition and your clients will be able to use. Would you expect anything else?

OK so sounds pretty good huh? A cheap easy to use, pretty site from a ‘Web Design’ company! Where do I sign? Not so fast!

Example 2 Design Bits

Have you clicked on the link yet? Notice anything? I’ll make it easier.

Kinda similar huh! There is a reason for this. They use templates for their ‘design’. Both sites come from the same template then are populated with content specific to their own site. If I had a template to use, I’m pretty sure that I could knock up that site in five hours or so. Five times $100.00 equals $500.00 not ‘from $1600.00′! So it’s easy to see where the profit is.

But what if both businesses are connected and or owned by the same group? I did consider that and it could be true. Instead I took a look at their previous work. Now using what you know about internet templates, do you see any similarities?

Basically it comes down to this. You get what you pay for. If you like what these guys are selling then how about this.

1. Go to Template Monster , Free Site Templates or one of the many other thousands of template sites on the net.

2. Pay between $25 and $65 for a basic template.

3. Using Google or any other search engine to hunt out step by step information you need to upload and populate your very own site!

4. Enjoy. Just don’t worry when you see a copy of your site somewhere else.

Let me tell you how I came upon BioShock: a new client liked the 1950’s dark, art deco feel to it, and asked me if I had seen it as a reference for their site design. So, being the ever-selfless businesswoman, I decided to spend some time playing the game to see how it felt. And a conversation like this took place:

Me: “I know I have made it when I get to justify playing games for a client.”

Jason: “No, Téa, you’ll know you’ve made it when you get to charge clients for the hours spent playing the game”.

Man he’s a smartarse.

A couple of weeks later, I have just, right now, finished playing it. And I have to say, I think… I have found the perfect game. Not too hard that it alienates me (Hello Far Cry-where-I-played-the-last-level-in-God-mode-because-I-have-carpal-tunnel-and-suck), and enough depth and choice to the story that keeps my goldfish-like attention span.

I really don’t know that I can fault this game. There are so many ways to play it (and apparently the ending reflects *how* you played the game…of course, I am always the good guy and can’t bring myself to play the bad guy… so I am just going on rumour :))

Anyway, if you haven’t played it yet. DO. IT. NOW.

It is creepy. It is intelligent. And, it is currently 12:35am and I don’t know that I can sleep just yet because I may just have nightmares. But boy, is it fun!

Check out the demo here.

I got an email from my friend, Former President James Taylor this morning that said:

Hey Téa, just had to share…

I’m disappointed that Trevor didn’t include the screen cap in the lecture notes (I think he respects your IP ;P), but go to page 11 of this PDF and check the references.

We had a look at online writing in Journalism class the other night and, for an example of a personal blog, what came up on the big screen in the lecture theatre but ‘Trash Talk with Tealou’.

I laughed heartily

Just letting you know that your inner most rantings now have even more academic merit

JT

The attached PDF, sure enough, referred to my website as an example. Holy Shit. It is so funny, and also weird, because I have also been copping some flak from my sister and her mates because I called her suburb shitholesville on my blog and they only just found out about it. Heh.

Its funny how you can go on a journey with a blog. It has chronicled some ups and downs, from moving house to having children, to being in the public service and wanting to glass the Town of Esperance in the face with the nearest bottle, to writing about Politics and world affairs, and the odd random quip between me and my equally insane soulmate.

I know it may sound strange, but its not often that my web life and my real life collide. I know it may sound funny when I make my living on the web, but really, it was always just this thing I do, representing my thoughts at the time, random observations about various things, and I have never actually thought that anyone read it, let alone putting it in a Journalism class.

I can think of maybe once or twice where something I have written in the heat of the moment has gotten me in hot water in the “real world”, like the time I upset the in-laws, and I think my mother reads occasionally… and a previous employer called it “Undergraduate but well written” (thanks Jeff!)… but its always just been a place where I let off steam, and a place where I attempt to log what life was like in my 20s. When my grandchildren google me one day, they will see that I was not always reliant on other people to wipe my arse (with the exception of this brief time), and was actually an ok human being.

I actually quite like that little bit of acknowledgment, particularly from a lecturer at my old University. And its not an ego thing, its not even out of a desire to share my stories, but just to have someone that is outside my immediate group in the blogosphere and circle of friends say “hey, look at this” - well, thats pretty cool.

It makes me think that I am kinda on the right track.

Even if my sister’s friends from Leda want to smash my face in for expressing myself, so what? Nothing they write will ever be used in a University classroom. So there.

And Leda IS a shithole.

I bought Vista the other day purely on impulse. I was in Dick Smith looking for a mouse for Mina’s computer (shut up — yes, she has her own computer) and the pretty display and $180 pricetag beckoned with new shininess. I nursed it for a few days before finally installing it, and I have to say, I am actually very pleasantly surprised.

I know that the Slashdot and Whirlpool geeks will talk about performance issues and the driver and compatibility issues that are inevitable with a brand new OS - but these guys are also anti-Microsoft, Linux lovers, who, despite making a very good operating system cannot make things pretty or usable to save their lives. Yes. There, I said it. Geeks cannot design for shit.

I also have to say that I have often been drawn to OSX and a pretty G5 Mac lately, what with all the widgets and the dock and the pretty window effects and, well, the ability of Apple to design an interface doesn’t really need to be mentioned here because we all know that Windows users are not worthy of a person in cargo pants that can afford a $15,000 PC.

Until now.

I guess when you have a long and laboured history with Microsoft, and you have read all the “meh” reviews on the usual geek sites, it is no wonder that I was skeptical. And when I first installed Vista, I had a problem with my RAID Controller and Firefox. The RAID Controller problem was my own — Vista was looking for drivers for a piece of hardware that I had forgotten was in there-and-I-swear-that-all-I-did-last-time-was-just-put-mainboard-driver-disk-in… in short, it was my own fault. The only drivers I had to actually install were my printer drivers. More on hardware in a minute though.

I do have to say that my initial thoughts about my impulse-purchased Vista Upgrade came to fruition when I went to open the box. I couldn’t work out how to open the bloody thing, and I remember uttering under my breath that I hope Vista is more user friendly than the damn packaging. It was kinda a nice experience though, being my first legitimate copy of Windows since….Windows 98. Yes, bad Téa… but it certainly made me feel all self righteous and legal I have to say. I put the disk in and I was greeted with something very pretty. Noice.

Installation was piss easy. Just make sure you have everything plugged in and off you go. Wait about half an hour and its done.

The funny thing about this whole experience was that when I actually loaded Vista for the first time, I actually did say “Wow”. Either my brain is hardwired to clever advertising campaigns or this is actually a very nice OS. And as much as it pains me to say it about a Microsoft product - it is most certainly the latter.

And the funny thing is, that you can see all the funny things that Microsoft have so obviously ripped off, like the tabbed browsing in IE7, the Window Effects and the…umm… Gadgets (no, I did NOT say Widgets. I said GADGETS! hee!), but they have actually implemented them in a way that you can actually forgive them for a moment for being the soulless copycat cunts that they are.

I am impressed by how Vista has handled all my hardware. It even recognised my graphics tablet right off the bat and my $18 Strathfield webcam. The only thing I needed to actually install was my Canon printer, and that was a breeze.
I am also impressed with the way that multimedia has been handled by Vista. We have a Wireless Media Player that streams my torrented TV sho-err I mean “home movies” to our big screen TV, and it has handled all of these things pretty seamlessly. After downloading Windows Media Player 11 and hating it, I can now see the bigger picture and it most definitely fits with the whole Vista experience.
I had to turn off the User Protection stuff because it was driving me bonkers and broke Firefox (yes Shandar love, I WORKED IT OUT AND CAN FIX YOUR PC! Aren’t I a genius?), but when I disabled that, MSN Messenger (of all things) decided it didn’t want to play. At the time of writing I have not put my Adobe Creative Suite or Macromedia Suite on it - but I don’t envisage any major problems.

So is it worth the upgrade? I will actually say yes with a BUT. The BUT being that you need to be confident that you have enough RAM and Processing Power to make it all pretty-like. I won’t really know how it compares to XP performance wise until I have loaded it with all the crap that normally slows my PC down (Photoshop, Flash, Video Editing, Music software etc…). I haven’t benchmarked it, haven’t looked under the hood, but boy, is it slick.

I know that in the Open Source fanboi world it doesn’t count for much (which is why Linux will never be mainstream), but for someone like me, who can easily stare at a screen for 16 hours a day, aesthetics and usability DO MATTER. And Vista has this.

Besides, its shiny. Its new. Its an opportunity for me to dodge work and play around. And who can complain about that?

For those people that have been having trouble with accessing this site using Internet Explorer, I apologise. It didn’t like my plugin for the absolutely beautiful Flash headings that I had installed, so thanks a-fucking-lot Microsoft.

Anyway, if you’ve been using IE, welcome back. Sure, IE6 sucks, but IE7 has to be better, right? Because its got, like TABBED BROWSING and everyfink! No. IE still sucks arse and if you can, get Firefox.

But, alas, after many attempts to repair the problem and still keep my beloved Flash titles, no can do. Remember what I gave up for you as you read my blog and I hope you appreciate it. Because now the headlines look ugly

Ah well.

Welcome back nonetheless.

I apologise for this bit of ultra-nerd gushing, but I can barely contain my excitement.

I may be a little late to jump on the bandwagon, but I have recently discovered a great little (well not so little, actually extremely powerful) development application called Ruby on Rails.

It is open source, it is extremely powerful, and can create complex web applications easily and can turn months of development into weeks, maybe even days, depending on what you want to do with it.

I have been going through the Lynda.com (another fantabulous site that is well worth the $25US a month subscription) tutorials on Ruby on Rails development and I have to say — this is the sort of thing that is making the new web so exciting for developers. I am currently more of a PHP and Actionscript/Flash developer, but I think I might try and start incorporating Ruby on Rails a bit more. I cannot rave about this enough. These development frameworks really are on the cutting edge, and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.

I might even start experimenting with some web apps in the future… in fact I think ROR may be the exact thing I am looking for for my LinkArtistCMS. Very, very exciting.