BackSpaceStudios Blog

WordPress Theme Design Workshop at RMI - Recap

This past Saturday I ran another WordPress workshop at RMI ( Rich Media Institute ), it was great to see so many familiar faces, you know who you are This is the first in a series of workshops I’m running a RMI this year.  This weekend, Saturday Feb 14th 1-530pm, is WordPress Plugin Development ( register now ).

Other workshops to look forward to , WordPress 2.7 - all the ins and outs,  WordPress 2.7 Admin Skinning/Customization.

During the theme design workshop, we converted a static HTML+CSS web template, from styleshout.com, to a functional WordPress theme. There is still a little work to do to get it all working, you can downlaod here and feel free to feedback or ask questions.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop.

As promised here is a list of some great FREE Premium Theme sites, enjoy.
http://themeshaper.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://www.wpsnap.com/
http://freethemelayouts.com/
http://www.styleshout.com
http://wpcandy.com/

…and for inspiration…
http://www.bestwebgallery.com
http://welovewp.com/

Posts from past workshops:
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/wordpress-25-workshop-at-rmi-recap/open-source/
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/vecta-lova-free-wordpress-theme/open-source/

ColdFusion is alive! And it’s Open Source…

Last night PHUG hosted another FREE workshop, Railo - Open Source ColdFusion, presented by Rick Mason, Technical Director for FITC.

…and yes, I said last night, normally we hold all FREE PHUG workshops on Tuesday nights, but Rick was unavailable so we changed the date to Monday,  which would account for the poor turnout ;(

However, those who did manage to remember and make their way out had the fortunate opportunity to learn about Railo and get some extra one on one time with the master.

Most of us, especially anyone involved in open source, doesn’t really know about or pay attention to CF. In fact, even those outside the open source community just assume it’s dead! Well, according to Rick and the many passionate CFer’s, the community is still here and growing! It’s always exciting to see another commercial project going open source. Hopefully, and from what I took in last night, Railo should attract many open sourcer’s to its realm. Open Source CFML offers tons of potential to the community at large, a few simple tags (which are basically HTML style with simple if statements) , you create on the fly pdf’s, out put and track video, embed AS and JQuery, and there is an Eclipse debugger as well, just to name a few.

Recently PHUG has recruited a few journalism students from Seneca to become bloggers and last they had the opportunity to sit down with Rick after the workshop and interview him on camera, they also recorded a good chunk of the workshop as well. The vudeo should be posted on PHUG soon, and i will make sure to cross post it here.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop > http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=08F13F85-D0AE-2914-9E21-F7C7C94B2818

BeatMaker Class - Awesome PHUG Workshop!

This past Tuesday PHUG hosted another great FREE PHUG Workshop at Seneca, Flash Media Server and BeatMaker. I won’t go into to much detail, you read the revieew over at the PHUG site, but I will mention the very cool Open Source Flash class that Dan Zen, presenter ( Sheridan Professor and Inventor ), demoed that night.

BeatMaker Class - Simple Access to Sound Frequencies
Inventor, Dan Zen, has built two wrapper classes that make accessing the Flash computeSpectrum functionality accessible to designers and easier for developers. The SoundBeat class sets up general spectrum analysis and the BeatMaker class extends the SoundBeat class to provide scale and / or alpha animations to sound.

Here is an example below, you can drag the flashing eyes around, also, watch the eyes careful when there is more base and less treble, very cool effect.

Download the files:
BeatMaker
UniqueBalls
Handout

And the winner is…

Congratulations to Aaron Jackson who is the winner of the BackSpaceStudios/Seneca Logo Design Contest!

BackSpaceStudios/Seneca Logo Design Contest

ONLY 5 MORE DAYS LEFT TO VOTE! CONTEST ENDS DECEMBER 12 !

Some if you already know that I am a part-time teacher at Seneca College in various different new media programs. This semester I have been teaching a class in Design Fundamentals for the MFD (Media Fundamentals) program. In our last class the students had to create a logo design for 1 of 3 fictitious companies; sporting wear, cosmetic, and travel. They where giving roughly 3hours to complete this assignment using only Adobe Illustrator.

Just for fun, I made a last minute decision to run a contest for the best logo design.

We received almost 60 entries from 2 classes! Below are the finalists (Chosen by PHUG board members). The winner will receive a cash prize and books.

The vote is in your hands!