About JCMAX.INFO

Honeymoon Over

Wed, 13 May 2009 21:35:00 -0400

If you haven’t followed my previous blogs, which your probably haven’t, you won’t know about my noble effort to work with iWeb. This website today is still an iWeb production, but you may notice this is the first blog update in quite awhile. In a nutshell, iWeb is limited and frustrating for anyone who might want to continue on the website making learning curve. And, well, I was a bit beyond the iWeb kindergarten level when I did the test drive, but as a new Mac user, I wanted to give this Apple product my best effort -- hoping it would be a simple way for my personal blog expression.
It just didn’t work, so it’s time to move on. The moving on led me to ExpressionEngine, a very fine modular website software. Everything I’ve dreamed of in an excellent web development product. I am presently hard at work (or play) building my ExpresseionEngine website for my newly incorporated JChost, LLC company. In the image above you see the current front door to a site that is still very much under construction. Take a peek and you will see my new enterprise. Not so new, really, more of a culmination of the last 15 years.
So, to get oriented with ExpressionEngine swiftly, I am making good use of wonderful free tutorials by wonderful ExpressionEngine ProWeb affiliate, Mike Boyink. His training website is Train-ee. Cute. And awesome, really.
There you have it. I truly have found my niche, an ee-niche. Now, be sure to stay in touch with my new JChost, LLC website, and watch for my kickoff celebration! Except...you know, don’t hold your breath, it may take a little while to get all the pieces in place, and of course, I don’t officially need another job until my County exit next March. All I need to do now is take one step at a time...

Helping Hand Wipes

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:46:53 -0400

Just before a planned week-off from the Parks and Recreation daily grind, a co-worker asked me for an analysis of his sister’s business website. The website markets wonderful products with award winning design packaging, yet was getting no traffic. The reason? Except for the shopping cart, the site was created with 100% Flash actionscript. This meant that it had virtual pages that were essentially images, with no searchable text, no pages to image in search engine cache, no way for search engines to detect updated content. The beautiful expertly done Flash was not being viewed by anyone. Just too much of a good thing!
My co-worker sent a brief of my analysis to his sister, and there went my vacation! I spent my “time off”, including more than 80 hours in one week, revitalizing in the Jamar Labs website into search engine optimized pages. And that is just the beginning. Armed with a strategy to maximize visibility, my services will continue in our joint effort to get these wonderful face, hand, and feet wipes into the hands of people who will love them.
Just as I have found great pleasure in informational services to the public about Parks and Recreation, it is a delight to promote a great product that I love and know others will too, not to mention the added bonus of working with a great lady who is an intelligent and energetic entrepreneur. Watch for more of this unfolding story and check out these superior Wipe Your Face, Wipe Your Feet, and Wipe Your Hands products!

Helping Friends...

Fri, 6 Mar 2009 20:02:16 -0500

There are just lots of folks out there who are giving there best shot at making a viable living by doing what they know and like to do best. With times such as they are, everyone certainly has friends or family who are creating their own businesses for lack of other potent employment opportunities, or just because they prefer to not work in a stressful job place environment.
I was recently honored by two such friends who are highly motivated and skilled in their areas of expertise. Since their focus has been doing what they do best, and rightly so, they do not have the time to develop expertise in website development or to acquire lots of the little insights that facilitate communication with clients over the Internet. So, they supplied the meal and the WiFi, and I supplied some insights and freely available website tools to help them get over some humps.
In both cases, their businesses do not depend in any way on the Internet, yet the Internet could lighten their burdens, if, and only if, the relevant tasks are not themselves a burden. My attempt was to give them an orientation in some available tools that might assist, such as the Firefox web browser with the Firebug FTP add-on, and a Word Press blog.
To many people who area on the Internet reading blogs, use of those website “appliances” might seem a trivial breeze, but to anyone who can relate, the “newbie” experience can be both intimidating and time-consuming. Very simply, it can distract from the real work of a business enterprise, raising the question of whether or not it is worth their time to shift focus from the guts of their businesses to fumbling around with the painstaking details of blogs and file transfer. Once acquired, the skills needed to use WordPress to post information and images can be extremely timesaving, but to many folks that first leap is very big. Used rightly, a vehicle like WordPress can become the “meeting room” desk, making communication with clients 3,000 miles away a breeze. But how to get over that hump so it’s a down joyride, that is the question?
For folks running their own business out of their home office, hiring someone to do these chores is not generally an option. Hopefully I can offer insights and encouragement to make the way easier, maybe even open doors for a mutual business relationship—just the kind of relationship I will need next year upon leaving county employment to fend my own way in the business world. Meantime, I had a great dinner with great friends, and hope I didn’t leave them too baffled or overwhelmed—Thank You Mike and Rhonda!

JChost Photo Albums

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:26:01 -0500

An online black and white photo contest has prompted me to put my new little Canon PowerShot camera through its paces. The growing portfolio of black and whites is presently for private viewing only—until after I make a selection and submit to the contest agency. I’m sharing one glimpse, but only of portfolio filler, not a potential submission.
I’ve never been interested in photo contests, because they are primarily for the benefit of the contest agency. The photographer gives up all rights to the photo, and gets only a token prize. The agency on the other hand, gains an enormous library of royalty-free photos. So why, you may ask, would I participate now? The main reason is because shooting black and white is one of the best ways to learn to shoot good photos. It puts a demand on good design, and on utilizing the full range of exposure settings of a camera.
After playing with black and white, and discovering the content that comes alive in a grayscale range, I began to recognize certain subject matter that would be especially favorable in sepia tones. Both the black and white project and the promising sepia series will become integral elements of the JChost.com Gallery.
Color photography will hardly fall by the wayside, especially as I’m thoroughly enjoying Apples’ Aperature software photo lab. What a pleasure to view and work on a series of photos, and to so easily make precision black point and white point adjustments, add a little “vibrancy”, even to the point of selecting the color range to make “vibrant”.

So, yes, there are growing albums of color photos, some of which will be displayed as slideshows, and eventually the Gallery will include video podcasts, animations, and graphic renderings. What about Flickr those who are “initiated” might ask? The answer is, “all in good time”. For now the focus is developing the home base, JChost.com. And please, by all means, visit and leave your comments! Or, if you have need of services I can provide, let’s chat. You can get in touch any number of ways, but the Contact form at JChost.com is the best place to talk shop.

WordPress Newbie

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:15:55 -0500

For the most part, I’m finding Wordpress to be as user-friendly as one would imagine a free, vastly popular, online blogging software to be. It just takes getting oriented by going through the many options over and over until they become familiar. This is not to say that there have been no bugs or troubles. Probably the most perplexing was a problem inserting images into posts. That process requires the software script to create a directory inside an “uploads” directory on the server. Instead of a simple successful operation, where I just click a browse button, find my image file, and carry on—all I got was a red letter error telling me it couldn’t create the necessary directory.
Not wanting to deal with a hassle, I put off tracking down the bug as long as I could. Typing in an image path worked as an alternative, but I continually felt deprived of the nice little upload tool that should have been doing the job for me. For a few days I attempted to login to the WordPress forum to see if anyone had a fix for the problem, but ran into another bug! The forum wouldn’t accept my username and password. So I re-registered with a new username and got a reciprocating email from WordPress, but the forum didn’t like that username and password either. I filled out the Forum bug report, but after a few days and no word, I figured I’d better move on.
Since the red letter error indicated the directory might not have the correct permissions, I decided it was time to get CuteFTP onto my Macbook and check out the directory chmod settings on the server. Turns out they were all as they should be, so finally I called my hosting service to see if the server had some setting that was interfering. As usual, the Hostmonster tech was wonderful and made every attempt to help. When he couldn’t put his finger on the problem, he wrote up a ticket to have another tech specialist look into it.
Whalaa! Just a few minutes ago I went to get a screenshot of the red letter error, but instead, the nice upload feature was working. I checked my email and found a message from the Hostmonster tech. He said:
I was able to fix this by going to the wp-admin -> settings -> miscellaneous and changing ‘/wp-content/uploads’ to ‘wp-content/uploads’.
So, it turns out the new WordPress upgrade came with a bug—one little misplaced forward-slash was the culprit!
Of course, that one little keystroke took entirely too many hours out of my life, but such is life. I’m flying now and a happy camper both with my hosting service and with my WordPress blog. Yes, a few trouble spots remain—will I ever get into a WordPress forum? Can I get the gaps out of the NextGEN gallery thumbnails? Fortunately there are ways to slip around these obstacles. For some problems I can use the WordPress knowledge base, or call my friendly hosting service! And, if I don’t hear back from the NextGEN folks, there are other nice photo gallery plugins out there.

Revamping

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:56:19 -0500

Long overdue for a facelift, I am moving jchost.com into the new world of social media. I decided to use a WordPress blog template for a variety of reasons. First, just as I am using iWeb for jcmax.info, I will be learning all the ins and outs of the WordPress world. Even though over 200,000 bloggers worldwide use WordPress, there are millions to whom getting inside the blog template admin is a bit overwhelming. They simply don’t want to do more than type in their message and insert some photos. For any of these folks who would like a WordPress design dressed up and personalized for them, jchost.com will be the place for this service.
Currently, my jchost.com website is in the “under development” phase. I have just the rudiments in place. The appearance will continue to change, and content will be added. After adding the NextGEN Gallery plugin to the template, the first content at jchost.com is an album of zoo critter photos. It has a wonderful PicLens slideshow.

The gallery plugin software has a peculiarity that you see in the image at the image above—5 blank thumbnail slots left unused, 3 in the second row and 2 in the bottom row. Instead of including all the thumbnails on one page, 4 were thrown onto a second page. When running the slideshow, the photos on the second page are run as a separate slideshow. I’ll be getting an inquiry to the developers to find out why this happens. Meantime, I’ll try adding or removing photos to see how things juggle and maybe get a clue.
So, do visit occasionally and watch for new life at jchost.com. Everything there will be geared for professional service. And please, let me know what you think, you can even use the form on the Contact page! If you find anything odd, or difficulties adding comments, or using the RSS feed feature, anything—it would be a great help if you would describe the details! Thanks so much!