Longboarding

Originally I was going to write about Digital Media and the things I have done such as websites, logos, and digital art, but wanted to let that be for another day (If you can no longer contain your excitement then just visit http://nickconraddesign.com/ to see some of my work).

Today this will be about longboarding, a recent fascination that I have been picking up on.

Growing up I used to skateboard quite a bit, my last board broke about 2 years ago and I just never went to get another one, until last June. I went to buy a board and throw my old trucks on it and saw something else that caught my attention.

Sector 9's 2012 42" Bamboo Drop Through

I felt like a kid on the day after Halloween with too much candy that will eventually hurt themselves. I had seen videos online of guys hitting speeds in the 40's on a longboard and always wanted to experience it myself.

These guys are from Florida going down our local parkway. Little did I know what all waited to be explored when you start getting more into longboarding. Speed seemed to only be one of the many abilities. Sliding seemed to be the next progressive step.

Sooner or later this will be accomplished, and the speed thing will not be as tough of an adversary because sliding is essentially breaking. Obviously special gloves are needed with thick pads on the palms and fingers to have the ability to not wear your fingers through like early 90's style jeans.

Here is a good video that shows a bit of everything. The first actual skating footage begins around the 4:15 mark, and if all you wanna see are falls skip on through to 12:35.

If anyone is interested, the basics are easy and I would love to teach someone and skate with others. Just let me know.

And as always... Another reason why cats are jerks....

Class Assignment

SPEAKER

Camel Lights Cigarettes.
OCCASION

A placement ad for Camel Lights in the 1980's. Possibly a poster or magazine advertisement.
AUDIENCE 
1980's alpha male, or those who wish to be the alpha male. It is saying that if you want to be a man, this is what a man does. It takes a broad audience, males as a whole, and tries to entice them to be like the advertisement. 
PURPOSE

To make males buy and smoke cigarettes to be like "the man."

SUBJECT

Camel infers that smoking will make you look like a "man."

TONE

Condescending in a sense, direct with a bit of subliminal messaging. Natural colors, for the nature man.

I'm sure that this ad was successful, every young male adult wants to be "the man." The 1980's was a time when manly men dominated the big screens and culture media. This ad went along with the times to capitalize upon the market.

Link To Video*

SPEAKER

Nintendo

OCCASION

The "new generation" of games is out and challenging people.

AUDIENCE

Young adults that want to be challenged by ground breaking video games. 
PURPOSE

To advertise the "new generation" of video games and entice people to buy them.

SUBJECT

Nintendo is presenting a challenge to those who want to take on the endless challenges of the super mario game.

TONE

Epic, upbeat, early 1990's feel with the music. The word "EXTREME" feels like it needs to be shouted throughout.

This ad was successful, I remember seeing this at a young age and wanting a nintendo myself. The kids in the video seem to have so much fun and who doesn't want to have fun?

SPEAKER

Anti-smoking ad.

OCCASION

When smoking hazards became a big deal and there was a movement to help those to quit. Roughly around 2005.

AUDIENCE

Anyone that smokes, even those who do not smoke probably couldn't help by notice.

PURPOSE

To make smokers quit smoking.

SUBJECT

Smoking kills and makes you look gross.

TONE

Informal, a bit of a parent-child feel to it. Shock value was wanted.

There is no way that this ad was not successful in raising awareness.

Cat related Advertisement to relate to the topic and show again why cats suck.
Hair.
Hair everywhere. 

*Every time I try to post the video from youTube it only brings up options for a Pitbull song. The only thing worse than cats are songs with Pitbull. That will not fly on my blog. So I do apologize to the lazy who do not like to click links to open up a new window, hopefully they are few and far between.

Self Is The Only Prison That Can Ever Bind The Soul.

This quote from Henry Van Dyke is still relatively new to me, but fits well.

For a quick history about myself would say that I grew up in a lower class home with my mother, sister, and myself. This upbringing has instilled beliefs and priorities in my life that have set me onto the path that has me writing this now. Since I was young I knew that my hard work, loyalty, and dedication are the only things that would get me anywhere. I have drawn conclusions about life and love to debate with anyone with opposite views.

Knowledge is power and I invite all knowledge, no matter the relevance or randomness.

With this being said, I declare myself as an atheist agnostic. I love talking religion (please note the word "talk.") and hearing other views on life and afterlife. Hearing people try to describe what déjà vu in their mind is and translate it to words is usually an interesting conversation piece for instance.

Another topic that is dear to my heart is talking hip-hop. Conversations tend to heat up over the definite line between hip-hop and rap.

Just to throw some of the other things I love to talk about are emerging technologies (videography/graphic design/typography/special effects/mobile technology/websites), beer (local and the other good stuff, unlike budlight), bourbon, movies, longboarding, cars, basically all around guy stuff.

Things I am interested in are xkcd, cyandide and happiness, freddieW, hyperbole and a half, to name of few online things.

and of course mma and the technical side of things

As we continue on with class more will develop and get revealed, hopefully with a bit of humor as well.

No guarantee that I will be this awesome.

To finish my blog, this last gif is just to suck up to the teacher, and probably the same way that I will end all of my blogs. This is why people do not like cats, they are mean, just for the fact that they can be mean.

...so rude...

Mobile For Wordpress

So for a missing feature that is missing that is wanted within my project my team and I are currently working on is the availability for mobile. Yes, it is easy to pull up the site on a mobile device, but I feel like if you are going to optimize a site for mobile, it needs to be done specifically and correctly.

Optimization for mobile devices is the new way of connecting with people. Smart phones are the way to look things up on the fly, not laptops, not desktops, not yellow pages. My client had mentioned his interest in this ability and it is appropriate for his business.

Plugins

There are multiple plugins for WordPress and I am looking for a simple one that my client may use and change if need be. Granted my client does not understand how to implement any of these ideas yet, let alone even customize HTML, so simplicity is key at the moment. 

WordPress Mobile Pack

Wordpress Mobile Pack is a plugin that has lots of cool features and seems easy enough to implement. Apart from the small things like color schemes and themes, you can re-size images, switch between mobile and desktop presentations, and standards adherence. 

MobilePress

MobilePress is another mobile plugin with a cool feature of showing ads, even your own managed ads. It is SEO enabled and works well with Google. Customization of themes is of course an option here as well. 

Mobile Admin

This plugin is specific for iOS devices, but can be used to customize for specific browsers as well. Some of the features are creating and editing posts, comment moderation, and ability to toggle between mobile and desktop.

Other Benefits

WordPress has an application to manage your site from iOS devices. With this you can moderate comments, create posts, and add images and videos, which makes everything a whole lot easier at times.

I'm Late! I'm Late For A Very Important Date!

While some of us can remember everything with what dates they are going to happen on, there are those of us who are jacked up on caffeine whose life depends on calendars.

The Truth In This Is Horrifying. 

Sliders! (Galleries, Not Burgers)

Galleries are necessities in today's tech savvy websites. Well every website I should say. For the WordPress project my team and I are working on, we need to find and implement an easy to customize, easily managed, easily implemented Wordpress gallery slider. There are quite a few just on this WordPress site.

Image Sliders, I said Image Sliders..... 

So With This Task, Comes The Research

With selecting a slider for this site, I looked for management and implementation as the top 2 credentials needed. Cropping is one of the big things that would be awesome to find within a slider for my client, as well as no need to know PHP, HTML, or CSS. As long as we can get it set up and teach him the basics of how it works, it will be perfect. 

Smooth Slider

Smooth Slider is a free WordPress plugin. *Free* we're off to a good start.there are many features listed, but I will translate a few that stood out to me:

• The CSS is fully customizable
• Easily readable for search engines
• Slider preview in admin panel option
• Custom size option for images

VSlider

VSlider is jQuery based slider that sells itself as the smallest file size because it uses the core WordPress jQuery library. Some features are:

• Customization of images
• Customization of transitions
• Customizable CSS
• Unlimited Image Sliders. 

While my search goes on to find a slider worthy enough for my teams upcoming project, there are thousands of others out there waiting to be discovered. Go forth and find the one that fits yours appropriately, at the moment my choice seems to fall upon VSlider. 

WordPress Contact Forms

Plugins for WordPress are not limited, if you haven't ever looked into it. I have been given the task of finding a good contact form plugin for WordPress for a future project.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 seemed to pop up wherever I went on my search. It can manage multiple contact forms, that allows customization, has CAPTCHA, and is powered by Ajax. The set up is as easy as uploading and activating through the plugins menu. It seems very user friendly with the set up and the basics. This, I believe is why it is so popular. For a free plugin, this is a good solution.

SimpleModal Contact Form
SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) is an Ajax contact form as well and uses jQuery and the SimpleModal jQuery plugin. It has options such as contact from elements, subject field, and "send me a copy" option. The installation is pretty basic and gives you 4 options on how to do it. It seems to have a bug that may or may not be worked out yet, in WordPress 3.3.1.

Send E-mail
Send E-mail was imported from Grunion Contact From. It adds full internationalization using localized string from WordPress core. Instillation is simple with this as well, just upload and activate. It allows you to add the contact form with inserting [contact-form] in the post.

Conclusion
There are more free contact form plugins for WordPress than you could possibly sift through. Summaries are everywhere and all it takes is time to fully look through it all and decide what is appropriate for your project and how in depth you would like to get into it.