New Website Launched

I began working on a new website about a week ago for The Green Mountain Baseball League.

The Green Mountain Baseball League resides in Vermont and is an 18 + Wooden Bat Baseball League. The league has 8 teams.

The site went live on Thursday May 1, 2008.

A few requirements from the client:
1) the site needed to go up quickly
2) the cost of building must be kept low
3) the cost to maintain/update the site must be kept low
4) the client needed a way to manage multiple lists in spreadsheet form
5) needed maps to seven Vermont baseball fields

The project started out with four pages in mind. The four pages quickly turned into twelve.

The Green Mountain Baseball League website uses Google Docs for the spreadsheet resource. This way the league can use one login (or multiple if wanted)(must be Gmail accounts) to maintain the spreadsheets (the have the baseball game schedule as well as team contacts and umpires in spreadsheet form). The spreadsheets are iframed into the site pages meaning that all the client has to do is login to Gmail, click 'Documents', select the document to edit, make the changes, and click "re-publish document" and the changes will reflect on the live site. No HTML/CSS or JavaScript experience needed! Good ol' Google - they sure know how to make things easy! See the game schedule page here Green Mountain Baseball League Season Schedule

The maps to the baseball fields are a result of embedding Google Maps into each field location page. See one here - Map Mount Mansfield Union High School The maps use iframe to embed the maps into the pages. Driving directions can be entered from within the iframe. Directions open in a new window (tab). Users can switch between satellite view or map view. The default is satellite view.

The site is built using the latest XHTML standards. The pages have been tested using Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14, Opera and Safari for windows.

The site uses Google Analytics to track visitors.

Future possibilities: individual team pages? sure, each team could have it's own 'section' of the GMBL website. There could be team rosters (with pictures), photos from games, spreadsheets to maintain statistics etc...the only problem being cost. The cost would need to come from each team directly as I don't think that there is much money in the league budget to sustain paying me to update each team page. Just an idea....

New Website Design In Progress

Notch Above Tours

Working on a new website....Notch Above Tours: Founded in 1993, Notch Above Tours is a Vermont-based, full-service Tour Company providing an incredible range of motorcoach tours and tour design services. Our tours feature fascinating locations throughout the United States and Canada.

click the image or here to view the new website

click here to view the old site (unless of course the old site has been replaced by the new site)

• view this website design project

The Acutal Video: Stormtrooper In Love

New Video : Stormtrooper In Love

okay, so this really doesn't have anything to do with designing websites...

Three young space lovers caught in an intergallectic struggle between good and evil. Watch as "The Princess", "The Stormtrooper" & "Hansome Solo" find out that love, even in space, can be deadly!

Stormtrooper In Love :: Released in 2008 - An animated, action/adventure-love drama from the critically acclaimed director/producer/writer - jHead.

See Stormtrooper In Love

check it out on YouTube

New Site Launched

I launched http://www.McKennedy.org at the beginning of January. The site is basically a holding place for my artwork (photography, video, music, web design etc..) and anything else I can think of.

One of my plans is to take 1 photograph every day (I am calling this gallery "Things I Saw") and at the end of every month I will post a gallery of photos. The first image of this series was taken on January 7, 2008.

So far I have not had any trouble finding an image to use daily but I image that since I travel the same route everyday (to work) I might run out of subjects to shoot. Hopefully this will not become the case and if it does it would be quite sad because what would that say about the time spent going to work, as well as being there? That there isn't anything worth photographing?

'Advanced' Image Editing Techniques

I had two problems to solve.

1. I recently left my digital camera outside in a rain storm. It wasn't a sprinkle either. Anyway, I figured that the camera would be simply dead and maybe there was a chance I could recover the photos from the memory card. I dried the camera off, powered it up and thought all was perfectly fine...until tonight. I had a spare minute so I decided that I was time to move a batch of photos off the camera to the PC. I have been using Adobe's Photoshop Elements to batch rename the files to a directory. The file naming convention is always by date. Ever since the 'slip of the mind' which caused me to leave my camera hanging from a tree a few hundred yards from my door there had been an issue with the renaming process. After viewing the files on the memory card I realized that the first image was corrupt. Naturally, I deleted the first image and tried the renaming/import again. It did not work. What actually happened was that the number 2 image which after removing image number 1 became image number 1 - became corrupt.
   
   
   The Solution
   
   I decided that I probably wasn't going to have much luck trying to fix the camera itself or the memory card so I went another route - Google. I searched for 'batch renaming utility' - many choices came up and then I realized that there was a much 'safer place' to pickup a free utility - SourceForge. I found a program called "Rename-It!". I was a bit confused as to how to use the program but once I figured it out I realized how much time this method could possibly save.
   
   
   
   The Process
   
   Download "Rename-It!" - save the file somewhere on your desktop and install the program by double-clicking the file. Run the program after it has been installed. On the first screen you should see there is a button called "Add Files". Click this button and navigate to the directory where your images live. Select all of the images (ctrl + A) and hit the "Open" button. Next click the button called "Add Filter" - and choose "Search and replace". Next, put a check in the box which reads "Replace '%d'by a number serie". Next, click the small arrow to the right of the text box labeled as "Replace with:" and select "New file name". You should see the text box populate with this text "$(NewName)Image %3d". My standard file naming convention for image files is "YYYY.MM.A,B,C(etc..)1,2,3(etc..)". For example: 2007.09.A1.jpg. or 2007.09.B1.jpg. Using this format I replaced the text in the "Replace with" text area with this text "2007.09.A%d". In the preview area you can see the before and after affects of the renaming process. The final step is to click the button "Rename files". That's all there is too it.


2. The second problem I encountered during this process was timestamp related. The digital camera was saving images with the following date format 0000:00:00 00:00:00. I use Picasa to organize my photos and to upload them to an online photo album using my Gmail account. After renaming the files in the step above I realized that Picasa had put my new folder of images under the year 2000 (due to the timestamp issue) which totally screwed with my desire to be organized. In a nut shell, I needed to figure out how to modify the timestamp on image files.
   
   
   The Solution
   
   ExifTool
   
   
   The Process
   
   Download and unzip ExifTool (I recommend saving to your desktop). To read the image data you can drag and drop files onto the ExifTool file (named exiftool(-k).exe. The meta information will appear in a command line window. To edit the meta data you will need to change the file name from "exiftool(-k).exe" to "exiftool.exe". Next open up a command line in Windows (Start > Run > CMD) navigate to your desktop (or where you saved the ExifTool file). (To navigate using the command line in Windows: type 'cd ..' to move up a directory and type 'dir' to list the contents of a directory) - once you get to where the ExifTool executable file exists (exiftool.exe) - at the command line type 'exiftool.exe' and hit enter. Instructions will appear on the screen. Scroll the bottom or type 'q' + enter to skip the instructions. The command I used to modify the creation date use this format "exiftool "-CreateDate=2007:09:00 00:00:00" DIR" and for the original date and time you can use this format "exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal=2007:09:00 00:00:00" DIR" (you must remove the quotes from the command, and replace DIR with the path to the image files you are trying to modify). Here is an example of the commands I used: exiftool -DateTimeOriginal=2007:09:00 00:00:00 F:\Photos\2007_09_Digital and exiftool -CreateDate=2007:09:00 00:00:00 F:\Photos\2007_09_Digital.
   
   
   
   That's all there is too it! Timestamps modified, Picasa placed the files (and directory) in the proper sequence (which satisfied my sometimes obsessive desire to organize).

Forum Upgrade : Take A Look

For a few years now my web host has hosted my phpBB forum. The software has been out of date for quite some time. I emailed the host and they informed that they cannot upgrade the version of phpBB I was using. The problem with the previous version is that I was getting spammed daily. The messages were easy enough to remove but I really wanted to upgrade to see what the difference would be in the amount of spam I receive. Anyway, over this past weekend I decided that this was the time to upgrade phpBB.

After several hours, and many a help forum visit (the phpBB help forums) I finally got the latest version installed and working. The problem now is that the old version of phpBB is still accessible from the web. I have no access to the original version of phpBB so I installed the new version in my own directory and repointed all the links in my site. I am afraid that the spammers will keep using the older links (found all over the web) to post messages to my forum! I guess that I will just have to wait and see.

I attempted to use the built in captcha feature but it doesn't seem to work. I go to the admin panel and 'enable visual confirmation' but when I refresh the page after enabling the functionality the check defaults to 'no'. I think that this would be a helpful in combating the spam epidemic but as of this point I can't get the damn thing working. O'well, that is for another day.

Anyway, here is a link to the new forum:

Having problems with spyware, viruses (trojan, worms etc..) and or adware? Post a question in our forum, or browse the answers - take a look registration is free! Malware Solutions Forum