Redford Design

Moving and Shaking.

Let me warn you in advance, this is partly a “test” post for myself, but partly a little blurb to let you know what’s going on here. Sorta. Read the rest of this entry »

Gravatars!

What is a Gravatar? Simple, it’s an avatar that can be shown on enabled blog sites when you comment on a blog.

According to the Gravatar.com website, Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars, or an “avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.” You register with the Gravatar server, and upload an image which you will use as your avatar. The gravatar image is keyed to your email address, so that it is unique to you.

Do you want a gravatar that will automatically be shown when you leave a comment? Get one here.

So you’ll notice I just added the gravatar function to my own blog comments.  I believe that most newer WordPress themes already have this built in. However if you are using an older theme, it’s very simple to add.

Check out this site for how to add Gravatars to your own blog.

Or you can try this plugin that I just found. It is probably easier if you don’t know anything about PHP. I haven’t tried it since I already did it the hard way first. Please leave me a comment if you try this plugin or have tried this lugin and let us know what you think.

This plugin will display gravatars for the people who comment on your posts. You do not need to modify any of your template files — just activate the plugin, and it will add gravatars to your comments template automatically.

Have fun!

Social Media Experiment

I know, it’s been about 4 months since I’ve actually written a blog post. As you all know, sometimes life just gets in the way. If that means I can’t write a blog post, then I welcome it, because life is cool. But that’s not what this post is about – I’ll honestly try to write more about the whole life thing later.

This post is simply about the social media experiment I recently decided to try on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. And now apparently I’m going to offer the same thing here.

I’ve put together a page to give away music from my old bands, for FREE. Now of course, you probably think I’m just doing this to show off what an awesome guitar player and song writer I am, but actually, it’s the only stuff I have the rights to just simply give away. I sure there are former band members that will argue that, but screw ‘em, I’m only offering specific albums up for a temporary time period anyway.

So the first FREE album offering is my last recording with the band The Treatment. The entire album, free. If you are interested, email me and I’ll send you the link.

In the future I will hopefully be giving away other stuff, like Mosquitones and Eightball Break so keep your ears open!

Example Of Adding YouTube Video To A Blog Entry

I was recently asked by a client about adding video from YouTube to a website. Here is an example of how it can be done and added to a blog. I think one upside to this is that the blog entry will be archived later so that it can still be viewed for years to come, but won’t be a focus for a website that may only want to showcase it for a certain amount of time.

Making Life Easier?

So I’ve installed the wphone plugin that allows me to easily write and post blogs from my BlackBerry, which is what I’m doing now. If it does prove to be as easy as it seems so far, I may be blogging more often and possibly for no reason at all. It appears I can’t add photos to blog posts or even links. The interface could be a little slicker too. Hopefully somebody will finally develop an app for BlackBerry the integrates with wordpress more seamlessly.

Disgusting Lack Of Blog Posting

I just realized that I haven’t written a single blog entry in well over a month.  My last blog entry was relating to Twitter and it seems that’s where I’ve spent most of my time.  It’s far to simple to use – and well – the microblogging seems to at first glance to take up far less time. This however is not the case.  It’s addictive and probably takes up more time as a whole than simply writing a blog post every day.  Yet one benefit is that the topic is constantly changing and staying fresh and interesting.

It has also been 3 months since I started my new job as Web/Graphic Designer at Rouse Advertising. This has kept me quite busy and I don’t really want to sit down at a computer when I’m home after work and write a blog post.

Of course I will try to write more in the future, I may even talk a little more about things in my personal life since not many more people read this than friends and family anyhow.  What I can promise is that I will be continuing to to work on discovering cool new ways to use social media and wordpress for sharing things like photo galleries, podcasting, etc.  I am hoping to have a new page up soon with a photo gallery for real pictures that I take versus the Flickr phone cam gallery.

So keep an eyeball on me in your feed reader – I’ll definitely keep you abreast of updates.