Web-Design: Eco-Bos
In the recent months I programmed a whole bunch of high-profile websites. The first one I want to feature here is eco-bos.com.
Stephon Karolus took care of the design, I implemented it in HTML and CSS. The site is based on Wordpress and uses a couple of custom written plug-ins and a fully custom theme.
Wordpress workshops
This week I hosted a two-day Wordpress workshop in Cornwall. I was showing the development-team from Imerys for the Eco-Bos project how to keep their website up to date with new content. Having given a training-course just about a month ago in Austria I was able to improve the whole package to be even more accessible to unexperienced users. Topics covered everything from writing articles and adding pictures and galleries to managing custom content types of the Eco-Bos homepage.
But not only did the participants learn new tricks with Wordpress, I learned some lessons about giving Wordpress-workshops as well. 
qTop – top-pages with qTranslate-support
Multilingual WordPress-blogs are still a challenging task. The highly recommended qTranslate plugin takes a lot of burden of one’s shoulders and works suprisingly well with almost all aspects of WordPress.
With many plugins the situation is a lot less cozy. Some don’t cause trouble, others do. To display a list of top-pages on the sidebar I used to rely on a widget from the GD Simple Widgets-collection. But in conjunction with qTranslate it would just display the page-titles in different languages as one continous string. After taking a close look at it’s code it became clear that this couldn’t be changed without editing the plugin’s core.
A new and clean solution had to be found, and based on the extremly good Popularity Contest plugin by Alex King I just wrote it myself. I proudly present: qTop.
qTopist currently still a very(!) simple plugin to display the top sites in the sidebar with full qTranslate filtering . While it doesn’t differentiate between posts and pages it at least let’s you choose the number of displayed entries. I’ve got a lot of ideas on how to improve it and I think it has a lot of future potential. You can see it in action on the right.
You can download qTop here, or directly from the WordPress plugin-index.
“Maybe I Should Stay” – music video
Last sunday I had a little time and used it to create a relaxed music-video. The song is “Maybe I Should Stay” by dabra.
This was a great opportunity for me to try out some things in After Effects. The things I did with Trapcode Particular & Form and the whole range of post-effects like grain and dirty film had been on my list for quite a while. The whole clip doesn’t use any external footage and consists entirely of digital effects.
If you want to know exactly how I did it you can download the after effects source-file after the jump.
more…
MARCREA showreel | winter 2009
It took a while but now it’s finally finished: the MARCREA winter 2009 showreel.
It’s our first reel that really shows what my partner Stephon and I are really capable of and what MARCREA can achieve for it’s clients.
