Evoke Media Group

AltEnToday.com is up and running

admin — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:41:06 +0000

Man, between GoDaddy and Wordpress, launching a website could hardly be easier. After deciding on a domain name (AltEnToday.com) I went ahead and registered it, got the hosting configured, and deployed WordPress, all within about 5 minutes of pressing buttons and about an hour of waiting for the domain name to propagate. Once that part was done, it just took a little time to tweak the Cutline theme that I’m using to look, well, like it’s an alternative energy site rather than a random blog. (more…)

Is there a market for NiteFive.com?

admin — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:23:43 +0000

No, I’m not selling my domain. What I’m asking is actually more a rhetorical question: Is there a market for a website that helps people discover what nightlife caters to eco-conscious party people? I honestly don’t know the question - it’s one of those “create the market” gambles. I’m trying to decide how to best allocate my time this summer between my numerous obligations. Obviously I’m still working on the last spurt of school so that I have that darned piece of paper that says that I did it.

Other than a very short burst of summer school, I’m going to have a pretty good amount of idle time on my hands. I’ve got a couple websites that I’m torn between working on, and I’m not sure how long some things will take versus others.

AltEnToday.com - This is going to become my new flagship. My objective is to update that site at least 3 times a week - if not more like 5 or 6 times a week (time and content permitting). Once fall comes, AltEnToday.com will become a major part of my week. I’ve already allocated the time this fall (while I’m wrapping my last semester of my return trip to school) on researching the solar industry. AET will be the best venue for me to document that research (some portions will probably stay private for the sake of good taste).
MySocialSurvey.com - One of my first web projects - this damned website gets a ton of traffic. I’ve got an enormous database filled with surveys, questions, answers, users, etc. The whole thing has run almost without a hitch since I coded it several years ago. I get the feeling that with a little parenting on my part, the site could continue to grow and actually make a couple bucks along the way.
Scifi-Guy.com - My science fiction blog. It’s popular, readers seem to show up on a regular basis, and I truly enjoy working on it. Not to mention I’ve got to post up a couple of new short stories that I’ve written. This’ll probably get at least once-a-week attention.
EvokeMG.com - Well, of course this here is sorta the hub to all these spokes. I could probably make this site a great deal better if I (a) gave it some sort of direction / purpose and (b) tweaked the theme so it wasn’t so odd. Not sure yet what to do.
NiteFive.com - My interesting “create-a-market” concept. I really think N5 could be a hit, but I just don’t think I’ll have nearly enough time to make it one. Perhaps I’ll develop it to the point that I’m comfortable with it, and see if I can find some writing partners to help me keep it fresh.
Audivian.com - Another cool concept for a home theater website that I worked on over wintertime 2007-2008. Again, it’s a solid concept, but the downside is that I’ve also been teaching myself PHP during the development process. PHP shares a lot in common with ASP, but not nearly enough that it’s a seamless transition.

So, anyways, there’s my predicament. Lots of things I’d like to work on, and only oh-so-many-hours in a day. I guess I’ll sleep on it and as things progress, I’ll figure out which project is worth the time and energy.

Fast-launching AltEnToday.com

admin — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:22:33 +0000

As some of you who know me already know, I’m a big fan of alternative energy. So much so, in fact, that I’m attempting to completely re-arrange my career path to head from information tech (ie, “web work”) to a career in the solar energy industry. This is not an easy transition to make and there are few parallels between these industries. Perhaps the thing that most excites me about this future career goal is that I’ll (hopefully very soon) become involved in an industry that can potentially shape not only how we use energy, but also stave off an impending man-made climate crisis, avert war, famine, and pestilence, and most importantly provide something that mankind genuinely desires. Our demand for energy is seemingly insatiable, and the prospect of getting involved in the solar industry is thrilling to me.

To this end, I understand that I have a lot of learning to do. This is why I’ve just registered and set up a new site that I’ll be working on (considerably more than my other sites, I presume) titled AltEnToday.com AltEn of course is short for Alternative Energy, and Today is a double edged phrase. Today is not just how often I hope to update the site, but also a sense that we are on the verge of creating this alternative energy future. Oil supplies are on the verge of dwindling for the first time since the industry was essentially created, and world demand is greater than ever, and neither side appears poised to break. Tomorrow’s energy picture will likely look like some combination of solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydroelectric, petroleum, coal, biofuels, and a whole mess of other options I probably haven’t mentioned. This is an exciting time in mankind’s history, and I hope to become part of a great industry that will be (as I believe) a pivotal player in the course of the next century and beyond.

Pace Deployment using Wordpress Timestamp

admin — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:33:43 +0000

Every now and then I catch myself saying, “Man, that’s a useful little feature they added” in to a piece of software. As my current favorite platform to work on, I just wanted to remind new & intermediate users of WordPress that you can use the “Timestamp” feature to delay posting articles. This can be really useful if you’re like me and go on blogging-binges. Sometimes I go on a drought and can’t conjure up a worthwhile blog post for days or weeks at a time (for any of my several blogs). Other times, I sit down to my computer and can whip up four or five articles in a hurry.

Changing the WordPress timestamp to a future date and time can help you better deal with those ebbs and flows… Usually I try to post on my main blog (scifi-guy.com) at least once a week. But with the help of timestamps, I can post two or three posts at the exact same time and delay them a few days at a time.

Readers get an updated website, and I get the satisfaction of knowing I’ve hit my target update interval. Happy blogging!

Things Worth Watching

admin — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:21:37 +0000

The creativity on the web sometimes surprises me. There’s so much available off the beaten path, sometimes you just need to stop and smell the [virtual] roses…

Aaron Platt music videos … More complex each time around.
Devoid of Yesterday … A video / visual art project that caught my imagination.
Mark Osborne’s “More” video … Stop-motion animation meets a somber tale about the struggle to find happiness.

Has Yahoo doomed itself?

admin — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:02:11 +0000

I wanted to briefly comment on the impending takeover / buyout that Microsoft and Yahoo have been working on in the last three months. I just finished reading the article, Microsoft in Quandry over Yahoo Bid and I think the article’s conclusion is pretty spot on: Does Microsoft really need Yahoo anymore, at any price?

I can recall my earliest experiences with the internet involved Yahoo.com, and since then Yahoo is still my preferred portal for accessing the web. But truthfully, when I do searches, I too am one of the millions that choose Google over Yahoo (and, for that matter, over MSN and Live.com). (more…)

The new Nitefive Wordpress Theme (Part III)

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:06:21 +0000

Well, I’ve poured through some of the Wordpress.org documentation, and I think I’m starting to get a hang of how to put this platform to work for the new nitefive.com project. Right now, I’m focusing most of my efforts on the homepage - I have a distinct style and flow in mind, so I want to get that dialed in, and I’ll allow the derivative pages to blend from the main style.

Simple Wordpress tweaking requires a little comfort with the PHP syntax. (more…)

The Nitefive Redesign (Part II: Planning)

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:35:57 +0000

Going a little further in the conceptualization of the nitefive redesign process, I’m going to share a few design & development considerations that are going in place ahead of time. The first step is to figure out what platform it’ll be developed on. For me, the decision is pretty straightforward - Wordpress. Wordpress already provides the basic CMS features that I’m looking for, and I’m familiar with the code base so modifying the theme and the base code of the site should hopefully be pretty straightforward. (more…)

Nitefive Redesign

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:37:59 +0000

I’ve owned the nitefive.com domain for a long … long time. It was actually one of my first domain purchases ever, and I was inspired to create a Maxim-style website dedicated to partying and all that other good stuff. I built my first custom content management system (CMS) on nitefive, which incorporated automatic linking, tag clouds, streamlined image management, etc. However, my single ASP-driven aspirations weren’t enough to get the site any better than a mere blogging platform (without, sadly, a lot of the nifty blog features - I only had a few hours to build this thing!) (more…)

Do we have to redesign the whole thing?

admin — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:35:12 +0000

Cars. Our environment, the modern world - the first world (and in many respects the 3rd world as well) is designed to accommodate these creatures. The average American spends something like 40 minutes a day in them just to get back and forth to work - and those people in car-dependent places like Southern California or New Jersey or Dallas end up spending hours on top of that!

Do we have to redesign the whole damned thing? The whole system that we’ve built to placate our dependence on these objects? Maybe. (more…)