New website launched! Arena Rock Photos

September 10, 2011

I remember my first concert back in junior high school, it was Ted Nugent. He came flying out over the audience in a loincloth howling away like the madman he is. I was hooked, and soon after that I’d go almost every weekend up to New Haven to camp out for good seats, Van Halen, Queen, The Police, all the big arena rock bands that came through…it was part of growing up, something exciting to do in a pretty boring area of the country for a restless teen, and it inspired me to get into playing music (later on punk rock gave me the confidence to actually do it in public). Those were the days of big hair and men dressed in ridiculous outfits playing God on an extravagant stage. We were happy to help Portland Oregon photographer Pat Goebel set up a simple ecommerce website to sell high quality prints of his colorful images of this wondrous era of rock music. Take a look through Pat’s website and if you like what you see pick up a print or two for someone nostalgic in your life. They will enjoy it.

 

Filed under: Art,Design,Portland,Web Development — Eric Baldoni
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You want fonts? Google got fonts.

June 29, 2011

Google is everywhere…it’s true, they have a hungry tentacle in so many cookie jars it is hard to keep track of. One of the more recent and I say exciting evolutions in web design and development has been easier embedding of fonts! Yay! No more just relying on the 18 or so web safe fonts available (let’s face it 6 or so that get used) to all viewers across platforms. Of course you always want to be careful and make sure your cool new embedded fonts will degrade gracefully, just to be sure you have all your bases covered. This of course has opened a new can of worms, and opportunity for font makers…it is of course not legal to just use any font you have on your website.

There are TONS of free fonts out there and I’d say (being generous) about 5-10% of them are attractive and usable…it’s like web design in general these days, almost anyone can design and build a font thanks to computers, but you know there are reasons you hire a professional! We’ll save that for another post. So, moving foreward, once you have found a free font that works for you, all you need to do is head over to the Font Squirrel @fontface Generator and upload your font: convert it, download it, and add it to your CSS! Excellent. Google has made it even easier, they have 182 fonts (as of this post) for you to choose from, and they are all converted and ready to go. they even serve them up for you, all you need to do is add a simple link to your code.

Take this final piece of advice to heart. Keep it simple…don’t use embedded fonts for your content, use them for headers or emphasis, as they can cause some page load issues if you load too many styles or use them for large areas of content.

Google Screencap

Check out the open source Google Web Fonts

If you need to grab them all for the purpose of design mockups, Google has made it kind of difficult. A kind fellow named Joe Maller has zipped them all up for you and posted them here.

Filed under: Design,Tips/Tutorials,Web Development — Tags: , — Eric Baldoni
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Website Launch for Deep Cello Portland Coffee Roasters

March 1, 2011

We worked with Portland designer Giuseppe Lipari of Studio Lipari and the Deep Cello coffee crew to set up an online presence with this new ecommerce website. The biggest challenge for us was we needed to craft a good shopping solution using phpurchase which was their plugin of choice. You can order their delicious hand crafted beans directly from the website and have them delivered to your doorstep! Studio Lipari provided us with a beautiful design that captures the hand made quality of the product crafted by local roaster Justin Kagan (also one heck of a cellist with the Portland Cello Project). Beam yourself over to Deep Cello and learn what they are all about….good people making good coffee with lots of love.

Filed under: Bitclone,Design,Portland,Web Development,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni
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New Website for Hank Topless, Country Musician

February 21, 2011

Back when we lived in sun soaked Tucson Arizona I had the pleasure of playing a few gigs on bass with Topless Opry. An honest down and dirty country outfit led by the cantankerous and deep toned Hank Topless. His dark songwriting and accomplished guitar picking have carried on into his solo act as Hank Topless, and we recently helped him design and launch a new website with help from WordPress and the excellent Gigpress plugin, which helps musicians manage and post shows and tours. If you’re ever in Tucson and you see a tall dapper cowboy with a gruff voice singing the country blues over at the Red Room or Congress…buy him a cold one.

Hank Topless WordPress Website

Filed under: Bitclone,Design,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni
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Misty Mountain Morning

November 16, 2010

The wind last night has cleared away all the pea soup up here in Forest Park. It is interesting to see how the dynamics of our surroundings have been altered now that it is all gone. The leaves have fallen, the trees are nude. Here are a shots I snapped up on Skyline a few mornings ago, it was a thick muddy ride to get up there, but the fog was just as thick.

Filed under: Art,Bitclone,Design,Portland — Eric Baldoni
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Fun with robots.txt

July 28, 2010

The robots.txt file is a file you can include in your site directory to help prevent most spiders or bots (automated programs) from ‘crawling’ or indexing certain directories. Here someone (on the Lastfm crew http://www.last.fm/robots.txt) decided to have a bit of fun with it, note the last set of rules.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?
Disallow: /show_ads.php

Disallow: /affiliate/
Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php
Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php
Disallow: /affiliatelink.php
Disallow: /campaignlink.php
Disallow: /delivery.php

Disallow: /music/+noredirect/

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

Filed under: Design,Web Development — Eric Baldoni
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Beware of the Kraken!

July 8, 2010

I’m a sucker for a good liquor bottle label, I love The Prisoner wine and most of the Orin Swift collection (how cool is the Papillon label?). So it was no surprise that this awesome bottle caught my eye. I confess I have not tried this rum, but I’ll have to report back to you as soon as I locate a bottle. The Kraken is our of my favorite sea monsters, and one you don’t want to meet on your oceanic travels!

The Kraken Website

Filed under: Art,Design — Eric Baldoni
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2 Billion searches for the word Facebook!

July 6, 2010

I stumbled upon an interesting fact while reading up on a post about how Google is creating a competitor for Facebook. Every month Google records over 2 billion searches for the word Facebook. Here is a screenshot of the AdWords Keyword Tool results.

Adwords Keyords

Screenshot of the search for the word Facebook using the Adwords Keyword tool.

So it stands to reason obviously that a good number of these searches stem from people not knowing the difference between the search bar and the address bar in most of the popular browsers these days. Here is a screenshot in case you don’t actually know! The one on the right is for searches, and you can actually choose your own search engine (you don’t HAVE to use the Googles you know).

There is a difference between these two fields!

One other interesting thing to note…Google has their own browser (you might have heard) called Chrome. In a twist to the usual address and search field set up Google just has one field for both.

Google Chrome, one search to rule them all.

If you enter just the website title in the address bar most modern browsers will take you to the correct site if it is available (filling in the http:// and the .com etc). Google Chrome however will take you to the search results page since you are using their address/search field, thus adding more hits to their results pages…A bit crafty I say.

Filed under: Design,SEO — Tags: , , , , — Eric Baldoni
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The Bitclone process of building a dynamic WordPress powered website!

June 21, 2010

It’s amazing how fast the world of business, and seemingly the world in general, has changed in my lifetime. This is, of course, heavily due to first the personal computer revolution, and secondly the internet boom. I graduated from Boston University in 1987 with a graphic design degree which gave me the ability to hand-paint fonts! Needless to say, it quickly became obvious to me that unless I started learning how to use computers I would be left behind as an artist and a designer.

In addition to designing and developing websites I also run a small business, which has opened up a whole other area of evolution and education for me. I interact directly with every client, and when I am approached by a potential customer some of the first questions are generally:

  • “Help me understand the process of building our new website.”
  • “How long does it take?”
  • “What are the costs involved in this?”

So let’s hope this post will begin to illustrate one of Bitclone’s basic processes – developing a WordPress CMS-based website. It should provide something of an overview, and help you get started in thinking about your project and some of the questions you’ll need to answer. We feel it is important to point out that every job is different, and part of our goal is to help you maintain your company’s unique identity among your competition. Having said that, there are some common points of focus we have identified through experience, and can discuss here.

(more…)

Filed under: Bitclone,Design,Tips/Tutorials,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni
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WordPress 3.0 new features on the road to CMS perfection!

June 17, 2010

So I had been writing this big post about WordPress 3.0 coming out, and how we were so sneaky as to be running a release candidate on our site…Then we got busy and by the time I came back they went and released the final version! The new version 3.0 is called “Thelonious” after the great jazzman and purveyor of awesome hats I assume. I am going to try to do some specific feature updates as I encounter them while upgrading our small fleet of WordPress clients! Some of the most noteworthy additions I have been testing include the merging of MU (multiple user version) into the standard version. That and the new custom post types alone make this a pretty huge upgrade and really push WordPress closer to being the perfect full CMS solution. My only concern is the application will get too bloated, as they continue to add to it, so I am going to also run some speed tests to compare this new version. Results to follow shortly I promise!

If you have not seen “Straight No Chaser” the Monk documentary directed by Eastwood…I’d recommend it.

Filed under: Bitclone,Design,Portland,Tips/Tutorials,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni
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