Website Roksprocket Mosaic Services Process

Mosaic process: C-A-M  (CAM is the process used for publishing on Joomla)

C- first there has to be a category (stay away from K2!!!) For each of Film, Video, Photo, and Audio I created a root category for each.

A- then there has to be an article; this article will be blank, more a placeholder than anything else, but because we want to be able to  switch between all mosaics this article will need to show the shortcode buttons for each respective Service category: Film, Video, Photo, Audio. This makes these mosaics all look alike and interact with each other.

M- then the Menu creation will tie everything together, uniting the article with the menu, the menu is the driving force whereby calling any other module on the page; ie. the header, everything else that goes on all pages, including the specific mosaic. The menu type is single article. Each mosaic will only be assigned to it's menu page; otherwise there will be a rocksproket error on the pages it is not meant for.

-The details tab must be finished first and then saved before moving on to the Modules Assignment tab, otherwise the correct menu page for the modules to be assigned will not show up when following through and clicking on their link in the list of various modules need for that page. If you link specific modules to other pages as well, an error will result on those pages that module is not intended for, these pages will need to be unlinked within in module manager; as an error page will show up and will try to direct you back to the Control Panel.

-So again, remember to associate the menu location and Parent (menu) Item, and then SAVE before moving on to the modules.

-in Page Display tab; DO NOT  Show Page Heading! It will already be in the headerbar, and so is not needed.

Uploading a video or file to LHF website

Overview: Need to upload a file(s) to our website (LHF) so that a customer can download it or view it.

Creating The Film File:

Render the file as small as one can for the customer to view it.  The last time I created an mp4 file using "Mainconcept AVC/AAC - Export for G1".  A file CineCap processed 1.04GB 16mm HD 2.09 minute B&W file rendered to 8.72MB.  Another CineCap processed 14.4GB Reg8 HD 33:18 minute colour file rendered to 135MB.

Two Options For Upload:

If the file is less than 1000MB (almost 1GB), then you can use the Cpanel - file manger - upload process.  Just logon using lifeti15 and follow the steps.

The other option is to use Smartftp.

Using SmartFTP:

Use SmartFTP to access our website:

address: lifetimeheritagefilms.com/

login: lifeti15

password: pwd

port: 21

Uploading (info for both methods):

Go to the following path and place your file….the last two folders are obviously the year and month that you are in….

domains/lifetimeheritagefilms.com/public_html/wp-content/uploads/YEAR/MONTH/

When sending someone a link for a file to download, here is an example…….

http://www.lifetimeheritagefilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/some_download_file.zip

The person that you send the link to will only be able to download the one file because they cannot look at any of the directory.

Name of the file should not have spaces….this may or may not cause a problem.

Related:

Check out upload speed

Real Fonts on the Web with TypeKit

It recently came to my attention that there is a very cool feature of CSS called @font-face that I had never heard of before. Since Internet Explorer 5.5 & a few versions ago of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome this CSS feature has been supported. It allows you to load any font in particular formats into the browser for use on any site.

The reason we haven't seen beautiful type everywhere is that few font foundries licensed any of their fonts ifor use on the web. Enter TypeKit. TypeKit is a web-font hosting and serving service that has been slowly building up a repository of fonts that you can license on a yearly basis to use legally on the web. The price is very economical, and as of a few days ago, they serve a good collection of Adobe Fonts.

I did some testing and its laughably easy to setup the service and install the fonts on your site. I set it up on my FireflyPhoto.ca site briefly, but I will be testing it more extensively on TimSchafli.ca.

The service automatically serves the right font files to Internet Explorer or the other browsers (of course Internet Explorer likes to use its own standard for the CSS implementation) and should the browser STILL not be able to display the fonts, you can still fall back to the next font in the CSS font-family stack.

You can sign up at FontKit.com and the subscription we want is probably the "Portfolio" service which gets us: Unlimited Fonts per Site, Usage on Unlimited Sites, access to their entire font library, and 500,000 pageviews a month. All this for the low-low price of $49.99 USD / year.

With the addition of the Adobe Fonts, they now have all the fonts we regularly use such as Adobe Garamond and Myriad with - get this - all the weights. That means we can, for example, us real italic Adobe Garamond on our sites WITHOUT using images saved for web. All the text remains purely HTML which means it's GREAT for Search Engine Optimization while the CSS rules make it look very pretty.

Fonts I'd love to use on the web (and now we can): Adobe Garamond Pro, Myriad Pro, Chaparral Pro, Minion Pro, Caflisch Script Pro, Bickham Script Pro.

Uploading file to our website

Use SmartFTP to access our website: address: s89628.gridserver.com/

login: tmmedia.ca or fractelferns.com

password: month!

port: 21

Go to the following path and place your file....the last two folders are obviously the year and month that you are in....

domains/tmmedia.ca/html/wp-content/m_uploads/YEAR/MONTH/

When sending someone a link for a file to download, here is an example.......

http://www.lifetimeheritagefilms.com/wp-content/m_uploads/2010/07/some_download_file.zip

The person that you send the link to will only be able to download the one file because they cannot look at any of the directory.

Name of the file should not have spaces....this may or may not cause a problem.

Website Version History for tmmedia.ca

Over time, our main website has had a few different faces.  This article is here to document them.  The domain was purchased on May 14, 2003 with Tucows, and our hosting with Ipower.  We have been with both of these since.  You can always check out our earlier website versions (and others) on the Wayback Machine.

May 2003: Version 1

This first version was entirely HTML, written by Paul while he was just in grade 10. I believe it was launched the day we bought the domain, May 14th. There are about a dozen unique pages, featuring a services list of four bullet points, video samples such as Elect Spencer 2002, Elect Spencer 2003, The One, The Shuttle Program, and Kat's Death. Of the seven main menu items, three of them only ever said "Coming soon" (Info, Prices, and Links).

October 2004: Version 2

The second version of the website introduced CSS and PHP.  The PHP simply displayed the main menu and  grabbed the contents of the selected page through reading .txt files as the "database". Within a month, version 2.1 was released, which contained upgrades to the main index file and filled in more .txt files as database elements.  On the homepage, we sported the cheesy slogan "Quality and Affordability"!

On this version there was a nifty "drop-down menu" and tacky samples section with such jems as Paulish Can Do It, Local Jumps, Elect Spencer 2004 and more!  The services section was slightly improved to include: Digitizing Slides & Negatives, Film Transfers, Multi-media Presentations, Photo Restoration (which we never got a single job for), and the two most amazing titles ever, Special Projects and Video Production.

July 2008: Version 3

With almost four years dating the previous version, Paul had accumulated a wealth more web-design knowledge, and with the addition of Spencer as the first "full-time" contractor/staff member, Paul had time to work on a new website from scratch.  The concept was to keep it clean and white-based to allow maximum flexibility, as we has an inkling that company growth was on the horizon.

The site deisgn was written from scratch, first for our brand new tmmdance.com website, and a few weeks later was adapted and improved for tmmedia.ca. It was entirely PHP, simply based on the concept of using the include function to drop each page as a PHP file into the website framework.  This was the first design to include streaming flash video samples, and they were showcased right on the homepage.  It also had AJAX driven Place Order, and Contact pages.

Samples that graced the hompage of this site included Aerial Footage of Vancouver, Port Coquitlam Canada Day Celebrations 2008, Chloe Ellis - The Masquerade, and Store Wars at Cypress Mountain 2009.

It was extremely flexible, which became its largest downfall when we started to fill it in and realized we could go on forever.  In January of 2009, the header graphic was replaced with our new logo, and design on a new website had already begun.  It was only online less than a year.

March 2009: Version 4

As the company is moving forward heavily into developing the base structure, we adopted a new logo to suit our more professional nature.  To convey professionalism, we did a complete re-design of the website and devoted well over one hundred of hours into it's development.

The main site is built with WordPress, with plans for additional components for incorporating surveys, client login, and a newsletter component.

The website went live at 5:57pm on March 26, 2009.