It’s time to get active
I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.
UBC Vault wins CCAE award
The UBCVault.ca website won GOLD award for e-Innovation from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The UBCVault newsletter, eVault also won the Bronze Award for Best Newsletter.
Congratulations to the entire team at UBC for making this website a great success.
Open ID - easier Internet logins
For anyone who spends time on the Internet and takes advantage of social media technologies in particular remembering a growing list of passwords and login details can be a challenge. Thankfully, there is a solution in the making in the form of OpenID.
Open ID is an open identity system that allows you to use one single identification (or digital identification) across many of your favorite sites. Participant sites include the likes of Ma.gnolia, pbwiki, 37 Signals, Technorati and Plaxo.
With Open ID, you register once for an ID then use that to identify yourself on different sites. The result: you don’t have to remember numerous login and password details. It makes surfing much faster, more secure and less of a pain.
Developed by the OpenID Foundation an organisation that was formed in June 2007 to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community, the group is quickly expanding and some of the behemoths in the industry are now OpenID providers.
To claim your ID use a reputable providers such as MYID, Claim ID or Vidoop and make the process easier by using a downloadable browser plugin like Vidoop’s to manage your standard logins.
At last my brain can take a rest and doesn’t have to store all those endless password details.
Creating Html newsletter can be a real pain in the…
The folks from the email standards project have released their 2008 gmail appeal. If you’re a gmail users you might have noticed that html newsletters just plain suck on gmail. Creating these newsletter is a real challenge. This video demonstrates how I feel when dealing with gmail…..
Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.
Karma yoga at Bluelime Media
One of my New Year’s resolution this year was to deepen my yoga practice and integrate yoga philosophy in my daily activities. I was already practicing 5 times a week, so I’ve now increased to 6 and sometimes 7, I attend workshops whenever I can with visiting teachers and went to my first yoga retreat a few weeks ago. I feel better than ever, but I still haven’t found an way to involve yoga in my Web work.
Ideally my goal would be to develop and create sites dedicated to yoga. I’ve had the pleasure to work with Barbara from Bluecitrus for many years now. When I first met her, she had just launched Chakravibe, an e-commerce website selling yoga jewelery based on the chakra colours. Built using OS-Commerce platform, the website functioned very well, but was difficult to update and maintain and the code was a complete nightmare to decipher. When Barbara approached me earlier this year and asked me to help her move the static pages to WordPress, I decided that if I wanted to get involved in the yoga community, this was a great first move.
Joseph and Ben took responsibility of the OS-Commerce component and moved everything to a sub-folder. I took care of re-creating the design using up-to-date HTML/CSS and removed all of the tables and set up the WordPress templates. I doubt that many people have noticed that the website has changed. Except for a few pixel adjustments here and there and the changes in url, the website is identical. We’ve also added a blog allowing Barbara and Teresa, to write posts and tell us what’s new. So far the results have been very positive. Barbara is very pleased that she can update the content and post new images and Teresa has been writing great posts.
I’ve spoken to a few yoga teachers and have plans on creating more WordPress yoga templates this summer. Hopefully when things slow down (fingers crossed), but if you know and yogis looking for a blog, send them my way.
And if you are visiting the chakravibe website in the next little while, enter the code code CV20122J09 and save 20% on on any Chakravibe product. This Spring special is only available for for a short time, so hurry.