I can’t recommend him highly enough!”
Service Category: IT Consultant
Year first hired: 2011
Top Qualities: Great Results, Good Value, High Integrity

1. I have a lovely, fantastic, goregous wife, who I love to spend my time with.
2. I have a keen interest in board-gaming (which I also enjoy playing with my wife) and dare I say it? Magic: the Gathering. Yes, that makes me very geeky and dammit – I don’t care!
3. I am enslaved to my Xbox (much to the annoyance of 1.), I can often find myself engrossed in a game for hours, see Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood or Call of Duty multiplayer.
4. I am also enslaved to the Sky+ box, which if I leave it alone for more than 5 minutes it seems to fill up with quality programming – we had a marathon session of Game of Thrones at the weekend – all I can say is WOW! Good plot, great actors, can’t wait for ‘winter’ to come.
5. I have also recently purchased a Blu-Ray player and am now experiencing ‘the very latest in high definition home entertainment’ – exactly what they said when DVD came out. But….. it does look good, very good. Casino Royale looks amazing and the just purchased T2 is very sharp. I think that having the player will also stave me off getting Sky HD (well for a year or so).
6. When I’m not doing the above, I’m usually sleeping or working, or at a beer festival enjoying a few ales. See below.

But somehow, I’ve managed to put a blog post up detailing how I can’t put a blog post up.

Spark is Jennifer Holloway who, with a career including 15 years in PR and communications, is a personal brand specialist, using her knack for spotting someone’s USP and her way with words to help them promote that in everything they say and do.  Known as ‘The Antidote to Yes-Men’ her down-to-earth, straight talking, honest style delivers real value by helping today’s leaders discover how, by being themselves, they can be even more successful.

Spark

Website taken offline due to split in chamber membership

Well, I’d seen it, sitting pretty in the file type drop down in the Save for Web dialog box and often thought “what on earth do people use that for?” whilst struggling with making colours transparent in the Colour Table, or making the background of my icon the same darned colour as the background it’s hovering over on the website. I’ve become a master at that I can tell you!

But alas my ‘eureka moment’ came just before Xmas, when I was creating an icon for the college intranet. I was following a tutorial to create a cool looking 3D mailbox icon in Illustrator, however when it came to the dreaded PNG-8 ‘choose colours to make transparent’ step in Photoshop, I mis-clicked and ended up saving as PNG-24. Only to find the finished file had – would you believe it – a smooth alpha channel drop shadow with no pixellation.

How many design-hours could this knowledge have saved me? I dread to think.

Well, I’ll hold up my hands and say I don’t know it all and I learned something new and really useful that day. Having been in this business for over 10 years now – that’s quite refreshing!

I can offer a cost-effective solution!

1. Email me your customer email data (max 5000 addresses, preferably in Excel format).
2. Send me your company logo and any other brand material.
3. Tell me what you want on your Emailshot, eg. details of special offers, discounts or promotions, website info etc.
4. I will create an Emailshot based on this information and send to all of your customers.

Read more here

She started writing a children’s story called ‘The Underground Experiment’ and I thought it was pretty darn good! Fun, very descriptive and engaging. So, to encourage her to continue with this, I set her up a WordPress-based blog website for her to express her thoughts, and add more chapters to her story.

Helen Wray

Infographic: The Darwinian Evolution of Photoshop by Tech King

]]> http://www.chris-wray.net/2010/10/19/the-darwinian-evolution-of-photoshop/feed/ 0 http://www.chris-wray.net/2010/10/18/leeds-college-of-art-intranet/ http://www.chris-wray.net/2010/10/18/leeds-college-of-art-intranet/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:42:55 +0000 admin http://www.chris-wray.net/?p=177 The all-new Leeds College of Art Intranet Portal was launched in September 2010, built from the ground up in Drupal with custom PHP and Ajax.

Originally, the College Intranet consisted of two Silverstripe CMS websites – one for staff, one for students. Keeping both sites up to date was time consuming, and the CMS itself is not very user friendly. Designing themes for Silverstripe was also proving difficult as the code and CSS syntax was non-standard.

I did some intensive research on the web to find a suitable alternative CMS, eventually narrowing it down to Moodle or Drupal. Moodle (abbreviation for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is a free and open-source e-learning  software platform, also known as a Course Management System, Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). However, Moodle is not designed to be used as a CMS system, it would haver taken a lot more development time to get it into a state where it would be suitable, add to that the file upload and document repository is non-existent as is site-wide search.

It was decided that Drupal would be more suitable.

Drupal is an open-source content management system.  It is a widely used back-end system for websites worldwide, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts within a role-based permission / privilege system, create and manage menus, RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As installed, Drupal provides options to create a websites ranging from simple to complex multi-user websites.

Drupal is extremely developer friendly, at first it was a very steep learning curve to set it up but once all the relevant plug-ins, extensions and themes were installed, I‘ve found the end-user experience to be very rewarding, with plenty of scope for further customisation.

The site was launched in September and has been met with fantastic praise. I am providing CMS training and am finding that users feel that the system is far more intuitive than SilverStripe. Furthermore there is no longer any confusion as to whether content is on the student site or the staff site!

http://portal.leeds-art.ac.uk

This is a small 4-page WordPress-based website with a basic CSS theme applied with a small amount of Photoshop customisation.

Globe Motors