In the past few days I have gotten to take photos of Maelle Ricker, Alexandre Bilodeau, visited various areas of Vancouver and enjoyed what has been happening in our city. Today though we checked out NBC’s Today Show that is being shot from top of Grouse Mountain.

We started our morning at 2 AM and picked up our friend Keith to head over to Grouse in time to receive the NBC tickets. NBC gives out 100 tickets on a first come first serve basis which allows people to access the mountain without having to pay. Though once you’re up there they also give first come first serve access to the outdoor section of NBC’s today show as well, so if there are some big names to attend expect a large crowd of people.

Our experience was fairly calm. We found out that Robyn and I could use our Grouse Ski Pass to access the mountain without issues. Once we boarded the Skyride up to the top of Grouse the sun was still down. Vancouver tinkles pretty well when there are no clouds. Grouse does have one of the best views of our city.

After about and hour wait or so, NBC started getting ready for their show. They did some segments from within the lodge at Grouse but more of it seemed to be outside around the fire pit.

Robyn’s friend from Oregon, Heidi, was excited to be on the Today Show, so much that during the weather segment with Stephanie Abrams, Heidi was asked about holding one of the Olympic torches at Birks on Granville Street.

Periodically they (anchors of the NBC Weekend Today show) would come out and talk about various events happening around Vancouver. One segment we found quite interesting was when they brought out Liberty, a female Bald Eagle.

Seeing an eagle up close is pretty cool. I’ve seen a Juvenile Bald Eagle within 15 feet, but being with 5 feet of an adult is neat. I did learn something new, female bald eagles are larger than their male counter parts. Liberty is roughly 12 lbs, seems like a big turkey eh?

There wasn’t any winter athletes being interviewed this morning. We did miss out on Shaun White being interviewed the morning before. I’m sure the weekday Today show will go back to featuring winter olympians but either way it was pretty cool to see how such a popular show is set up, coordinating and executed.

If you haven’t been up to Grouse during the Olympics, I recommend seeing the sunrise and checking out the Today show too. Remember, the first 100 people at 3:30AM get free lift tickets up the Skytram so attend the live taping of the show.

On a quick note, Keith and I checked out the wolf enclosure that Grouse has near the base of the mountain. I heard that they used to be in the same enclosure as the Grizzle Bears but had a small incident so they decided on separating them.

You can check out the rest of my Olympic experience photos over on Flickr too!

What Are Moo MiniCards?

Moo MiniCards are small business cards that you get to design and create. You can use either your photos from a service such as Flickr, or upload a design, or designs, you have created. The cool part is that not only do you get to design the front side, you also get to include text on the back side.

The Moo MiniCards are roughly 2″ x 1″ which makes them smaller than typical business cards but I find the weight of the paper used seems to be slightly heavier.

I thought it was time now to look at ordering some Moo MiniCards, mainly because I don’t have any sort of business cards to hand out to people when they ask. I think they would be great for the Social Media scene, small and if the photos are decent, memorable.

When I was looking to order some of these cards, my buddy John Biehler mentioned he had a first-time buyer’s discount code I could use which would save me some money on my first order. I loaded up Moo’s website and started the process of ordering the MiniCards.

At first I wondered out of over 3,000 photos I have online, how could I possibly choose photos for my first batch? Rebecca mentioned I could probably ask people to choose my cards for me but I never did end up doing that, perhaps next time though! I just sat down one day and started to go through my Flickr Photostream choosing photos I liked, ones hopefully the represented myself the best.

I ended up choosing 17 photos, though I could have chosen 100 different photos for the 100 MiniCards that the order was for, but I didn’t. On the backside I went with a black background and some basic contact information in white. Some people have asked why I did not choose to put DynamicShark Media on it, but I thought these Moo MiniCards would be more for a personal/photography use than an actual business card for DynamicShark, in which I’m still designing.

After looking over the photos I had chosen, adding information on the back of the cards, I submitted my order. The processing of the order and shipping the result to me would be roughly 5-8 weeks. It was quicker than that.

Arrival of my Moo MiniCards

I received my Moo MiniCards in roughly 2 weeks from the day I submitted my order. I was pretty excited to check them out.

I thumbed through the cards and out of the batch of 100 only 1 seems to have a weird print issue, that doesn’t bother me though. I like the quality and feel of these MiniCards. I can’t wait to start giving them out to people. Hopefully other people like them as much as I do.

I’m really happy with the outcome of these cards. Let’s hope I can give them away so I can order another box of them!

Have you ever used Moo Cards before? If not, I recommend you to check them out!

Why Change the Layout?

Some people fear change, I love change (well for the most part). I wanted a new layout that would give more emphasis on my Photography. After all, I seem to do more blog posts on Photography than anything else really.

Some of you know about http://www.tyleringramphotos.com. It was a photoblog that I ran somewhat separately from this site, but I found over time, I would be just repeating a lot of the same photos. I tried to make the photoblog more of a portfolio site, but decided to just let it go and concentrate my photo efforts here.

I also wanted to change it up before our trip down to Costa Rica. My camera is coming with me and I will be sure to post magnificent photos of the area we will be in, and thought increasing the space for photos here would be a good idea.

What Changed?

I pushed the navigation menu up above the entire site. I thought it was a nice way of getting it out of the way.

I expanded the width of the site to 1000 pixels wide. This will help accommodate the size of the photos I wish to display which will be 800 pixel wide. This also eliminates the need for using the Lightbox that the 500 pixel wide photos currently use. According to Flickr’s ToS, the use of the lightbox technically takes away from the experience of using Flickr, so I guess that is a bad thing.

The header image is still pulled from my Flickr stream at random. I increased the length to the full 1000 pixels wide and increased the height to 250 pixels. this gives a much larger header image. Because my photos are typically 800 pixels wide on Flickr, I did use PHP’s GD Library to increase the size of the photo. There is small loss of quality of course, but I still think it looks really cool.

You will notice a “Featured Post’ slideshow. It is Ajax based and loads with both Firefox and IE (why are you using IE still anyway). I haven’t had time to play in the other browsers, but according to the place I got it from, it’s supposedly compatible. Let me know if you experience issues with it. I think it’s cool and have always wanted one.

I got rid of my Sidebar. Yup, I started hating it anyway. I’ve moved the Categories, Recent Posts and Recent Comments to the footer of the site. This keeps the main focus hopefully on my big beautiful photos. Right?

The main content will accommodate my 800 pixel wide photos, with room to spare. After all, since I love Photography so much, I thought it would be best to share the photos in a nice, large way.  Such as this photo:

Isn’t that beautiful? The rising sun off the beaches of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. If you have to scroll to see that photo, you really need to upgrade your monitor. Though technically you should still be able to see most of it on a 1024×768 resolution, but I don’t know why you’re running your resolution that low to begin with.

Added some cute little Social Media icons near the header. No need to show how many people follow me right?

The main page (index page) will show up to 5 posts with excerpts along with a 500 pixel wide photo. The excerpt code is custom, which includes a custom call to the WordPress database (MySQL) so strips out any HTML it sees. It works better than the default WordPress function the_excerpt(), or at least I think so.  I also have a function that pulls the first image from the post and uses it as a 500 pixel wide thumbnail, same as before but that was 100 pixel wide. I also tweaked it a bit to load quicker (hopefully).

I guess that is about it. There have been some little tweaks to the code here and there. Primarily to the code that handles the recreation of images for the various locations on my site.

What’s Next?

I’m sure I’ll tweak things as I find them. If you notice anything out of place, don’t hesitate to tell me here via Comments, Twitter or even contact me via my Contact me page.

I will be writing a small WordPress plugin to deal with my contact form. Currently I use cFormsII but it is just too much and always gets stuck in my spam filter. I will look at creating a small, simple (or minimalist) contact form.

I might look at creating a WordPress plugin to better handle the “Featured Post” Slide show. For now it is changed manually (via HTML).

What do you think?

I’m alright with criticism. If you like it, what do you like about it? If you don’t like it, what part(s) and what would you do to make it better? Let me know via the comments section!

The past few hours I have been pretty geeky. I’ve been looking into Flickr’s API (application programming interface) and how I can monkey around with it and PHP. What did I want to accomplish? At the beginning I didn’t really have a goal, I wanted to see what I could do with it, how I can access my photos and from there I would figure out something fun to implement.

Well it seems I have figured out something cool. If you’ve noticed the larger photo on the header of my page, the one above the Flickr RSS thumbnails, it is a bit more dynamic than usual. Previously I had 5 (I think) header images that I created in Photoshop and was using PHP to randomly insert on when the page refreshed. Now I can be a bit lazy at times and I haven’t looked at updating those 5 photos in a while, so I was thinking how I could incorporate my Flickr photos with my website in order to help give my photography a bit more exposure.

So what’s different? Go ahead and refresh the page, it should show a random photo of mine from Flickr. Though there is a catch, it isn’t the fastest system yet and it doesn’t always show something cool. Let’s see if I can explain the functioning behind how it currently works. I might have a revision or two, but for now I think it’s pretty cool!

1. Pull the last 400 photos from my Flickr Photostream (pulls XML data)
2. Select a random photo using PHP’s rand() function and create URL for photo
3. Check to see if it is in landscape or portrait orientation, discard if it’s portrait
4. Select the middle third of the photo, remember the “Rule of Thirds” for photography? Hopefully this is the more interesting portion of the photo. If not, tough luck! Typically my photos are 800×533 on Flickr
5. Create a new 850×118 jpeg image and copy random photo into its placeholder, resize to width if needed
6. Display photo in all its glory as my header image

Not bad for a couple of hours of work. Either way it allows for a more dynamic header and some more ‘freshness’ too!

I am looking for your feedback on this! Is it slow to load? Do the photos suck? Is it a cool idea? Is it random enough? What do you think?

I can just sit here and refresh my screen all day looking at whatever random photo is pulled from Flickr.

Recently I went in for some preventative surgery. As I mentioned a while back I had a Pilonidal Cyst that it seems I was disposition to have since I was an embryo. Even though it was taken care of previously, it still had the potential of coming back. This recently surgery is to help prevent that from happening. So I sit here at my computer with stitches in my backside, not the most pleasant feeling.

To keep myself from going insane, I thought I would take the opportunity to head outside today and of course bring the camera along. Now typically my photowalks can be 3 to 4 hours in length, this one was roughly an hour and I did not venture too far. I thought with the sky being overcast, I nice little trip around Lost Lagoon would not irritate my recent surgery.

The following is the only photo I really have to share of that walk. Willow trees have always been one of my more favourite tree and they dot the shoreline of Lost Lagoon. Their branches skimming the water’s surface.

If you click on the photo above, it will overlay a 1280 pixel wide image. I also recently learned that the lightbox via the WordPress plugin I use is borderline against the Flickr API usage agreement. According to the API’s ToS you are not supposed to take away the viewing experience of Flickr. By not hyperlinking the photo to Flickr’s site seems to be a bit of a grey area, or is it? What do you think? If it indeed is against their ToS with the use of their API, then I might have to look at changing somethings up with this site as I really do like offering a larger image for people to see.

Saturday the 3rd of October  marked the second time I’ve attended a Barcamp here in Vancouver. What exactly is a Barcamp? Well it is an unconference. What is an unconference? From my observation there isn’t really anything scheduled during the day and the first part of a Barcamp is for people to give a brief overview (within 30seconds) of what they would like to talk about and then their talk gets scheduled into an available slot during the course of the day. There were a lot of topics being discussed but only a couple that I attended.

One aspect I do like about Barcamp is that there is also something to do in regards to Photography. So I definitely hit up the photography photowalk and then the work flow session afterward.

The photowalk was the first session I attended and a good sized group of people showed up to do it as well. Typically photowalks for myself last hours and hours, but since this was part of Barcamp and there were other talk sessions, this photowalk was only about 40 minutes. Though that can be enough time to capture a few images anyway.

Yes, that bottom photo is of Peter laying down near a Mercedes, though I never did see what sort of photo he took from that position.

After the photowalk I attended Raul’s (aka Hummingbird604) talk on how Freelancing is not Free and a lot of valid points came up. If you do freelancing, try not to do work free even if it’s a passion of yours (like web design/development and even photography are mine) but to barter, or look for compensation in other ways. Like John mentioned, a bottle of whiskey can go a long way! Well perhaps for him haha!

Then was lunch, where I just talked with Peter about various photography things. I’m always looking to learn more about photography and the industry surrounds it. Then it was off to the Photography work flow session with John Biehler and Scott Prince. They went over ways they could use tools such as Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom to organize and process your photos after you take them. I learned a couple new tricks via Scott as he uses Lightroom. It seemed the majority of the users during that session were using Apple’s iPhoto though, which according to John is a not as technical as Aperture but offers some similar features and functions. Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom will run you about $199 CDN.

Overall it was a really good Barcamp and I look forward to attending the next one. The venue was easier to get around to this time as last year it was on Granville Island and the venues were much further apart. People had to rush around between buildings last year, this year you could just wonder from room to room and up a couple floors if needed.

Did you attent this year’s Barcamp Vancouver? What did you like or dislike about it? If you haven’t gone to one, you should!

I have also attended WordCamp Whistler which was great fun. Unfortunately due to the 2010 Winter Olympics, they might hold it in a different spot.

What Is A WordCamp?

WordCamp is an all day(9-5pm), informational event for people who are interested in blogging as well as the blogging environment WordPress. Throughout the day guest speakers will hold 30 minutes sessions ranging in topics related to the blogging world and the WordPress environment.

I’m New To Blogging and/or WordPress, Can I Attend?

Of course you can attend and I’m sure you will come away with not only very useful information, but also some new friends too. I have found that the sessions range from beginner topics, intermediate topics to even advance topics such as how to create WordPress themes or Plugins. No matter your level in blogging or WordPress, you’ll find useful and interesting information.

Of course if you are a veteran to blogging and to WordPress there are also sessions that will interest you.

If you are not using the WordPress environment for your blog, you should attend too! Find out why you should be using the most popular, largest community supported, open sourced blogging environment; WordPress.

Who’s Talking About What?

There are 4 tracks with at 3 guest speakers each track.

Beginner Track

Session 1 -Rebecca Bollwitt – More then just a Blog.

Session 2 – Glenda Hyatt – 3 Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility

Session 3 – Raul Pacheco – Accessorize Your Blog: Top Ten Ways to Maximize Reader Experience

Intermediate Track

Session 1 – Lorraine Murphy – Blogging for Creativity

Session 2 -  Kulpreet Singh – Mastering the Admin Interface

Session 3 – Dave Zille – Using Custom Fields for Fun and Profit

Development Track

Session 1 – John Biehler – Setting Up WAMP for Local Development

Session 2 – Jeff Kee – Beyond Template Tags

Session 3 – George Plumley – Modifying Your Own Theme

Twitter Track

Session 1 – Gary Jones – How to Build Your Brand on Twitter

Session 2 – Rainer Schmoll – Integrating WordPress and Twitter

A pretty extensive list of topics being discussed! Looks like it will be a busy day with lots of information.

So How Much Is All Of This?

Each track is $25, or you can pay $75 and attend all 4 tracks (yes, you save $25). Head over to the WordCamp Fraser Valley ticket page to purchase your ticket(s)!

Okay, So I Bought My Ticket(s) Where Do I Go?

This year’s WordCamp Fraser Valley is being held at SFU’s Surrey Campus. I plan on taking the SkyTrain from Vancouver to Surrey which seems to be the easiest way to get there as the SFU Surrey Campus is across the street from the SkyTrain Station. Check out this page for more information on the location.

What Else Might I Need To Know?

The couple of WordCamp’s I have attended it is probably best to bring something to write with (pen/pencil, paper) as you will find useful information you will want to remember for later. Don’t be scared to bring your laptop either, chances are 90% of the people in attendance will have one too.

Looking to network with people in the blogging world? Business cards are great to hand out to people you first meet, if not I’m sure there will be name badges which you can also include your Twitter account. You do use Twitter right? If not, sign up now and start using it!

I am looking forward to this WordCamp Fraser Valley and my journey using Public Transit to get there too. Glad it was somewhere where I didn’t have to drive my car as I’ve gotten used to walking everywhere. Don’t worry my camera will be in hand too so I can capture (hopefully) the majority of the tracks and post them to Flickr and write about the success this WordCamp Fraser Valley will be.

See you all there!

I’ve been using the Flickr Photo Album plugin for WordPress for quite some time now, but mainly to allow me to easily integrate my Flickr photos into blog posts. A feature I have not looked at, until now, has been the use of a lightbox. Lightboxes (in terms of web sites) allow you to pop up a photo over-top of the regular content, this allows to show a larger photo to your visitors without changing your layout or redirecting them. Some people might dislike this, but others I find generally like the effect it creates. To check out the larger photos, just click on the photos below. A larger (800px wide) photo will load over top. It should not hinder your browsing experience and you can just click on the photo again to make it disappear.

Deep Cove is about 30 minutes east of the City of Vancouver on the North Shore, and located in North Vancouver. The trail head is located next to a private property along Panorama Drive.  It is just before a small bridge that goes over a small creek, so it can be easily missed.

The trail that leads from Deep Cove to Grey Rock is not terribly difficult, but there is a large amount of going up. Even though the elevation gain is only 100m, if you are not used to going up so many steps, switch backs or rooty areas you will want to take it slow. Just be sure not to wear flip-flops or Crocs as we noticed some people had been wearing.

Eventually (roughly 45 minutes) you will come to Grey Rock. This over looks Deep Cove, Belcarra (the the left) and parts of Port Moody and Burnaby (straight ahead). Definitely a great spot to have a picnic or enjoy the sun.

After you have spent time in the sun, you just follow the trail back the way you came. It’s much easier going back down to the parking lot than it is going up to Grey Rock.

Be sure to check out the rest of my photos in my Flickr photostream, including more photos from our litle day hike to Grey Rock.

So far using the lightbox I find to be quite useful. This particular WordPress layout allows for only 500 pixel wide photos within the content of the posts. The ligthbox allows me to display the 800 pixel wide photos (bigger photos is better right?) to people who wish to see the larger size. it also allows people to easily navigation between photos within a blog post as well.

At this time, I have also decided to go back to posting my photos here on Tyler Ingram dot com. I have seen a recent slip in traffic numbers that is primarily due to the fact that I have not been posting very much here. With the use of the lightbox, I can proudly display my photos here without having to change my layout. I love being able to show off larger photos to people, and I find that anything really below 800 pixel in width is a bit small.

There are some local blogger meetups that happen on a regular basis here in Vancouver. One of which is called ThirdTuesday.

ThirdTuesday normally happens on the third Tuesday of every month, though sometimes it can happen on other days of the week. It is a free meetup of Vancouver’s communications and marketing sector who are interested in social media. Typically there is a guest speaker who will talk about a particular interesting topic. A large aspect of ThirdTuesday’s, in my opinion, would be social networking, the meet and greet of other people who share similar interests in social media.

Tuesday the 19th of May was the first time I attended a Vancouver ThirdTuesday. Recently they have been held at Republic, a bar/lounge located in the entertainment district of the downtown core, between Smithe and Nelson on Granville Street. I arrived just before 7:00pm and glad that the doors to Republic were open.

John Chow talks to the attendees

This particular ThirdTuesday’s guest speaker was John Chow who talked about running a million dollar business on 2 hours per day. He gave examples of how he earns the majority of his income through his primary company TTZ Media. His blog (www.johnchow.com) does earn a hefty amount of money but, to John, it still is a hobby of his.

One of the main points I took away from my first ThirdTuesday meetup was that you should not trade time for money. Working X amount of hours for X amount of dollars will rarely get someone a wealthy income. His example was roughly a web developer earning $200 per hour, working 8 hours a day would make roughly $416,000 in a year working 8 hours a day. Not quite the $1,000,000 per year income right? Of couse that developer would have to minus expenses, so really, the take home pay would be less. On the other hand though, $400,000 per year is a pretty nice annual income that I wouldn’t say no to.

John likes to be the middle man too, which requires less work on his part. An example would be how John charges $500 for a review on his blog. John doesn’t write the review himself, he outsources that review to someone at a lower rate. John does get a share though. He also does a lot of affiliate work, well not physical work, but he refers a large amount of people to various Ad Affiliates Networks (such as Market Leverage) who pay John a percentage on advertising that his referees earn. Small amounts can add up quickly.

Anyway, there was some great information that John gave out. I’ve heard most of it before from his other talks but that’s beside the point. Overall I thought this particular ThirdTuesday was successful. Republic as a venue for this sort of meetup I think is a bit lacking. There was nearly not enough seating; 90 % of the people there were standing. It was dimly lit; some people mentioned to me they had troubles seeing while talking to people, and it was a bit too dark to take photos. The above photos were shot at ISO 1600, f1.8 and a really slow shutter speed, also bumped the levels up using Lightroom. Though the photos of course, weren’t the main point of the meetup.

Plenty of options for Conversation Starters

A lot of networking did go on before and after the talk by John. I meet a few new faces and talked to people I’ve previously met. I would think more people might attend if it was at a larger venue with more seating and perhaps available appetizers. Being a free meetup one can’t complain right? Unfortunately I will be out of town for the next one, but I’m sure it will also be successful. If you are interested, I would recommend heading over to the Meetup.com website and attending the next upcoming free ThirdTuesdays in Vancouver.

I’ve been using Facebook for a while and I have seen them change the user interface (UI) numerous times. People hate it or they like it, but for me, the most recent change annoys me everyday and there seems to be no end. When Facebook changes something, we are all stuck with the change, no matter how many people complain about it, there seems to be no going back.

I was okay with the first few UI changes as it seemed to make things a bit easier to use. Though the most recent change has been bugging me more than lately, namely to new additions: Highlights and Suggestions.

Highlights and Suggestions

Before the most recent UI change that Facebook made go live the suggestions only dealt with friends that you _might_ know. There are a bunch of people I know through other people but I am more acquaintances with them. I might have met them once or twice before. I might know of them through people talking, but if I choose not add them as a “friend” then why do they keep coming up as a “Suggestion”??

Now most recently are the “So and So is a fan of going to the bathroom” or some completely useless action. Seriously, do I care if you’re a fan of Sleep, or eating, or you are a fan of not being eaten by bears? There seems to be new ones every day, I just wish I could turn off this feature of Facebook. If I click that little X I do not want to ever see that “Suggestion” again!

Let me remove this from my profile!

Facebook and Twitter

This next annoyance might relate to some people, but for me it is becoming more of a nuisance lately than anything else either of the Social Networking sites might have recently changed.

I don’t have a huge “friends” list in Facebook (currently 138.. err make that 137 as of writing this) but a large majority of them are now using Twitter. For those who do not know what Twitter is, you might be hiding under a rock so this is not going to make much sense to you.  Though if you do use Twitter and Facebook, you might be one of the people I wish I could change the frequency of which you show up on my news feed. I don’t want to hide you from my Facebook news feed, but since Twhirl (or any other Twitter client) is faster at showing me your tweets than Facebook, I get a lot of regurgitated “status updates” or links posted on Facebook. It’s really annoying.

I understand that you might have different followers on Twitter as you might have for friends on Facebook, but I would say the majority have both.  I would personally prefer that people on Facebook uninstall the Twitter application. Leave Twitter statuses to Twitter and Facebook Statuses to Facebook. Or perhaps they could rewrite the Facebook Twitter application NOT to update your Facebook status, but to have it as a seperate ‘box’ that won’t spam a person’s Facebook news feed, or not as often.

I guess I use Facebook and Twitter differently than other people. Perhaps I don’t use them entirely different, but I don’t have my Facebook statues linked to my Twitter profile. I think they should be kept separately.

What annoyances do you have with Facebook? I don’t believe I am totally alone with this thinking either. I want to hear your thoughts!