Futurelooks.com

Futurelooks.com is run by Stephen Fung and crew. I first got on board with with Futurelooks back in about 2002 while working as a Computer Specialist for London Drugs. Since then I have done numerous reviews of geeky gadgetry available to consumers. My more recent work with Futurelooks has been the following:

• Vantec EZ Swap 2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive Enclosure
• Razer Lachesis High Precision 3G Gaming Mouse (I still use this mouse today)
• M-Rock Zion 525 Camera Backpack

If you are looking for some great reviews on latest technology I do recommend checking out Futurelooks and the community that Stephen has build over the years.

ThinkComputers.org

ThinkComputers.org is another great technology review website based in the US. Bob Buskirk has also recently switched over to using WordPress for their platform of choice for their reviews. It is also a great example of how you can use WordPress for something other than a blog. Here is also a list of my more recent product reviews:

• Samsung HMX R10 Full HD Digital Camcorder
• Axus FiT RAID 500 Storage Device
• Samsung EX1 10 Megapixel Digital Camera

I have quite enjoyed receiving product and writing about it my experiences with it over the years but with school coming up in less than 8 days, I find myself without the time to do them. Once I get more comfortable with being a full-time student and being able to better manage my work load and whatever else happens, I am sure I’ll get back into doing product reviews. At this time it has been a great experience and I will miss doing it.

If you have a product you wish to have reviewed, I do highly recommend checking out both Futurelooks.com and ThinkComputers.org. The exposure you can receive with those two websites can definitely help increase your sales.

So what sites am I talking about anyway? I decided to merge TylerIngram.com and TylerIngramPhotos.com. Since TylerIngramPhotos.com is primarily a photo showcase website with little traffic, I thought it might be best to just merge it into this site (the blog) since I tend to update this way more often than my photo site. I also think it might be easier to share one website with people who are interested in my photos, but might also find my writing to be of interest as well and vise-versa.

What was done?

Since TylerIngramPhotos.com was more of a one page sort of site (that was manipulated to look like many), I thought I would look through the code I wrote and port it into a WordPress environment. TylerIngramPhotos.com uses the Flickr API extensively and since most of my code is function base, it was fairly simple to move over into the WordPress Environment without too much trouble. There was some CSS issues that I dealt with, though for the most part they should be corrected now.

All the photos are pulled from Flickr from a particular Collection. This collection stores various Sets which holds the photos themselves. The great thing about using Flickr’s API, is that I can pull any data from my photos that is stored on Flickr. The tags, or keywords that the photos on Flickr have are used here to pull up the top 5 most related blog posts. I hope this helps people who land on a photo stick around a little longer and check out some other things here on my site.

You can check out TylerIngram.com/photos for the Collection itself.

What else needs to be done?

I find that I am forever adding, tweaking or changing so I am sure there are other things that need to be done. It looks like I might need to fix the positioning of the top header menu so it aligns vertically better with the social media icons.

I need to look at my Photo of the Day script and implement that in an easy and fun way.

Add more photos into my Portfolio Collection (the collection on Flickr for which my photos are displayed from). Granted not all photos are everyone’s cup-of-tea, but, I do like what I have there so far. I know there are more photos to add, and I am sure I’ll look at ones to weed out.

I need to redirect TylerIngramPhotos.com to this site and reactivate the Photograph Page I have stored in the WordPress database. Perhaps add some sub-pages to the Photography section for Services/Prices that I offer.

What Can You Do?

A couple of things you can do for me. First off, if you come across any weird issues or bugs, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ve so far tested this in Firefox 3.* and IE 7. Typically I find that if it works in those two, chances are it will work in the rest (mostly).

Second, you can Like my Facebook page! Yup, I created a single Facebook page to run for both my blog here and whatever photography stuff too.

Last but not least, if you have any suggestions for my site, I am always listening!

Hope you like the changes!

I am one of about 6 photographers who are working for Watermark Communications Inc., the company that  is putting on the festival. Today, being the first day, I was scheduled to photograph the Orage Master’s practice session at Skier’s Plaza (next to the GLC aka Garibaldi Lift Co.). At first it started out a bit slow and I overheard the events crew say the riders were a bit late to start. Though eventually they started and it was a great thing to watch as the competitors went down the custom course pulling tricks and getting air.

Tomorrow (Saturday, April 17th) will be the Orage Masters (yes, it is spelled Orage, not Orange)  event which will definitely draw in a large crowd.

Here are a few shots I took today while on the course and around Whistler Village:

I do have more photos online which you can check out over on my Flickr Photostream.

Be sure to follow along via my RSS feed too, so you can keep up to date with what I am covering as well as experiencing at this awesome festival that helps end the Whistler 2010 season.

Also, if you are not already doing so, follow me on Twitter as I tweet throughout the day!

New Layout Changes

If you’re reading this from the physical site and not from the RSS feed, you will notice that I’ve changed the colours around a bit. I’ve kept the general layout the same which for the most part is a single column. I wanted my blog to look a bit more like my photography site so I’ve used the same font for the header on this site.

I’ve moved the Twitter, RSS and Flickr icon’s to the top and made them a bit smaller. I thought the darker colours would look better with the photos I tend to post here. I’ve kept the same 800 pixel maximum size for the photos, not too small so that you have to squint to see them, but not too big that some people might have to scroll around to see the entire photo as well. I checked my statistics and the majority of my readers are still using 1024×768 monitor resolutions, so I’ve tried to keep the site’s width within 900 pixels.

I’ve added the TweetThis button to the individual posts themselves, not saying I get many retweets but I thought it was a nice option to include. I’ve tweaked other CSS and PHP elements as well. Cleaning up the code I suppose for the most part anyway. I still might look into my retrieving of photos from Flickr routines to help speed that up a bit without loosing image quality.

Photography

I was recently at the F5-Expo with media accreditation. I have never been to an F5-Expo trade-show before but I found it for the most part interesting. Hearing the comments from people afterward I find to be interesting as well. It seems the majority of people I’ve seen mentioning their thoughts on Twitter have been saying that the F5-Expo was geared more towards people/businesses new to Social Media. Which is perfectly fine too. If you want, you can check out the photos I took during F5-Expo for your entertainment.

I also attended Rebecca’s (Miss604) book signing at the Granville and Georgia Street location of London Drugs. It was a good turnout and many people had their copies of her book Blogging To Drive Business signed. There was some excellent items given away too including a Nikon Coolpix L110 and a Certified Data notebook computer.

I also did a recent engagement shoot with my cousin this past weekend too. I meet up with my cousin Steve and his fiance Theresa at Kits Beach for some fun in the sand and sand. Though I am still in the process of going through those photos. It was my first time doing a shoot like that, though I am sure they will like the results.

Ski and Snowboarding

Robyn and I also hit up Whistler for some more Ski and Snowboard action. Whistler has had incredible snow and we’ve been trying to get up as much as possible over the past couple weeks. We would have liked to hit up the mountains during the Olympics but it was just far too expensive to even take the bus during that time.

The previous week when we went up to Whistler the visibility was pretty crappy due to the high winds. We stayed around mid-mountain but the snow was great. This week (this past Sunday) the sun was out, the air wasn’t too cold but the snow, again, was great! This time Harmony and Symphony were open so we hit that up. We also met up with my older sister and her boyfriend for some lunch up at Roundhouse lodge after taking them across the Peak 2 Peak gondola.

What’s Coming Up?

So what else is happening soon? Well we’re heading up to Whistler for the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival. I’m accredited with the company who puts on the festival again this year, so I am looking forward to shooting as much as I can for the 2 nights we’re going to be staying. I hope to get up a few more times during the 10 day event as there are other events I want to see and cover. Too bad my emails to various businesses have gone unanswered though in regards to the potential of staying for a night or two. I would have liked to been able to trade my blogging and photography for the ability to check out the various accommodations Whistler/Blackcomb has to offer. I guess I’ll just have to drive up whenever Robyn doesn’t need her car and then drive back down in the evening.

There are some other things coming up too, but for now that’s about it.

Looking forward to a great time up at Whistler this weekend and getting out with my camera too!

Some people I know who will be speaking at F5-Expo this year are: Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604), Tris Hussey, John Chow, Kris Krug, Tod Maffin and more. This year’s F5-Expo features Malcolm Gladwell (Author, Staff Writer for The New Yorker) who will be talking about the explosion of social media and how it can be used for human engagement.

Here is a quick little video on what to expect at this year’s conference:

This will also be the first time I’ve attended a F5-Expo and I look forward to taking in as much as I can, though I will also be covering it via photographs so I got to get a game plan ready.

Some of the Panel Discussions:

• Search Marketing in 2010
• The Metrics of Social Media
• Mobile Marketing

Some of the day’s Workshops:

• Device Tips: Demystify BlackBerry Terminology
• SEO & Paid Search for Beginners
• WordPress for Dummies
• Twitter Etiquette for Business
• Blogging for Profit
• Blogging for Business
• Podcasting 101

You can check out the rest of the sessions that will be held during the day too: All Sessions. It does look like it will be a jam packed day of interesting topics!

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.