seaborgfund.org is the web site of the Seaborg Open Space Fund. The fund was founded for open space advocacy by David Seaborg in honor of his father Glenn T. Seaborg, UC Chancellor and discoverer of Plutonium. The fund began as a tribute to the elder Seaborg, a Nobel Laureate and UC Berkeley professor. As a Lafayette, CA. resident, Glen was involved in the identification of 10 elements — including plutonium, berkelium and, naturally, seaborgium — and worked on the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb.

http://www.seaborgfund.org/

Features:

• Twitter social media integration
• Facebook social media integration
• Gallery
• Original design

Freelance Frank’s role:

Frank has been involved with the conception and design of the site from the beginning, with a special emphasis placed on SEO and social media integration. Frank also provides written content for the site, including a white paper of the purpose and role of the fund.

Tools:

• Wordpress
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Custom theming

Children’s House Montessori is a school based in Rapid City, South Dakota.

http://www.chkids.net/

Features:

• Custom Thesis template design and coding
• Events calendar
• Image gallery

Freelance Frank’s role:

Frank re-designed the previous site completely and ported most of the pre-existing content to a new Wordpress set up with a custom made Thesis theme. He also set up a calendar and image gallery.

Tools:

• Wordpress
• Custom PHP
• Thesis
• Thesis Open Hook

The graphic result of a quadratic function

Quadratic functions also allow for a fun afternoon combining the jQuery form plugin with the jpgraph PHP library. I started out with a simple PHP function to produce a range of f(x) values for any set of values x. I then built a form to allow any value for a, b and c to be input as well as the maximum and minimum for x and the steps that x takes. Once that was working, I passed the results into two arrays and passed those to jpgraph which produces a graphical image on the fly and stores it on the server. Finally, to avoid page refreshes, I wrapped the form around the jQuery ‘plugin’ (can these properly be called plugins? I suppose so…) The result is a simple and relatively intuitive visual demonstration of the relationship between mathematics and geometry. In fact, expanding that out, the relationship is actually between mathematical logic, computation and optics – but that gets us into a kind of crazy Turing territory and lines have to be drawn somewhere.

Try it out here

For the future, I would like to be able to produce more accurate and extensible graphs for larger number ranges, and to plug the whole thing into calculus, to really push the spatial theme. But this is something of a start and it is perhaps the simplest demonstration of the more general relationship.

An event scheduler and calander display with narrowing search parameters for the owners of everythingrapid.com.

http://www.everythingrapid.com/events.php

Features:

• Event administration suite
• Custom coding

Freelance Frank’s role:

Coding and consulting on all aspects of the design and usability.

Tools:

• PHP
• MySQL

Christmas is, in my experience, a quiet time for the freelancer. Projects, unlike presents, are wrapped up early. Nothing new or urgent need be embarked on until the new year. It is tempting, then, to while away the time decorating one’s own site in the grand old Google style. I suspect, however, that idea that has almost seen its day. Discretion is advised. Hence the snowman, peeking around the corner of the site title, and the tiny, almost invisible, decoration on the RSS icon. And that’s it. Hibernation now until things warm up, in every way, in January.

Google is the new Twitter

This post caught inside Google Real Time Search

That means a large hike in marketeering on the already over-loaded social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. A tweet is no longer just a tweet – it’s a number one ranked Google entry – and the less the punters talk about it, the longer it stays there. The wheels are off the bandwagon now.

Just for fun, I made this post, tweeted it, captured the Google result and updated – so now the post mentions itself in the kind of self-reflexive paradox that only Google makes possible…

Here’s the official line:

While I am writing about Vivid, I ought to briefly mention the nifty jQuery vertical scroller that I have installed on the right hand side column for the front page of the site. The editor has long wanted to show off the covers of all past issues, and I thought this was the most economical and user-friendly way to do it. I also linked each cover to the subscriptions page on the site, because it’s always worth getting the best economical advantage out of any addition.

My home page features a number of acronyms. They’re not uncommon in the coding world, after all. I wrapped some in acronym tags and these work fine. But, naturally, it wasn’t enough. Enter jQuery…

The Qtip demo screen at craigsworks

I was after, in addition to the standard acronym definition, a tootip that goes into more detail for the unitiated. When hovering over S.E.O., for example, I wanted the standard ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ hover tag to appear as usual, but in addition, when clicking on S.E.O. a new window should open smoothly, with more details about what S.E.O. entails. The whole thing needed to look good and work well. jQuery was the obvious weapon of choice.

Wordpress has a JQuery plugin that enables smooth tooltips of the kind I was interested in, but I didn’t want to use a plugin for a number of reasons – the primary one being that it’s just too easy. So I went instead to the source – the jQuery code at craigsworks which the plugin is based on. After some tinkering around (basically modifying paths and so on), I had a complete module that slots into my front page and allows me to create acronyms with tooltips. Clicking on any acronym there prompts a smooth tooltip with content that I can modify in any way with internal XHTML.

One stumbling block was a conflict with my Mootools slider. That was quickly resolved, but I prefer to not have to multiply libraries unnecessarily. My next task is to re-tool that slider in jQuery (and maybe even leave the jQuery.noConflict(); up, just to keep the namespace clean and clear). Conflicts are a whole other story. I’ll post about that one some other time.

The traditional approach can be summed up easily: Make a keen visual impression on the client. This requires a large office in a warehouse location, filled with the right kind of curved furniture. It means clothes, staff and sites that are overloaded with visual ideas. While appearing cutting edge the approach is in fact very traditional. It comes, largely, from the old advertising agency assumption that image is everything – that you can’t throw too much money at making an impression. I call this approach the Mad Men Web Strategy.

The Mad Men strategy is expensive and cumbersome. It places an undue bias on gloss over substance. Even today, in many cases, it assumes that the main job of a company site is to be little more than a brochure – even if that now means a standards compliant, clean-coded brocure. When the web was exciting and new it was necessary to spend a lot on securing the trust of clients. There was value in the visual impression. That value is diminishing.

Strip away the gloss and a number of things become apparent. Chief among them is that there is very little a Mad Men agency can do that a good freelancer cannot. Time required in co-ordinating group projects may well be more than that required by a single committed individual in just getting the job done. Teams are expensive. Individuals are not. Client trust in the individual freelancer is on the rise. All of which bodes well. It is easier to feed when you’re unencumbered.

Medieval Tours is a brochure site for a Romanian company that specialises in custom itineries for all areas and sites in Romania.

http://www.medievaltours.com

Features:

• Custom template
• Custom photography
• Online payment
• Inline promotional movies

Freelance Frank’s role:

Frank has consulted with the Romanian owners from the start about designing the site and content to appeal to foreign clients. To this end he has translated content from the original Romanian and has improved on supplied English translations. He has also supplied the site’s tagline ‘Romania. It’s Yours’ and some of the photographs used. Frank is engaged on a weekly basis in updating all the site content.

Tools:

• Wordpress
• Custom PHP
• Movies (Flash and Youtube)