Magzalez’s eyes on media

I am redesigning this blog and the rest of magzalez.com! I know I just redesigned this place about 8 months ago, but my design skills are improving and besides, I’m coming up on a new chapter of my life — post graduation.

I still have some work to do. I have to design the full-blog portion of the site, galleries, resume, etc. I just wanted to get the overall look out in the wild.

Do me a favor and criticize it. Tell me what’s good and what’s bad. I want to have this out in a little over a month, maybe before September starts. I still have a couple of other projects on my plate — namely cookingmatt.com for my summer class.

The Alligator has a weekly entertainment section called the Avenue. It is a silly section, but I’m sure a lot of people read it. There is an over-the-top sex column along side book, cd and movie reviews. Honestly, I don’t think the paper puts enough work into the section, but that is only because the section does not put enough work into the paper.

Either way, I edited — and I used the term lightly today — a video shot by avenue-write Bailey Park. It is just a silly supplement to her story about a new store in Gainesville that I won’t bother plugging by putting its Web site here.

She shot the whole interview/tour in one take. It’s shaky; It’s crazy, but the information is actually pretty interesting, and it is a good example of how, if done right, even a simple video tour shot by a reporter can be a great supplement to a story that needs visuals.

Really though, the most important thing to come out of the video is the new Alligator logo that is going to appear at the end of all the videos. Exciting!

Last night I collaborated with The Alligator managing editor for online media, Ken Schwencke, a sweet and to-the-point infographic about proposed bus route changes around Gainesville.

I wrote the action script and made the design. Ken found the maps on the Gainesville Regional Transit System’s Web site. We copied some Google maps, and Ken overlayed the bus routes with the hoity toity Photoshop Pen tool — the most difficult part of the night.

I was glad I didn’t have a whole heap of trouble catching up on my Flash. It is really pretty intuitive once you’ve done it before. That was the first Flash I’d done since I made a small package for class a couple of months ago. Before then it had been more than a year.

Although this story and idea were sprung up on me, I commend Ken for thinking out of the box for different ways to present information on The Alligator’s Web site. The site’s multimedia section is growing as Ken has somehow motivated reporters to shoot video. Alligator photographer Charles Roop — great photographer — shot a video about a roller derby for today’s online edition as well. I’d be lying if I said I’d seen it already, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out!

I recently finished a freelance job I did for a UF fine arts professor. He asked me to turn his print, tenure package into a Web site. So I did.

I’m not exactly gushing with pride over this site, but I’m glad I did it. There are a whole mess of things that fly in the face of standards, validation and good sense, but hey, I was working with a certain customer who needed a certain finished product displayed in a very specific manner..

Some peculiarities of the job:

• Ridiculous, but I mean re-DIC-ulous amounts of content.
• Mr. Offerle was the first person I’d ever met who actually had javaScript disabled on his computer
• I only had 10 days to put this site together
• Much of the work came from ripping videos off of DVDs, cutting them into snippets and making them Web ready.

Things I am embarrassed about on this site:

• Does not validate: This is the first site I’ve made in a long time that doesn’t validate. The problem was that because he had javaScript disabled and his audience was a bunch of viejos whose computer settings couldn’t have been much different, I couldn’t use .swf object to embed video players or audio players.
• Doesn’t use a CMS: This site was a prime candidate for using a CMS, and with all the work I am doing with TextPattern I could have done it easily. The problem is that I only had 10 days to set up the entire site, edit all of the videos and audio, burn DVDs of the videos, make photo galleries and input the massive amount of text. Time just didn’t allow.
• SoundSlides demo: When crunch time came around, I needed to make some photo galleries. Unfortunately I didn’t have a registered copy of SoundSlides plus at my disposal. I had to do with the very cheap, very ugly and very stupid alternative of using the demo and dealing with the “This was made with SoundSlides Demo Version” sign. It goes away pretty quickly, but it’s up just long enough to make me want to vomit.
• I must have spent close to 70 hours in 10 days on top of my regular 40-hour work week.

Things I’m happy about:

• I got paid
• The customer really liked his final product
• I made some contacts, got some referrals and learned a bit about the world of freelance in terms of the Web.

I have been working on a Web site for a summer conference the folks at my job are putting together for early August. It is called Summer of Web.

A co-worker of mine, Al Kirby, designed the site in Photoshop, sent me the image and let me have at it. I did all of the mark up — javaScript, CSS and XHTML.

I learned a whole new way of designing Web sites by doing this small, one-pager. I found that you are almost completely unrestricted in terms of design once you have a firm grasp of the power of background images and position.

All in all, it was a very fun experience.

Launched almost simultaneously was the UF Web Admin’s new blog. I had much less to do with the production of this blog save for a few meetings where I gave my input. My duties regarding this product will likely come in the form of content. More on that later.

Check out the site, and check out the conference. It should be fun getting the whole UF Web community together for a half day. Worse comes to worse, the food is free.

Let me know what you think.