Upstairs Room

New layout with new shopping cart will launch this week. I’ve revamped it to make it easier on me and the customer.

I’ve used the osCommerce on the site for one year now and it’s good, but there are a few issues I have never resolved, like having it consistently email me a copy of the order. The site has received over 11,250 visits since Aug 11th, 2008.

The new site uses CoffeeCup for the shopping cart. I’ll give it a try for a while.

Camp Bethel’s site will be updated soon to clean it up from the summer. Getting ready for Family Camp. I still haven’t gotten anymore pics or videos from the summer to post there.

Transformation Ministries will be incorporated ASAP and the site will launch officially upon that milestone.

Just got back from a road-trip to California and will post pics on Elaine’s site this week.

Oh, then there’s Elaine’s teaching site. School’s back in session this week and she’ll start posting lesson plans again soon.

Transformation Ministries is now online though not officially launched. Not much content there, but the design is ready to go.

Gotta get Elaine’s site updated with a few more photos and news of the summer.

Camp Bethel Summer Camp is over and hopefully I’ll get some videos online soon. I really planned on keeping them up-to-date weekly, but I had no control over that. And now apparently the videographer/editor is more concerned about getting a YouTube channel setup for the videos than posting them on the website.

Same with the weekly photos. Out of all the weeks, we only got three camp weeks plus the Super Saturday even posted.

Now it’s time to clean up the site and get ready for next year!

2000 Pontiac Montana – after spending lotsa dollars fixing the tranny and needing new tires after our blow-out in Kansas City, I’ve decided we should keep this van and sell the ’87 Jeep Cherokee. I wouldn’t make any money from it now anyways and we’ll use this as a second (or third, maybe that’s fourth…) vehicle.

The Jeep Cherokee will be listed on Craig’s list soon.

see it here…

CB has added three Day Camp weeks to the summer at the Hickory Hollow property in Bristol.

I didn’t create the latest HH website, but I did modify it a bit today with the Day Camp info.

The CB website required some not-so-minor editing of graphics and Publisher files for pdf’s of registration forms. Also took care of the pdfs with the old unofficial logo by adding the new logo.

Oh, I almost forgot. I added a Live Chat applet on the page also. It’s very neat. I hope it will be useful. It’s from meebo.com. Never heard of it before and I’m not sure how I found it, but it’s pretty cool.

The new logo for Camp Bethel has finally officially been decided upon. Just received word a couple of day ago.

The logo is excellent! Top notch brand marketing in my opinion. It’s bold and colorful. It makes a great statement in the progress of Camp Bethel Ministries.

I spent a few hours tonight adding the logo to the page by rebuilding the header graphics and flash. A few other updates were made with some other graphics also. The new font use in the logo has been incorporated in various site graphics.

I’m glad to see the logo has finally been approved and accepted to use, even if I did use the previous “new” logo on Elaine and Gabe’s summer missionary reminder cards already. The old one still looks sharp and it’s not a big problem. I will make new cards and postcards for them soon with the new official logo.

I created a small quick-n-easy site this week for The Choral Arts Society.  A co-worker is part of the group and they needed an easy way for their members to listen to educational mp3s they created.

It includes a player and an online listing for downloads.

It may develop into more later, but for now it’s simple and easy to use for them.

upstairsroom.net/cas

The last few weeks have been crazy at work (my real job).  Not so much the long hours (which it was), but the odd hours.  Overtime is nice, but it’s tough to get anything done when the hours are so scattered.

I hope to be in touch with another potential client this week to get info on the type of website he is interested in to see if I can help him.  We’ve been playing phone tag for a couple of weeks now.  I pray he hasn’t given up on me.

chavs.net has been redesigned now.  Although it may look similar, ir has been completely rewritten (at least the code has).  This allowed me to rebuild the photo galleries to make better use of Google’s free Picasa3 and online photo albums through my free Google account.  Just swell!

I have also moved the hosting because of continuing struggles to keep things simple and up-to-date at my previous host.  They have been good for quite sometime, including fast and somewhat accurate tech support, but the email is questionable at times and the not-so-intuitive install of some programs – osCommerce and WordPress – have caused some issues.  WordPress is actually up to ver. 2.7 and they still offer only 2.0 for the install. Yes, you can upgrade to the newest version manually, but there were other issues with it i didn’t come across with my current host.

Also I have implemented (finally!) the Feedburner feeds for elainefoster.net, my ebay experience and this site.  It just so happens that Google now owns Feedburner.  Google just keeps on getting the FREE good stuff.  Feedburner is my choice because it makes email subscription to a rss feed extra simple.

Just finished updating Camp Bethel’s site a few hours ago.  It now has the latest info for Summer Camp 2009.  I took the finished Summer Camp brochure and grabbed some graphics from it for the page.  Not thrilled with it, but it came out acceptable.  Hard to work with the colors in the brochure and make them look decent on the page.

I hope to get the online registration linked into online payment via Paypal soon.  I don’t think I have the Camp Director convinced of it yet.  It’s all got to do with the handling of funds I believe, but I have had a Paypal account for many years and have never had any problem from it.  They actually helped me get some $$’s back from a bad eBay transaction once.  Anyway, it’ll be very convenient for the parents to make payment.

I added a link to a Camp promo video that Jose made and uploaded on his Facebook site.  I was actually surprised that the video embed worked as well as it did.  No link to Facebook showing or anything.  I can stream a flash video file straight from the CB site, but the one I had was not as good quality as the Facebook one.  I also added a link last week on the main page for the CB Facebook page.

Speaking of Facebook.  I’ve been playing around with it a bit.  I don’t like it much yet.  Several reasons.  One is the fact that you have no control over the ads that show up on the right side of the page.  Some really strange ones there.  You also have no control over what your “friends” write on your wall or shows up there otherwise.  If they are really your friends, surely they won’t write anything in there that you wouldn’t approve of.  Still, you have no control over that.

It seems like it shows everything everyone is writing on everybody elses wall.  Not sure that’s the case, but it looks like it.  Maybe it’s just walls of your common friends it shows.

It’s really difficult to get around on also, at least as far as I’ve seen so far.  I’m only there to learn about it and to maybe get my info out to some friends/acquaintances that do not know some of my work.

Elaine had me delete her account because of some of the things popping up on her site.  She didn’t want to be associated with those things.  I can’t blame her.  So far mine has been OK.

I spent a few more minutes on a flash header for my friend Jose’s site, mybethelexperience.net.  I had to make some code changes to the header and stylesheet, and it came out fairly well.  Jose is a friend we met at Camp Bethel.  He’s been on staff there for about a year.  He uses his blog to keep up with friends and family.

Oak Grove’s website I designed several months ago has finally moved up into the Current Active Sites category!!

I designed a site for them a few years ago and it never caught on. I was afraid this one was headed in the same direction, but finally this week, they rediscovered it was out there waiting and decided they could do the updating themselves.  So far they are doing great!

I created a document for them with a few simple instructions and they are grasping it quite nicely I see.

I love the people at Oak Grove, they are our second family, home away from home.  The website is the least I could do for them after all of the support they have given us over the last few years.

Now hopefully the King’s Christian Academy site will be next to move up.  I see their old original site has disappeared, I hope they do something soon with this one.  KCA is the school located at Oak Grove Baptist Church.

As far as video production goes, we (C&H Audio Visual) have decided that we will recommend someone to KASA to do the Fred Award videos this year.  I just can’t do that along with other work that is or may be scheduled that time of year. There were 4 videos last year for KASA, predictably there will be 4 again this year.

Last year I did all the traveling, camera work, editing and producing (on my own personal computer) along with my regularly scheduled A/V work.  I just can’t do it again this year.  I have my regular work plus the office IT Management this year.

Today we turned down 32 video spots for the upcoming Texas Roadhouse Awards Banquet.  (I’d love to sink myself into that, but I cannot jeopardize my current position in doing so.)  We’ll produce the live show, but we’ll pass the video work along to others.

Besides, C&H is not a production facility,  we rent the equipment and produce live shows.  We are treading on our clients territory when we start producing content.

What a slow week… at work anyway…

It’s New Year’s Eve and we sit at home where it’s safe (safer) than out there in the strange world of partiers. That’s OK with me. Hanging out with the family is good. I’m sure I’ll even skip the “ball-drop”. It just doesn’t interest me any more.

Services4u.net is up and running. Google Analytics and Google Webtools are in place and doing their job.  Now I need to find time soon to get with the owner to do some computer hardware and software upgrades at their office.

The newly designed Camp Bethel website launches tonight at midnight (+/-) using the new Camp Logo. The site’s been ready to go for several weeks awaiting final approval on the logo, but we don’t want to rush a new logo just to get it on the website. The logo is still being scrutinized and possibly could change, but Jeff and I agree that we can change it later if necessary. We’ll start a new year with a new website.

I got a new blog up and running last night. My Ebay Experience is going to be my extended ebay feedback blog. Sometimes I wanna say more than what will fit in the 80 characters allowed by Ebay, so, here it is in purchases and sales categories. Listing item title from the ad, item number and seller ID. I may decide to add photos, but unless I download and host them, they will disappear from Ebay after 60 days or so.

I finally got more info on this website. I also manipulated the code by trial and error and lots of googleing to get the top menu to be in the order I want and to exclude certain pages from the list.

This  theme is different in most as it uses “list_all_pages” instead of the more often seen “wp_list_pages”.

I have also included a listing of most of the videos I’ve produced in the last couple years. Not alot of quality in the camera work, but end results are decent. It’s 99% recorded with a Panasonic camcorder on mini-DV.

I used broadcast quality JVC’s on the KASA videos and it shows.