AWBS Template Tool

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Design | 3 Comments

Update to the AWBS Template Tool

Only a brief moment available to drop in and make post about a few updates to the AWBS tool.  Previously I had posted that more than 16k errors or should I say declarations and code structure were changed in the default template to make an all new one based on XHTML coding standards. Yesterday and the day before I found dozens and dozens of additional changes I needed to make in order to get my broke template master to work.  Fixed I decided to make a Dreamweaver snippet and extension tool real quick which although isn’t super beautiful it is fully functional.

AWBS Template Dreamweaver Extension

What I did is take all the code out of the templates that were considered tags that can be used elsewhere and put them in to three snippet categories in the extension.  After visiting the AWBS documentation site I took a list of the available tags and simply put them in the drop down menu for the extension.

I have NO IDEA what changes AWBS has in store for future releases and I’ve offered the template to them as a master layout if they so desire which is cleaner, lighter, faster and validates better. Its loaded with comments for novice persons to easily and quickly build a template for AWBS.

I’ll still keep the extension, support files and template masters as part of this very affordable template kit for AWBS.  If AWBS decides to implement the new reworked template as part of their release, I’ll still provide minimal support for it in the new forums I’ve installed on my domain.

I have literally been up to my neck with catch up tasks and have turned down freelance projects as a result to get these projects complete and out the door.

If you want the kit now, without the tutorials or video guides, you can purchase the kit for $29.95.  Please note however that when other elements of the kit become available I will notify you of download location.  What is pending is the video how to guide, the dreamweaver extension needs testing and I just wrapped up the photoshop action and image TDK for AWBS standard icons and I’ve included several reworks in that area too.

AWBS is a great product written by intelligent programmers.  We all know that programmers and designers don’t always see eye to eye so all the above mentioned errors and issues are design related and should not reflect poorly on the quality of AWBS as an ideal solution for hosting companies.  Besides, AWBS is likely the most affordable and easy to use solution among the many I’ve tested. I’m a fan and a user of the product and have it on no fewer than 33 client servers ( last count ) at any given time.

Please EMAIL me or contact me to purchase the kit without the videos or documentation until they are complete.

Kissing Freelance Goodbye!

Posted on April 25, 2008
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

No longer accepting project commissions for now!

The time has come that my existing contracts with real estate website service providers is so demanding that free time to pursue any projects of a freelance nature is not realistic and delays are just foolishly long and simply un manageable.  I’ve decided to wrap up my existing commitments and agreements which can be easily done today and tomorrow which I will then publish my existing open-source projects and free plugins which have been delayed time and time again and I do not want to anger people so its time to put these "delays to rest permanently".

As it stands I will only wrap up my existing projects I’ve agreed to. I’ll refer and and all requests for request and proposal to a designer I’ve worked with in the past who is well versed in Open Realty, Joomla and WordPress and has a substantial background with server migrations and integrated solutions.  My teaching schedule along with my above mentioned contracts are too demanding and rather than have things slip beyond any possible control I’m going to step out of the freelance arena for a period of time.

Any requests for work related to the posts that led you here may be submitted which I’ll forward to a designer who is competent and qualified for most entry level to mid level design projects.

NEW Production Workstation

Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

The ideal solution to lengthy project delays

A complex lesson learned during the build of my new production machine making me realize how little I actually know about the building of computers or hardware in general.  The entire weekend from Friday about 1PM until late Sunday evening I spent building the machine to replace my tired old production work station. The process may be interesting enough for some readers facing the challenges I had with projects being drawn out sometimes months because the tools for the trade were just simply out dated and not up to the challenge of high end production.  So herein before I get my Monday morning started I’ll share the details with you at this early hour.

The first objective, a new local linux box for testing.

My old machine, a dual CPU AMD 1.8 Ghz was plenty fast for many things but not at all current or ideal for things like Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash Pro or Photoshop CS3.  So rather than toss it to ebay for $100 I spent Saturday converting it to a linux server to test apps and websites on before they go production. It was simple really, the installation and configuration of CentOS with the necessary server software to run a local linux box on my network, so it gets only casual mention in this series of events.  The real challenge was the build of the work station.

Lengthy project delays became a serious problem.

One thing that has nearly crucified me time and time again is the lengthy time frame it has taken me to complete MANY dozens of projects of the hundreds I’ve undertaken over the past three and a half years.  A lofty chunk of these delays was due to over booking projects or multitasking which really isn’t a bad thing if you have the infrastructure to handle such a daunting schedule.  Teaching Photoshop at the College the first 3 hours of my day leaves time for freelance projects usually from about 11AM until about 11PM daily (which seems to be my average schedule).  Over stacking or over booking projects is common with designers, especially those in freelance given the nature of the business. But such practice can be dangerous and costly if you are not experienced or well versed in how to juggle projects with a little finess.  Hardware does in fact matter and even though you have all your finest procedures down to an effective set of steps, things bottle neck with outdated and troublesome equipment as I’ve experienced.

Can a person really claim that better computers can help with production time with design? YES! Experience has shown me that people who are able to produce high levels of output and production in the design business either have a well placed standardized procedure for turnkey production or a serious inventory of resources which usually includes an impressive production work station.  Naturally there are other factors in successful design procedures that I’ve left out only because my post is really geared toward the individual designer and not design firm involving many individuals.  Because of this, proper design systems then tends to look like the solution I built with the help of Shane Gibby at Click Once Computers.

The graphics work station, a PC platform.

When I set out to solve this nasty history of lengthy delays in project completion I had strongly considered the transition to a Macintosh noted for its reliability and impressive super computer like characteristics.  I work with the Macintosh at the college three times a week and the speed and reliability of a Mac is difficult to compete with as many would tend to agree. However two key limitations in that platform motivated me to stick with the PC for my specific need. 

The importance of graphics horsepower can not be underestimated in our business and although a Mac certainly has this down to a science the PC can be build to rival a Mac in this area leaving the balance of the required features all pointing to the PC for my concern.  Hard drive space, graphics power, speed and ram were all top priority with peripheral components as secondary considerations.

Here is what we came up with for my new work station.

The CPU needed to be ideal for graphics and video related production and a dual process was my original plan until I discovered the very impressive criteria of the AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor.  More cache per CPU than the competitors coupled with true quad core chip structure the hyper transport feature provides separate pipes for data, a major motivator for me.

The 800MHZ front side bus speed of the DDR2 memory sticks  was sure to provide substantial performance improvements over my existing older 2GB setup. Now when considering this I had to decide if I was going to install Windows Vista in order to take advantage of the 4GB I installed or stick with XPSP3 Pro which would only see 3.5GB of the total available.  Most would agree that XP would run much faster given the current setup but we had to be sure.

Trial and error is sometimes the best teacher so having spent Saturday installing Vista, it took only a few hours of testing and examination to quickly motivate me to re format the drive and simply go back to XP which I knew would run circles around Vista in terms of speed.  So I took the half a gig loss with XP for the compounded increase in speed when compared to Windows Vista.

Next was the drive space.  One thing my old machine was infamous for was rebooting during the save of large files like Photoshop files or video tutorials from Camtasia studio.  There were times that this reboot during the save to the hard drive would deliver a blue screen of death as the NTFS system file would be corrupted forcing me on more than a half dozen occasions to recover data and start over.  Frustrating and costly these delays have forced some projects to literally go into certain death overtime as my systems lack of quality RAM and drive space just beat me up with tragic performance issues.  Hard Drive and redundant backup would be essential.

The net results looks like this;

  • AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor 2.50 GHz / 4MB Cache running up to 2000MHz FSB
  • ASUS M2N SLI Deluxe2 Mainboard
  • Thermaltake 140MM ORB CPU cooling fan
  • The "Ultra Black Box" 1000 watt full tower case with slide in hot swap drive bays, 2 120MM Case Fans and a spank of room for components.
  • 3 SATA 160 GB HD’s 2 of which are on RAID 0. ( I chose the 160GB only because I don’t trust high density drives for mission critical data storage having had many high volume drives crash to frequently )
  • 2 EIDE 160 GB HD’s migrated from my old box
  • 1 Multi media card reader for USB and other types of data cards like those in my digital cameras.
  • 1 DVD-CD-RW Drive
  • 1 DVD Blue Ray
  • 2 Married Visiontek Radeon HD 3870 X2 Video Card – 1GB GDDR3, PCI Express ( With SLI you can put two of these together with an SLI card bridge.)
  • 1 21" flat screen trinintron monitor which will soon be upgraded to 2 View Sonic 24" DVI flat panel LCD monitors (on back order)
  • 4 GB 800MHz FSB DDR2 EPP RAM ( 3.5 actual with Windows XP )
  • CL Audigy Pro 4 Sound module with the Sanson C01U USB condenser microphone ( podcasting naturally ) I added a 31" boom stand for the mic and a professional model PF1 pop stopper and a 60" X 54" acoustic box to keep external sounds out.
  • 1 WACOM ArtZ-2 12×12 art pad (migrated from my old system)
  • 1 Epson pre press printer with Ultra Chrome 7 ink features and Kodak’s Matchprint roll feeder. I use this when I get hired to create print materials and need to produce a match print for examination. This system costs 1/10th the cost my Fargo Dye Sublimation printers and can easily match its quality under most conditions.

When done my new system will feature dual monitors, all my printers on a network hub, and the Sony digital video production box for producing video for real estate clients. 

There you have it, my new motive for this Monday morning in getting all my outstanding projects caught up and completed. Eager to get rolling, I’ll be back later today to post the release of all my plugins and modules.

 

Joomla and AWBS Bridge

Posted on April 3, 2008
Filed Under Products | 5 Comments

Joomla – AWBS Template and User Bridge

One of the coolest products I’ve used in the past few years for my servers is the AWBS shopping cart for hosting companies. This tool is exceptionally detailed and efficient in billing for recurring monthly hosting and the ease in which it can be added to a PLESK or cPanel server makes it my number one suggested solution to clients seeking such a package.
 
Templates in AWBS however are not just a tragic and difficult undertaking for designers they are exceptionally complex and most examples, even commercial ones, are jam packed with countless broken elements and nested tables making them impossible to build truly XHTML / CSS compliant designs.  I truly love AWBS but the templates needed help and I avoided it for a very long time because I knew the scale of the project and time it would take would need to be justified somehow.  Well I found justification.
 

AWBS Template Designers Resource Kit

This particular design resource kit is essentially a foundation master template for AWBS using all conforming XHTML and CSS required markup and also includes a few extra open source extras to assist in things like forcing of column length, and ajax loading of some elements using an open source library called DHTMLX. 
 
After spending nearly 4 days cleaning up the code from the default business theme included with AWBS I then used the code elements as a sort of template foundation.  Having removed or changed 16,000+ design and layout related elements from the template I was able to get the base template 90% XHTML / CSS compliant as well as reduce the overall template weight to 1/3 the original size.  
 
What I then decided to include was a handful of small snippets that would allow users of Joomla 1.0.12 – 1.0.15 the ability to bridge registrations and to provide a way to control menus in AWBS from within the Joomla admin panel.  Naturally this took an Adobe Captivate Video to explain it in better detail how to do this. 
 
That leaves us with a final project or product that includes the following;
 
  1. AWBS master layout template kit (of sorts) that is XHTML and CSS compliant for the most part.
  2. Dreamweaver snippets I use for the drop in template tags
  3. The JS Library
  4. The Joomla External Modules code and video on how to use
  5. The WordPress inclusion functions called wpglobal.php This allows you to put snippets from your blog in AWBS.
  6. swfobject.js version 2.0 for the flash jpg slide show I have included
  7. 3 videos outlining the use of the master layout for building templates.

Released as AWBS Template Kit – version 1.0 – the price is $39.95 and is available now.


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