Ryan Ilg

Creative Design

778.228.9562

creative + {at} + ryanilg + [dot] + com

Blog of Ryan Ilg, Web Developer and Graphic Communication Specialist.
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Make your days more productive.

I just read an interesting article titled 6 Rules For A Teflon Mind. It has a few tips for making your days more productive by getting away from everyday interruptions.

Recent Readings in the AS3 Department

I just visited my local chapters and picked myself up a copy of the Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook published by O’Reilly. I’m really excited to dig in and get down and dirty with the latest version of Actionscript. Now that I am doing freelance full time, I will be setting aside an hour or two each day to sit and read, and get back to researching online.

Also in the works, I have been planning, and putting off, starting, then getting side tracked with client work… tutorials! In the coming months I plan on giving back with help on the problems that I found myself stumped on in the past. Keep and eye out.

Y.E.S! has Launched

The Young Executives For Success (YES! - by Dress for Success Vancouver) website launched today. It was a small charity project. The design was created by Sonja Schneider, who I had the pleasure of working with at Free Agency Creative for the past 2 years. She recently left the team over to there to pursue running her own company back home in Switzerland. I wish her much luck with her new endeavors.

</Whistler>

Well Whistler was a blast. There is nothing better than a minor get away from the everyday, especially when things are as busy as they have been. With the trip out of the way, its back to work. I recently took on a little charity work for Young Executives For Success (YES! - put on by Dress for Success Vancouver. I defiantly would not call it a huge project, but with tight deadlines, it put a twist on the project. In under 8 hours I managed to get the site wrapped up. It should be launching in the next week so, I will keep you informed of its arrival.

Whistler.

I will be away from the city for a few days, and will be unavailable from the 16th-19th. I am going to be spending a few days in Whistler soaking up the sun. A few adventures are planned, including ziptreking, maybe some rafting, atving, and of course a few beers beside the pool.

The Fun of Learning

I recently had the pleasure of working with the team over at Science World (@ Telus World of Science). On this project I was in charge of taking their static mockups and creating fully interactive learning modules.

The first was called Green City Smackdown. The basis is that the user gets to choose 2 cities from a list of major cities in Canada. They then learn a little information about the city, and compare it to the other one they chose. The comparisons are based on 7 different categories, and in the end, one of the cities will come out as the victor. Check it out for a little incite into what I am trying to describe. Green City Smackdown.

The second module is called Shifting Skyline, and is all about the changes that have happened over the past 100 years in Vancouver. Included is a really cool panorama that shows you how much downtown has changed since 1897. Other information included is the murder rates since 1912, the population growth (as well as where they are living, city vs suburbs) since 1921, and how much the cost of housing has increased over the last 30 years. There are pictographs as well as line graphs for all the information, so choose the one that makes the most sense. Check out Shifting Skyline.

The Third module is a great interactive timelapse video player. Included are 2 locations, downtown Vancouver, as well as False Creek Vancouver. Each location has 4 video options, which let you choose how much video to see, one day, one week, one month, or even from the start of filming (which commenced mid June 07). Its quite interesting to watch the construction of the new Olympic Village in False Creek. Both cameras are mounted on top of Science World, and republish new videos to the modules almost daily. Check out Timelapse Video.

Not only were the 3 modules created in English, there were also French counterparts, so everyone can enjoy them.

A few projects out the door

With the last month being super busy, there has been a lack of time to do any personal projects. It will be nice to finish everything up, and finally have some more time to sit down and learn again. With Lake City Centre launching today, and GoldFish Pacific Kitchen nearing its phase 3 launch, I will soon get some extra time to play. Currently I am working on a few projects for some undisclosed clients, but with quick turn around times, they will be out the door soon. Summer is here, now its time to enjoy it.

Project Management for the rest of us.

Update: ActiveCollab is no longer an opensource project, but lucky for us, others have taken on the development from version 0.7.1 onwards. You can check out the new system at ProjectPier.org.

If you always find our yourself jumping from project to project, and forgetting where you left off, then you should check out Active Collab. Its a open-source, FREE, project management system that you install onto your own web server. I have been using it for a few months now, and have come to love its ease of use, and customization. It even allows you to theme the interface, so you can make it look just like your familiar site. If you are familiar with Basecamp, you will be right at home. A lot of the systems are the similar, you add clients, and employees, and then assign then to your projects. The client will then have access to adding files, to-do lists, milestones, etc. When there is something added or updated, there will be an email notice waiting for you. Overall, I am really pleased with Active Collab, it allows me to do everything that Basecamp does (with some minor exceptions), minus the monthly fee, which can get pretty pricey if your managing more than a few projects. Check out the Active Collab features page for more information about what it can do for you. Enjoy.

New CMS, New Blog, and a whole new set of toys.

Well as you may have noticed, over the last 5 months this blog has pretty much been inactive, for the last month, the blog has not even been online (mainly for the reasons below). I decided one day that it was time to completely overhaul the whole back end of my portfolio. After a year I was getting a little sick of its lack of functionality. Starting up a new version while keeping the older version as the live copy, I ripped into it, rearranged how the back end worked, and totally scrapped the old database (except for the content). In the past when I was setting up my site, I did everything in pieces, instead of sitting down and pumping it out in one go.

When I first created this version of the site, I started with the design and production. I built the site in a very simple way, using php includes for each portfolio entry. A few months later, I added a cms system to control the portfolio entries, a month later, a custom tracking system (from scratch) to track hits on projects, so I could see what people were getting attracted to. Then came a projects section, and an archiving system. By the time the smoke cleared I had a stack of sub sites all accessing their own database tables, and they were all starting to get to me. I had features I really liked in some that I didn’t integrate into others, so thats when I decided to change everything.

I started out by fiquring out my content, since that is the most important part of any site, and tackled the databases one at a time. Deciding on what needed to go, and what was staying, I created a short list of necessaries. On the front end of the site, you will most likely not see much change (as far as content, not design) since a lot of what was on site was working. The content as getting me quite a few hits, and as well was the most useful information about the projects.

I then created a brand new database with one table… yes only one! This allowed me to bring all the content to one place, calling one table, but differentiating the content based on a few variables. I included a column to tell me what kind of content it was, ie folio, projects, in the works, or archived. On top of that, it could all be interchanged. I build into my cms the ability to switch an entry from one section to another, on the fly. I could add a project when I started it, then move it to the live portfolio when it was all wrapped up. I had always wanted to better track when a project started and ended, that, the old archive was doing quite well, but until now I never integrated it into the portfolio.

So along with a new database, also came a new cms, with more options, more information. I cleaned up all the calls, perfected the functions, and created better name based variables. Overall, it was perfect, at least to me. I no longer was going to 5 different places to manage everything, the uploaders (for the site previews) were well rounded, and now removed the old screen when a new one was uploaded. Some might think this is not that big of a deal, but when your writing everything from scratch, its just satisfying to see everything work so problem free. Basically I am building my own, personal, custom, wordpress cms, from scratch. I have plugin functions, feeds, config docs, global headers & footers, etc.

By the time I had everything wrapped up, a month and a half had gone by (don’t forget I am still working a full time job at Free Agency Creative, as well as had a number of side contracts going on at the same time). At this point it was almost ready to launch. My new and improved tracking system was up and running, as well a few external site statistic systems, like the new Reinvigorate (which is currently still in beta, but works so well), and google analytics. I wanted to get as much information about my visitors as possible. That way I could tweak my site in little ways to make it run smoother for everyone, including the friendly search engine spiders.

I always made sure my content was presented in a logical order, and have always been obsessed with making sure it still looked good with no style sheets. So I could not just up and abandon this now, I went the opposite direction, and made it better. Integrating multiple microformats into my site, I am giving the user more information. One of them included an hCard, which allows users with the Operator toolbar for Firefox to automatically pull content on the page (styled with specific classes) and convert it to a vCard for their address book at the click of a button. For the web savvier clients and contractors, its saving them the time of having to manually find the information and add it.

So all in all, a lot of time has gone by, and as you may have noticed, the design has changed here. After the new site & cms system was live (on the old design) with all the new features. I then decided to sit down and work out a new design. It has been a long time coming, and every time I had sat down to do it in the past, I felt I could not make it any better well keeping the same simple flow, so I would just leave it. But then it came to me, I started with a concept and ran with it, so basically what you see is what you get. I took my time, made sure everything was perfect, and it took me about a month (between work, my girlfriend, and friends) to get everything to a place that I was happy with.

I just hope everyone likes what I have done. I would love to hear what everyone things, so please post a comment if you have time. Thanks for the patience, in waiting, and reading of course. This turned into quite a long post.

Back to work

I just got back from a 2 week vacation. Before I left, tdSwansburg Design Studio’s site was launched. Check it out at tdesign.biz.

Over the next little while I plan on designing a new portfolio & blog. Im not in a big hurry, so don’t expect for at least a few weeks.