Category : Blog

Awesome Animations

Posted by admin at 12:31 am

I was recently stumbling and came across some pretty awesome animation shorts I thought I’d share

Oxygen from Christopher Hendryx on Vimeo.

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

“I heard I can get a web site for free!”

Posted by admin at 7:57 pm

Being the lucky girl I am, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to spend a month in Maui. After the last year and everything I’ve been through, I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to actually arrive in Maui. So, the first thing I did when I got here was I splurged a little on myself. It had probably been about a year since I had a pedicure/manicure & there was a nail shop right around the corner from where I’ll be staying, what better way to start a staycation in Hawaii??

The salon wasn’t anything fancy, no special resort style treatment, so it wasn’t anything too crazy of a splurge, just as if I was back in Iowa or Arizona. The people however, were extra friendly! I was ecstatic! I sat down and the gentleman taking care of me just started chatting away. It started out going down the same road you would expect most conversations to go down while you’re in a very over populated with tourists area. He eventually asked “What do you do for work?”. After explaining to him what I did he asked the unexpected, “What do you charge?”. Now, I say unexpected because where as I am here for a while and planning on working during the week, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to pick up any new work from any local businesses. Not that it didn’t cross my mind, but my mind wasn’t necessarily strolling down “business lane” at the time. So I threw out a very rough estimate on what a low budget simple web site would cost, even lower than I would normally charge (blame it on my good mood with being in maui!). He was silent for a while, it was a little awkward. Then he says to me, “I heard I can get a web site for free.” How exactly am I supposed to respond to that? I didn’t give it much thought at the time but I simply replied, “Yes, there are very low quality templated sites with limited capabilities that you can get for your business for free. However I code and design each project so it’s my time and experience that’s being paid for.” That was the end of that conversation.

Where as that probably was a pretty decent response, it wasn’t until a few days later when I actually got to thinking about this. Here I am, at this gentleman’s nail salon paying him for his services and time. Now, I could have gone to Sally’s and picked up some fake nails and acrylic gel, some nail polish, some foot exfoliant, and done it myself at home for free. What would he have said if when he gave me my total bill I said to him, “Oh, well, I could have done this for free…”

Reminded me of this…Vendor vs. Client

Had to laugh. Of the many, and I mean many things I’ve learned this last year, it’s to pick and choose my clients. I can say no. Though it would have been awesome to make a great connection and pick up a new quick project while on vacation… do I want to work with someone who sees the value of a free web site from some crappy free web site service, or do I want to work with someone who is going to see the value in paying me to give them something more specific to their needs and that will pay off in the long run?

Hmm, that’s a tough decision…

Excluding your own site in Analytics Reports

Posted by admin at 11:33 am

So I’ve been trying to get used to Google Analytics. I’ve used lots of different statistics counters, but I’m trying to break my habit of what I’m used to and branch out to explore other options. Most statistics services I’ve used have always allowed you to block your own IP. Being a web designer who visits my own sites regularly when making changes, it helps to have my visits kept out of the reports. So since I’ve been using Google Analytics I couldn’t figure out how to do this. I had, of course, googled “how to exclude my ip address from google analytics” but the explanations were rather vague and pretty much got me nowhere. After a few days of messing around, I finally figured it out. I’ve created this post in hopes that hopefully I can help others looking for the same solution!

What you’ll need:

- Google Analytics Account

- Your IP address (or a service that will tell you yours easily, such as “What Is My IP“.

Essentially everything I googled told me I needed to create a filter. Yet their description of how to do so was very vague and not helping me get the job done. I figured maybe the posts were outdated and there was a different method since google has re-designed their analytics. So here’s my solution:

1. First, find your IP Address and either write it down or copy and paste it to a text editor as google analytics filters don’t allow copy & paste.

2. Log into Google Analytics.

3. Under your Web Site Profiles, select “Edit”  from the right hand side of the site you’d like to block your IP address from displaying in the analytics settings.

4. Scroll down the page until you see the section “Filters Applied to Profile” & choose “+Add Filter”.

5.  Give your filter a Name, I chose to name mine “Block Me”, original, eh?

6. Filter type: – Predefined Filter

7.  Then select the following from the drop down menus:

- Exclude

- traffic from the domains

- that are equal to

8. Lastly, enter your IP Address
Turns out it’s pathetically simple, but google analytics hides the filter settings and unless you’ve added filters before, it’s easy to miss. Seems that you have to create a filter for each web site profile, rather than set the setting for more than one profile at once. This is kind of a pain, but at least I’ve found the solution!