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Big Boy EXPO – Punta Gorda

Ross — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:36:32 +0000

I had a great weekend at the Big Boy EXPO in Punta Gorda. I am happy to have met a diverse group of people there. I am the developer of the web site for Big Boy EXPO at bigboyshow.com and help with online marketing so I use this opportunity to participate and meet the show exhibitors and visitors.

That was my first time in Punta Gorda, a nice little harbor town in Charlotte County on the Gulf Coast between Sarasota and Naples. It’s good to see this town is alive and vibrant these days. I vividly remember Punta Gorda being directly under the crosshairs of Hurricane Charley when it made landfall in 2004. The area today seems unscathed. I should mention another one of my clients Naples Soap Co. recently opened another store location at Fisherman’s Village in Punta Gorda.

The event took place at the new Charlotte Harbor Event and Conference Center. This is a great facility for EXPOs, events, conferences, concerts, sporting events and more. I was very impressed with the level of organization and professionalism of the staff at the center. They seemed to be on top of all aspects of the event and everything seemed to go flawlessly. Marlene Rivello, the president of Shell Marketing which runs the Big Boy EXPO did an amazing job of putting this all together with help and hard work from her sales manager Dede.

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Congratulations on another successful show. See you at Germain Arena in October.

What’s New?

Ross — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:15:55 +0000

I have been busy on a few client projects lately including deazzle.com. I will get these into my portfolio soon. I am also involved in some on-going personal development projects that I hope to release later this year. I appreciate the support and help from those that look at my blog and are interested in my work. There are always exciting things on the horizon and new opportunities are presenting themselves as the internet and the companies that are shaping it continue to evolve.

AU98Z5D3JDYV

What is this Wave you speak of?

Ross — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:27:59 +0000

If you do a lot of Emailing back in forth as I often do, you may want to try Google Wave. Google Wave is still an invitation-only beta (Gmail was an invitation-only beta from 2004-2007 years before being released to the public), so you will need an invite to start using it. I have about 10 invites left, so you can drop me a note and I will send you one if you are interested in trying it and promise to post something nice in my wave. Google Wave is hard to describe as I am quite a wave newbie myself. It is an amalgamation of Email, chat, bulletin board, shared document and a live meeting.

Since wave is currently the bleeding edge of technology, you will need a couple things besides an invite to make your web browser Wave ready. First of all I recommend using Firefox, so if you don’t have that web browser go ahead and install it. Next go install gears. Ok you should be all set! Now go visit my wave and try it out.

You will probably need to watch some of the videos and read the instructions at wave.google.com/about.html. If you have other resources and links, please share them in my wave. I am still a little perplexed by it all myself, but see some potential here. Who knows, maybe this thing will be really useful when it gets out of beta in 2013.

Thanks blog.zenika.com for sorting out the details.

Adobe Flash CS5 is Coming…

Ross — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:11:56 +0000

I am looking forward to the launch of Adobe CS5. Although I have never been an early adopter of major software releases, preferring to read others feedback and take my time to understand the benefit of new features before shelling out hundreds of dollars, this release has my attention.

Adobe Flash CS5
I just got through watching a sneak peak of Flash CS5 at gotoAndLearn.com and it looks like Adobe is hitting the suite spot when it comes to what developers are looking for.

Text handling and fonts have always been a weak point when working in Flash. I am impressed with the features in CS5 that address text flow, better multi-lingual character support and the new font palette.

Flash has established itself as the most popular video streaming platform on the web today. Being able to scrub the video on the stage and add ActionScript cuepoints will be extremely useful timesavers.

Flash’s real power lies in it’s powerful ActionScript programming language that gives developers the freedom to shape the user experience without limits. Code snippets and a host of new features make it easier for programmers to control Flash using ActionScript. The XML-based source files are interesting too. From what I can tell at this early stage it looks like Flash is opening up their traditionally closed, complied SWF files for developers to be able to edit it’s properties and library items on the fly. Not only will this help with using version control, but also unlocks some interesting possibilities with custom content management systems.

The most hype about this release is centered around it’s wide distribution feature. In a nutshell, Adobe wants to allow a project created in Flash to be deployable across any platform (web, desktop, mobile, tablet). Ahead of this release Apple has announced it will not support applications developed using 3rd party (Adobe) software on the operating system running their widely popular iPhones, iTouches and iPads. This latest plot twist in the friction between Apple and Adobe definitely puts a crimp into this feature. However even without the Apple devices this feature will make it easier for developers to port their applications created in Flash to other popular mobile devices running Google’s Android, Windows and others.

I am much more excited about the release of Adobe’s CS5 than I was for the launch of the iPad. This one looks like it might actually be worthy of the hype.

Big Boy EXPO photos

Ross — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:11:51 +0000

I posted photos from the Big Boy EXPO in Estero, Florida on Flickr and FaceBook.

View them on FaceBook

View them on Flickr

Big Boy Show – Germain Arena 2/14, 2/15 2010

Ross — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:38:43 +0000

I think everyone involved would agree the show was major a success this year. It was a pleasure participating this year and meeting so many of you at the show. I really was impressed at the number of activities and attractions, the amount of visitors and the quality of the exhibitors. If I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the show please drop me a line and we can talk about your experience at the show. See you in Charlotte in September and back at Germain in October!

Site Updates

Ross — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:35:34 +0000

Today I updated the portfolio section to load posts from a Word Press category instead of using the ‘pages’ feature. I like the portfolio organized more like a blog instead of a static page. Some new items have been added and I will continue to update now that I have the formatting updated.

Welcome to the Blog of Web Site Design By

Ross — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 17:35:04 +0000

The purpose of this blog is to post information related to the design and development of web sites. This ranges from technologies, processes and ideas involved. As a developer with over 12 years experience designing and developing web sites and applications, I hope to provide useful information that you can apply to your web site development projects. At the same time I hope to learn from those who contribute to this blog through commenting and sharing.