Small town newspapers can have a great web presence

There is a high probability that what’s contained in this post will be conceived as another old media versus new media argument over who’s better than who or which one will die out first. That’s not my intention, even if does point out a newspaper’s website presence.

Basically, it boils down to this; I want information on what’s going on in the small town of where I grew up in Iowa. My only option? The local newspaper that has been operating their print publication since 1879.

What’s the point of online presence if you don’t do it well?

The newspaper in question does have a website, but it’s highly outdated in terms of how it is constructed and updated. In fact, the basic foundation is something I helped to create in the mid-90’s when my parents owned and operated a website business during that time, giving me my first, professional gigs that have transformed into the sixty4media projects of today.
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Crusing along at WordCampSF 2009

WordCampSF 2009

After a GPS and Google Maps adventure of helping our taxi driver get to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it’s been a jam packed morning at WordCampSF 2009. And actually, it’s been very relaxed and chilled in terms of the sessions so far today.

WordCampSF 2009

Andy Peatling gave a great session on BuddyPress, Matt Cutts from Google had a variety of great insights when it comes to SEO and your WordPress site, and the “State of the Word” by none other than Matt Mullenweg himself was great. I learned a lot about the history of this CMS, and the future looks really promising for WordPress on multiple fronts. It’s one of those days that makes you excited to be a developer and gets those ideas cranked up in your head.

There have been a variety of great announcements that are going around the circles, and I can’t even recall them all. It’ll take a little while for me to digest them all and give my insights to later, but a lot of what I’ve seen today make our projects with sixty4media clients look even more exciting when it comes to current and future endeavors.

Needless to say, there is a lot more to check out today. The afternoon sessions are getting ready to kick off, and I have my time at the Genius Bar at 4:55PM to 5:45PM. If the morning has been any preview, the rest of the day should be pretty kick ass.

Gearing up for season three of The Crazy Canucks podcast

The Crazy Canucks Things really got busy on us this past week, but I can finally stop blaming work getting in the way and start pointing the finger at hockey. More importantly, we’ve been doing some neat stuff with The Crazy Canucks podcast in anticipation of the coming season.

First and foremost, the new design for TCC has been launched. This is the first step in bringing some new elements of social media to the podcast, and it is an official design by sixty4media.

If you’re on Twitter, then be sure to add @thecrazycanucks to your twitter stream and get all the latest updates as they are published on TCC.com, plus anything else we decide to through into the stream. Also, if you’re drinking the Facebook kool-aid, join the The Crazy Canucks Facebook group and stay in touch with our army of supporters on there.

And there’s more!

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

The Canucks (yes, the organization) brought your favorite podcast crew in for a photo shoot at GM Place to get our faces and Canucks gear for some promotional stuff that will launch later this month. We can’t be sure how, where, or to what capacity these photos and video footage will be used, but it was exciting to come in and be apart of something like this, simply because we’re all fans.

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

Special shout out to Richard Loat, who also was invited to this promotional gathering. He’s the man (in the middle of this picture above) who created the Vancouver Canucks Fan Facebook Application. Nearly 150,000 people are using that application on their Facebook profile. Not bad for a kid barely over the age of 19.

Photo by Miss604 on Flickr
Photo credit: miss604 on Flickr

So as we hang on to the last days of summer in Vancouver, there is some satisfaction that hockey is coming. It dulls the pain of cooler days, less sunlight, and rain, but I’m certainly beginning to get excited.

Alanah and Rebecca have their posts up about this day as well, and you should stay tuned for more stuff from The Crazy Canucks. It should be a good season.

sixty4media

sixty4media I keep having troubles figuring out how to start this post because this has been something Rebecca and I have been working on for months. It’s not a brand new announcement because we have rolled out a bit of a “soft launch” with the company we have formed, but I’m proud to publicly announce, on my blog at least, the formation of sixty4media.

sixty4media is dedicated to sharing our knowledge and offering our years of expertise with several key services.

We have each managed to bridge technologies in our own way and so far it’s been paying off. Our knowledge of the new media realm has lead to our profiles showing up in various magazines, online publications, newspapers, and radio programs individually. However together we have discovered that pretty much anything is possible and it’s time to give back to the community here in Techcouver, and around Metro Vancouver. [sixty4media]

With the abundance of social media, blogging, and podcasting that Rebecca and I do on the web, this is the natural progression of taking our knowledge into the professional realm. People consistently ask us for our time and knowledge about these elements that we know about, so it makes sense for us to pool together our resources and help those that want to get into the things that we are doing and seeing how they can use it professionally.

Going back to what I said about a soft launch, we have already had a few clients asking for our services, and those projects have been extremely fun to work on. However, it’s more than having clients to work for as much as it is giving back to the community that has taught us so much. For us, that comes by teaching others what we have learned and sharing that information to those who are anxious to learn.

When it comes down to it, these are the things we love to do. Consulting, blogging, web design, and social media are tools available to many people who are not sure how it can help their online presence, so that’s where we come in. If you want to contact us, you know where to find us.

Designing drop down menus with CSS on WordPress

I designed a WordPress site for my friend Andy at No Boundaries.org some months ago, and the final version that we settled on really pushed my personal boundaries of knowledge in terms of PHP and CSS to get some of the things to work that he was wishing for. Never wanting to let a good friend down, I got something to work that came up tonight at WordCamp Fraser Valley.

I’m not sure what the original question was, but my design for No Boundaries had custom drop down menus added to the header so that Andy could easily add and remove pages from where ever he was in the world and have them show up in those menus.

And to be honest, I can’t really tell you how I got it all to work because it was that long ago. However, Stu Nicholls made a great blog post about how to do this with simple CSS. I used this post to hack together my concept for Andy’s site, and the final design turned out to be what he wanted.

Now doing a quick Google search to find this resource again, I came across this WordPress plugin, WordPress CSS Drop-down Menu, that could do this for you without getting into all the code. I have no experience using it, but the author makes reference to the same blog post that I just did, so it might be worth checking out first before you get into the code.