Buffablog.com is celebrating their second anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they’re throwing an all-out shindig at Nietzsche’s this Saturday featuring Harvestsum’s On Beta and a handfull of other great local bands. Come out and join us as we congratulate Buffablog on two great years.

Saturday, March 31 @ Nietzshe’s
[248 Allen St, Buffalo, NY 14201-1324]
featuring: Early Attic, Voodoo Friends, On Beta, Andrew J. Reimer’s CPX, Ramforinkus & much more!

For more info visit:
http://www.facebook.com/events/307862969274296/
http://www.buffablog.com

ps. The rumours about this being a secret cirque du soleil performance are most likely not true.

Check out highwatermark films for more

To keep things easy on the eyes I used a lot of washed-out blues and off-whites inspired by her book cover to make sure nothing stood out except for her product photo and headline typography.  There is also a subtle background grunge background near the top of the page that I’m not sure is very obvious but I’ve always really liked.

This site was built the old fashioned way by hand coding html pages into notepad. Its one of the last sites I’ve built at mainstreethost that wasn’t built into some sort of CMS platform.  So far this makes sense because there haven’t been many content changes but I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to redevelop this site into WordPress at some point.  It would be great to add some sort of social community element to this website.

Check it out at www.stopthestresshabit.com and feel free to leave a comment.

WordPress

The official WordPress app is a free download on iTunes & Android Market.  It gives you most of the features you’d expect for blogging on the go but lacks any features like page creation/administration or html editing that would make it truly powerful.  It really does excel at mobile blogging, though.   Compared to other apps, WordPress iOS’s typing screen is bigger and more intuitive.  It also gives you a few useful shortcuts for posting links and speeding up other everyday blogging tasks.    Being free, its a great place to start with mobile WordPress admin.  You may never outgrow it, but if you find yourself needing different options you can always upgrade to a more specialized paid app.

Joomla Admin Mobile

I recently installed this app on a Mainstreethost client’s iphone and he absolutely loves it.   It’s so much more powerful than any of the WordPress apps I’ve tested so far and gives you tons of control over both content and internal Joomla options.   My client takes photos with his smartphone of closeout inventory and instantly posts them with captions to their ‘closeout deals’ page.  It’s especially helpful in situations where keeping your content current is of utmost importance.  Joomla Admin Mobile (or JAM, as it refers to itself) comes in a free version and a paid version for $9.99.  The free version includes advertisements and only lets you control one Joomla site.  The paid version also removes restrictions to 3rd party plugins and gives you more control over menus, categories & users.

BlogPress

Blogpress is $2.99 on iTunes & Android Market and supports all sorts of platforms including Joomla, Wordpess, Blogger, Tumblr and many more.   In addition to a clear and full featured blogging interface, BlogPress also includes a few nice features that I found myself wishing for in a few other apps I’ve tried.   When controlling wordpress it allows for all user levels to update the site. (WordPress iOS only allows administrators & editors).  Best of all it has a simple HTML editor that gives you a lot more power over your content than other mobile admin apps.  Blogpress also integrates with your YouTube and social networking accounts, allowing you to automatically take videos from your phone, upload them to YouTube, and add them to your website from one screen.  You can also automatically update your Facebook & Twitter feeds announcing your latest updates.  I haven’t tried this one yet at Mainstreethost, but in my limited experience with it I found it easy to use and extremely powerful.

Click here to leave a comment & let me know if you think there’s an app I’ve left out.

Traditional Photo Galleries:

Obviously this plugin was created first & foremost to display and manage photo galleries.  Example 1, okamishfurniture.com uses Nextgen to display their huge furniture catalog.  (We also installed a 3rd party plugin called Nextgen-Search to make sure visitors can simply search the word ‘table’ to see a custom gallery of all tables in their catalog.)

Check it out here - http://www.okamishfurniture.com/furniture/bedroom.html

Crescentbeach4rent.com also uses Nextgen for simple galleries but rather than create entire pages of albums they’ve added single galleries in their content with simple captions.   I also used a slightly customized thickbox effect on popup.

Check it out here - http://crescentbeach4rent.com/crescent.htm#gallery

Third Party Plugins:

All sorts of other options can be added to Nexgen Gallery through the use of 3rd party plugins.   A few of my favorites come from a group called J.J. Coder, who created a few plugins adding various slideshow options  [click here for a list].   Another Mainstreethost client of mine- Getshotbybob.com, uses JJ Nextgen Gallery Slider to create the homepage & alternate slideshows.  The site’s owner, Bob Ditommaso can easily add/rearrange photos and captions.

Check it out here - http://getshotbybob.com

Same plugin with a slightly different effect on Bambinobar.com

In addition to porting Nivo slider effects to Nextgen, JJ also developed Jquery Cycle & Carousel plugins.

Custom Templates

Using WordPress shortcodes you can control the template Nextgen uses to display your thumbnails.   The pre-installed templates have different borders, captions & other misc looks.  Taking this a step further I developed a custom template for blakemaninteriors.com that pulls each photo’s caption and displays it in a left column beside the image.  The custom Nextgen template also displays the gallery’s thumbnails in a horizontal conveyor below the selected image.  This was one of the more specific gallery requests I’ve received while working at Mainstreethost and I was happy we were able to use Nextgen to create a portfolio that matched our client’s vision.
Check it out here – http://www.blakemaninteriors.com/portfolio/kitchens.html

These examples really only scratch the surface of this plugin. It comes pre-bundled with several different lightbox effects,  automatically resizes uploaded images, and supports a tag based sorting system right out of the box.   These basic features are really what makes Nextgen so useful.

Click Here to Comment.  As always, I appreciate any feedback.

Design
Besides making it easy to use, they had no specific requests for the design. I tried to keep things simple and use a lot of warm, natural colors and textures to make their product photos stand out better. We wanted to leave plenty of open space to fill in with as much search engine friendly content as possible.

Development
This was one of the first websites I developed at Mainstreethost in Virtuemart, which is a full-featured e-commerce plugin for Joomla – and I really got into the nuts & bolts of Virtuemart for the first time on this site. A lot of the techniques & customizations I first tried on tannersfish.com come in handy for me all the time these days so it was definitely time well spent.

>> Check it out at www.tannersfish.com and click here to leave a comment.   As usual I appreciate the feedback.

I was planning looking into the php  files and try to remove the links until I discovered this easy CSS solution on the WordPress.org forums:

Just find & open this CSS file: http://www.yourdomainname/wp-admin/css/colors-fresh.css

and add display:none to #update-nag

You can also remove plugin upgrade notices with this class: .plugin-update-tr .update-message

Source & Further explanation here

Design
Web design is 3000% easier when your client already has a decent logo & high quality pics.  Luckily Bambino had almost 100 great photos and great branding.   The site design had to reflect their dark, stylish but rough around the edges style.   I used stained wood textures and a simple, dark palette to try to match their physical decor.

Development
I’m starting to use the google-font Oswald a little too much, but in this case it really made sense because it matched their logo so well.  I developed the site in WordPress because I wanted easy access to misc plugins including Nexten Gallery for their  Gallery page & All-in-one-Event-Calendar.   This was also the first site I’ve developed at Mainstreethost where I had to integrate an OpenTable reservations system and I’m really happy with how it came out.   I may actually use it when we make our way over there for dinner one of these days.

>> Check it out at www.bambinobar.com and click here to leave a comment. I appreciate the feedback. (Except from jerks.  I hate feedback from jerks)

When: Tonight! Nov 26th 7-10pm

Mark Norris & the Backpeddlers official album release party.  Matt Smith kicks it off at 8 sharp.  I’ve been assured that this show will live up to it’s incredibly large poster.

more info and notes here: tinyurl.com/6s2kwh7

Also, On Beta ended up not being able to release their new CD last night and we’re all pretty disappointed about it. Production of the disc ended up being delayed a bit and we’re currently planning an actual release concert in a few weeks. Check back soon for info.

Happy Thanksgiving and see you soon,
Mark