Marcus Neto

New site and pictures

I’ve been working with Tom Aiken of Aiken Custom Homes for a couple of years now. I created their first website and have taken pictures of their houses for use on the site and in various publications. It had been awhile since Tom and I talked last but he recently said that he wanted to make some changes to the site. The previous site used straight HTML and had SlideShowPro on the gallery page. Not an ideal solution. So with this go around we kept the same look and feel but added ExpressionEngine as the backend and used a mix of imgsizer and fancybox to display the images.

You can see the website by clicking here.

I also went out with Tom yesterday to his newest creation to take some pictures. This house was beautiful. Definitely like something straight out of Southern Living. His attention to details is meticulous. The layout of the homes is nice but where he gets you is in the finish. All of the trim work and materials that are used are top notch. And the houses have a timeless sense about them. Anyway, I love taking pictures of his homes because they photograph really well. I’ve posted some to flickr. But here are a few… Hope you enjoy them.

Just getting a chance to post these

I recently went up to DC to visit my folks. Dad was turning 67. Hard to believe that. Anyway, it was a surprise. He did not know I was coming up. I wish I had gotten a picture of the look on his face when he saw me. I’ll remember that forever. I did manage to get a couple of pictures before I left. These are my favorites of the bunch.

It’s AALLIIIIVEEE!

Way to be all dramatic and stuff. I guess it is well deserved as I am announcing that after 3 years of looking at my business website and hating it I finally managed to put together a new one. And so far so good. The reviews have been supportive. So head on over to Blue Fish and let me know what you think in the comments.

Next week I’ll try and put some thoughts together on building the site using ExpressionEngine 2.0. It was definitely a learning experience.

Click Here to see it in all of it’s fabulousness!

It is almost ready

It is a well known fact that if you work as a web designer your company website is always taking a back seat to forgotten email passwords, updates to the events schedule and taking pictures of products. As the old saying goes “the web designer’s website has no interwebs” or something like that.

Anyway, I have for about 3 years now wanted to redesign my 3 year old website (you read that right). But I could never get to it. Well recently I decided that no matter what it took I needed to show people that I know how to stay current and just do it. So I am almost there. I have chosen my favorite CMS (ExpressionEngine) as I am embed (techie humor) with them and think they are the cat’s meow.

You want a sneak peek? Well here it is. Notice that there is NO BLOG. I purposefully decided that a blog on that site, here and on EETemplates was just a bit much. I mean a fella has to work sometime right? I cant just all be educating you people and all.

So without further ado here is the goods. I hope to be launching within the week.

Retraction of Support

Back Pedaling a little. In the last couple of days there has been additional analysis of the code in Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme for WordPress and it does appear that much of the code is either moderately modified or just outright copied from WP. So I don’t think this case is going to see the light of day. As a matter of fact I would suspect that Chris will be changing his license to GPL by end of next week (if he is smart). I’m still not a fan of the restrictions placed on derivative works within the GPL licensing but that is not a big deal. I just don’t build anything on GPL based code.

Here is the link to that article on the comparison.

GPL is the Death Star

Today I ran across this interesting discussion regarding from Mixergy. For those not in the know there has been quite a few discussions about the GPL license and compliance by 3rd party developers. As a matter of fact this type of discussion was responsible for my move to ExpressionEngine from Joomla and WordPress. At the time Joomla put their boot on the throat of 3rd party developers and told them to adopt the GPL license or take a hike.

Most 3rd party developers do not want to adopt the GPL because of things like this:

Woothemes is a prominent Theme developer for WordPress. They made the switch to GPL and this is the thanks they get? Legally speaking under GPL the person offering their themes for $10 can do so. As a matter of fact they could offer them for free and the Woo clan would have no recourse. Or they could take them and fork them and make them into something else entirely and sell them. Either way adopting GPL to me means losing control of something you have worked hard for.

I know some of you out there are enamored with Open Source software like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. They are for the most part robust systems that none of us would want to finance but are extremely happy to use for the going rate of free. The problem for me is that the “owners” of the projects are enforcing GPL only after a successful 3rd party developer ecosystem has brought them thousands of users. There are hundreds of thousands of users of Wordpress that have never even looked at the code that it takes to build a theme. The one click themeing makes it really simple for non-technical users to get a beautiful website with functionality that would cost them thousands of $$$ if they had to have a developer create it custom.

So in the case of Chris Pearson (Thesis) vs Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) I am rooting for Chris. I think GPL is the Death Star. It kills everything in it’s way. I see it as destructive to a community. Money is not evil. Profiting off of your work is not evil. GPL would have you believe it. Even though plenty of Devs that collaborate on projects that are OS use the notoriety and connections they gain from the project to make PLENTY of the green stuff. It’s all a matter of perspective. Somehow in the GPL economy time for money is ok but product for money == bad. That just doesn’t add up for me as often times the time that goes into building a product like Thesis is enormous. And doing support for a theme and feeding the monster that is created when you start a theme shop can be a huge undertaking….

Anyway, click here to see the video.

Huntsville Part II

So the trip to Huntsville just absolutely rocked. The picture up top was taken in a little off the beaten path cove that was ridiculously beautiful. We saw a sea plane fly down from the mountain far off and fly about 20 feet off of the water down through this little cove. We also heard a splash and saw a beaver swim about 25 feet away from the boat. The water was in the 80s and perfect for a little lounging around as evidenced by this picture…

We did a lot of driving around just getting the lay of the land. Stopped by the Bridge Street mall for some yummy tacos and Cantina Laredo. This place is my favorite location for Mexican food. I wish that we had one here in Mobile. We took in a lot of the area from Madison County to Jones Valley / Hampton Cove and all points in between. I was especially impressed with the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce and Visitor’s Center. They were both extremely helpful and their facilities were very nice. We were also able to make it on Redstone Arsenal as my Father-in-law is retired Air Force so we saw some of the NASA facilities that they have there… so awesome.

No trip to Huntsville would be complete without a trip to the Space Museum (Davidson Center for Space Exploration). Unfortunately we got there after 5pm and the main museum was closed (oh well guess we’ll have to go back ) but they had a special exhibit of the Star Wars collection going on so we just HAD to go to that. It was a collection of props and memorabilia from the Star Wars movies and it was AWESOME. Everything from Costumes to some of the original models that they used for the X-wing fighters and other ships. Really cool stuff for me and the boys… well Jen liked it too…

The highlight of the week has to be the time spent at Lake Guntersville. I do believe this is paradise on earth. A man made lake of the huge kind Lake Guntersville was just what we needed to escape from all of the Oil Spill crap that has been going on here at home. Matt has a pontoon boat that is the perfect platform for swimming, fishing and tubing… so that is just what we did. There is nothing more relaxing than spending some much needed time on a boat watching your sons have a blast getting whipped around corners and hanging on for dear life while riding a tube.

Huntsville Alabama

We are currently in Huntsville Alabama on vacation. The last couple of days we’ve done some wandering checking out the area and having some fun. This area reminds me a lot of the Shenandoah Valley which is where I went to school (Go Dukes!). The rolling hills (and mountains) and the trees. It is just awesome. And fortunately a good friend lives in the area and has been gracious enough to take us out n his boat on Lake Guntersville. There are some absolutely stunning spots on the Lake. I’ll make sure to post a few shots when I get a chance.

This area does not seem to have many web design companies though. That surprised me. I stopped by the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce and got one of their directories and only saw a few in there for web design, or development. I thought that was interesting considering the amount of tech in the area. I was just hoping to talk shop with someone while here but oh well…

For those of you that might read between the lines and think that we are moving I want you to know that we love the Eastern Shore and the life that we have there. We are not moving. Carry on…

Teth Lee - Editor of This That and The Other

I’ve known Teth for a couple of years now. She is currently working in Simple Blue Headquarters with Casey Lee and I. So every once in awhile I will show up at work and she will ask if I have a minute to take a new headshot. I love it as sometimes this is the first picture I will have taken in a week. I thought it was cool that she has red hair and we had the green seamless paper set up.

Ruth’s Chris

My design studio has done the design and web work for the Bluegill restaurant for 2-3 years. Recently they were purchased by Cooper Restaurants which runs Felix’s Fish Camp (Mobile, AL) and the Ruth’s Chris Steak House here locally. Recently they asked me to take some pictures for the Ruth’s Chris for some ads that we are putting together. I was excited because even though the location is part cave, it’s dark inside, where else can you have access to top notch food, beautiful setting, wine cellar and more?

Technical: These pictures were all taken with the Canon 5DmkII. Most of them were taken with the 50mm f1.4 lens, iso640, f2.0 at 1/60th of a second.

So I wanted to share some of those photos with you. To see more click through to the set on Flickr.