New Site, Next Screencast, New Software...

Just wanted to announce a new site I designed using Freeway 5 located at www.production-studios.com. It had been quite a while since I had originally laid out the first design, but now I've redesigned it from the ground up and things have turned out quite well. The turning point in my design process was using the wood-background found on this blogspot and utilizing it in the designed site. It provides a clean and tailored feel and also draws attention to the way the photographs appear on the various pages. Thanks to Brandon and Sarah for the opportunity to clean up the site and I wish the best of luck to them in getting Production Studios running at full speed.

In other news, my next screencast is coming up and is being worked on. I've just checked my download stats tracker and about 50 people have downloaded my second blogger tutorial + template released in the last post. It's been downloaded faster than the other one and that's exciting and I've been receiving some solid feedback on it. Thanks to those who have downloaded it. However my next screencast steps away from Blogger and moves to another CMS (Content Management System) named Expression Engine. I've been learning Expression Engine for a project I'm working on and I have been finding it even easier to implement over my CMS Made Simple routine.

The site is being built without actions (although Joe Muscara it's been tempting) and has been written with tags in tact plus using Tim Plumb's paragraph tags action. It's actually easier for someone whose never used tags much before to figure out plus it's all done in Freeway 5. My next screencasts will be how I'm implementing Expression Engine tags into Freeway 5 then into Expression Engine and then finish with a preview. So stay tuned to that.

Finally I'd like to wrap things up with praise for a software item I've recently acquired named TextMate. I had seen the software title thrown around on a few websites with mixed reviews and never really considered it thinking it was just another text editor and felt that I was satisfied with Text Wrangler meaning that I didn't need anything else. I downloaded a trial and messed around with it and it's super intuitive and also an Expression Engine bundle can be added to it that with a few clicks can drop in the tags needed without having to look them up. Very convenient, 5 big stars to them.

That's all. Thanks for reading.

FW5: Your Second Blogger Template

For those who have been following this website closely you'll see that I've posted a Blogger Template tutorial using Freeway 5 Pro a while back. In that tutorial, I laid out how to build a flexible layout along with a few sample Freeway files and since then I've rebuilt and compressed that tutorial into a brand new second tutorial. First and foremost for the 90+ people that downloaded my first tutorial I'd like to thank you. It makes me feel the time I take to do these is worth it and that it is hopefully helping you understand how easy things work using the actions provided in Freeway 5.

Now we're going to be moving on from the first tutorial and onto the second by providing a new 4 minute Screencast that introduces how to implement them into your existing design. Before we had a list of instructions involving a structured list and some sample files, but people wanted a more advanced application and this is where the second tutorial takes off. The bonus to the second tutorial is that I've provided a free template that can be used in Freeway to be a jumping off point for your Blogger design. It features a simple two column layout and resembles what a stripped-down version of this site would be. Again this is provided free for the response I've received of people downloading the first one.

Screencast and Files can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?koquajzcdxu
Password: apple

I'm still planning on making another screencast for the use of Expression Engine with Freeway 5 and also some CSS edits for use in Blogger that can adjust your design further. Again, thanks to everyone for downloading.

I'd also like to take a moment and announce I will be attending the Journey concert in September. I purchased the tickets today and am super excited about it.

Let the wheel in the sky keep on turning....

FW5: CMS Made Simple Template

On the Freewaytalk.net forums there was some discussion on filling the void of a proper CMS Made Simple tutorial for building a template using Freeway 5 Pro. I first took the opportunity to sit down and spend some time learning the CMS software and finding the ways that made it "simple" over other management systems. What I found is that CMSMadeSimple requires simple HTML tags to be placed within a DIV (like normal text) and then there are optional parameters to achieve a more custom look.

After I had a grasp on the subject, I spent about 2 hours writing out a tutorial that came out to be like 5-8 pages, single spaced, and no images to describe what I was doing. Now my Blogger template tutorial on the other hand had no images either, but it had sample files and that seemed to be enough. So I created some sample files to get people going and I packaged everything (including the two actions required) and as I was reading through my tutorial even I didn't get it. That's not supposed to happen.

So I decided to try out "ScreenFlow" and create a 26 minute screen-cast video on how to build a template in Freeway 5 Pro and implement it successfully into CMS Made Simple. It has a prebuilt sample file, the 2 needed actions, and a decent video. Excuse the occasional coarse areas of the video, along with an occasional coarse voice crack due to dense humidity during the day. I also used my "Rock Band" microphone to record the audio, so turn up those speakers.

So without further ado here are the links:

The Entire Package: http://www.mediafire.com/?pqr5onwhgde (97.3MB)

Password: apple

CMS Made Simple History and FAQ: http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/support/faq

*The screencast requires Quicktime to run and can be found in the "video" folder.

I'd appreciate some comments on this or a simple thank you if it was helpful.

(Also a quick thank you to spiral94.com for the use of hosting the CMS software)

Enjoy!