July 2008

Back from Europe in one piece, and of course there’s a pile of work waiting to get started on as soon as I’m back. After some deliberation, I decided to start up an actual business to run all of my freelance projects through instead of being “that guy” someone knows who can build a website. This way I can keep clients, communications, and finances all in order and separate from my personal stuff.

So I’m officially announcing the founding of the Raster Factory.

I plan on keeping this site up as more of a personal reference and portfolio for people to find, but the business site will be much more in-depth and hopefully finished soon.

June 2008

I’m fortunate enough to schedule in a whirlwind trip of Europe at the end of this month. I plan on focusing on photography for the most part, and hope to have a second book completed once I return. It’s going to be taxing try to fit in London, Scotland, Belgium, Amsterdam, Germany, Switzerland, and Paris in two weeks (!), but we hope to keep on our toes and get a taste of all the areas in a short period of time so we know what exactly to look for when we can return again.

I will be keeping everyone up to date with a separate blog during the trip instead of trying to email dozens of people. Follow along at ryanmclaughlin.net/europe.

May 2008

The success of culture|garage has surprised all of us involved with the project. We’ve been flown to international auto shows as guests of General Motors, offered inside media coverage for events only open to automotive publications, and have made ties with several automotive related companies and sponsors.

Within the first few months, we reached the front page of Digg.com three times, and now average 50,000 unique hits per monthy since we opened our doors in December 2007, and have over 130 subscribed RSS readers. We hope these numbers will continue to grow as quickly as they have been!

That all being said, this is a learning experience for everyone involved. We’ve moved to a dedicated hosting server and tweaked the current templates and layout as we have gone along. We let the system run its course and have found what works and what does not. Therefore we have come up with a redesign and restructuring of the site in order to cope with the next year or so of growth, and direct the site where we want it to go.

Look for the new release to make a full appearance in July.

culture|garage

December 2007

In a whirlwind of design and development, I worked with a few friends around the country to put together a new automotive site focused on news and the culture and lifestyle of cars. Articles are written and published by us or one of our editors, and topics ranging from something to anything can be discussed in the forum.

The remarkable thing was the entire project, from initial planning and hosting setup to going live, only took three days. I ended up severely modifying a Wordpress template with custom graphics and layout to get the pages looking good in a speedy manner, and worked with another designer in completing the logo. The forum install was fairly simple and straightforward, although I had to dig in my bag of tricks to get it to mesh with Wordpress.

Check it out and see what you think.

culture|garage

November 2007

The past few weeks at WildFireWeb have been spent developing for our own Facebook application. Facebook opened their API to third parties a few months ago, and we came up with a way to use our editor and external hosting software to allow people to create blogs, photo galleries, books, poems, resumes, etc. all within their Facebook account. People can also create external RSS feeds and export PDF’s of their content.

The content in each Slate can be set to be private for only your eyes, or be shared with friends. There are some wiki-ish features which allow your friends to work together on one Slate.

We think this opens up the practicality and usability of Facebook, which traditionally limits both the amount and the content which you can add to your profile. Slates expands this to near-limitless proportions to allow people to really start using their Facebook accounts for real work.

I’ve been working at designing the logo, a completely new UI for the application, as well as editing and writing some of the existing code. Look for the new version to drop in the next few weeks, once we get all the bugs worked out.

Take a gander at the Slates homepage.

July 2007

We’ve finally rolled out a project we’ve been working on for a few months now at WildFireWeb. The basic gist is that all K-12 schools in California now have free websites available to them, already full of content. They can of course edit, add, or remove whatever they want using our editor, and all the teachers get their own pages to use however they want for the classroom.

Our income is derived from in-page sponsorship, and we’ve been really selective in picking who is allowed to advertise with us. Once each school hits a certain amount of sponsorship income, the rest is returned to school.

My involvement in the project has been designing the templates used by the schools, as well as writing the code for each template’s framework along with authoring the WebSchoolPro corporate site.

More information is available at WebSchoolPro.com. The press release can be found here.

May 2007

My senior project at Sonoma State was to create and get published a book of my photography. I gathered up my favorite images I’ve shot throughout college, including some of the 35mm that I had processed and printed. After a few weeks of figuring out order and editing out the ones that didn’t work, I ended up with something that I’m pretty proud of.

It was published using Blurb, which specializes in per-order books so I don’t have to buy a run and worry about selling them all. The book is a full-color, hardcover 13×11 coffee table book.

Copies are available here through Blurb and cost $59.99 each. I’d like to have another one completed in a few months.