Tag Archives: web design

Sub-par Campaign Websites for Sub-par Candidates

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

If you’re going to run for a legislative office here in GA as a Democrat, you better get your communications straight. In fact, DON’T DO YOUR OWN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE, as you’ll probably screw it up anyway. Call/txt me if you need a comms person.

Angela Pendley ran this year as a Democrat for Lynn Westmoreland’s old seat GA-3, which includes northwestern Muscogee.

Her website, http://apendley4house.com is a damn joke, likely self-created on Wix. Her “About” page proudly proclaims thus:

“Angela Pendley does not use social media such as Facebook, twitter, or instagram.
​
Angela Pendley communicate with people in person, on the phone, through email, through United States Postal service, and through text messaging.
​
Supporters of the campaign are encouraged to share Angela Pendley’s message with friends, even if they are republicans who will vote as independents in November.”

Like, what the hell is this? If you’re not where the people and their eyeballs are, you’re ruling yourself out. You’re also doing damage to other progressives and liberals who want to run for that seat after you fail so needlessly.

No wonder she was beat by Drew Ferguson 68%-32%. She had it coming. Her communications looked like absolute “trash can juice”, to quote Nick Decker.

Same with Ben Anderson. Lost 64-35 to Josh McKoon. No website, just a Facebook page Anderson for Georgia.

Democrats out here in the country areas don’t know what they’re doing. Ugh.

Don’t be Angela Pendley 2016. Don’t screw up 2018. Call/txt me. #gapol

Over the next two years, if you are a progressive or liberal elected official who needs a website, or if you are looking for a website+mailing list+social media for your progressive or liberal campaign or activist group, please hit me up.

I don’t know if I have enough life experience to run for office, but I sure enough can cook up a communications platform for you. I can also write press releases.

Progressives, liberals and democratic socialists, please. And maybe pirates.

Had an interesting night at MPower Project.

During the meeting, I was disappointed by a phone call from an organization for whom I’ve long operated their website. This phone call was the culmination of 2 years of free, volunteer website work, and I was sorely disappointed by the decision against my proposed compensation.

I am now weighing my options, but as I’ve told the representative for the client organization, I’ve removed the website from search engine viewing until further notice. I also intend to abstain from maintaining their social media outlets on Twitter and Facebook.

One thing that has come out of tonight: Except for current interested parties, I will be very reluctant to do website or social work for non-profit orgs in the future. I am very numb and ill to the idea right now. No more freebies.

Last night at the meeting resulted in a very interesting set of developments. The air in the building was tepid due to the heat, and I had a headache for much of the meeting.

After the body completed other business, I was allowed by the chair to present my proposal next to a projection of the proposal, and I explained as much about the document and what it will do for this organization as I could imagine explaining.

The questions came, and they built in momentum. Most were questions that I could answer immediately, a few were questions that I somewhat staggered in answering. One person’s questions were so pointed that they could have sunk the whole thing if other members of this organization hadn’t intervened and explained what I was trying to get at.

Two sticking points: the price and the terms of the payment. Wanda, I stuck with my price, just like you said, and I explained what it would cover. I was reassured by many of the members that this constitutes a normal meeting, and that I did an excellent job in my presentation. However, I stayed outside for the rest of the meeting when they debated the only other rivaling proposal (the proposal’s author didn’t appear at the meeting, but I understand that it is far less in price than mine).

In the end, no vote was taken (a few of the members left, denying the meeting a quorum needed for a vote), and the question was delegated to a subcommittee to handle the matter, and to hold out for more candidate proposals, until the next meeting on 16 June.

One thing they could agree on: this organization needs a website as soon as possible. I made plenty of acquaintances last night, but I got a substantial, emotional taste in democracy that I won’t be able to shake off for a week. Still, I will see this proposal to the end. I already know what it will look like, what it will have, and what it will do.

This organization deserves a good website, and I feel that I’m the best at bringing it to fruition. Aaliyah’s “Try Again” comes to mind: “This ain’t a yes, this ain’t a no/Just do your thing, we’ll see how we go….” #braveface

More on CSS in SVG and SMIL: Wiring visible content together

Uncategorized, , , , ,

CSS is most well known as a means of creating nifty-looking graphical effects and enhancements in W3C-compliant webpages. Also, it has been demonstrated that CSS can be embedded into both HTML (a text-oriented markup language) and SVG (a vector graphics-oriented markup language).

But while CSS can wire together embedded content (images, video, etc.) and text into a variety of harmoniously-compartmented displays on xHTML, it remains to be seen what CSS can wire together in an SVG file, apart from doing the same job in SVG (wiring text and embedded images together into specific positions) that it does in xHTML.

Sure, SVG can be approached in the same way that non-image MLs like xHTML are approached: text can be embedded into SVG just like SVG can be embedded into text. However, SVG embedded into HTML would be treated like any other image format like JPEG, PNG and SWF, while text embedded into SVG wouldn’t have anything to do with xHTML (at the moment, I don’t think it’s possible to embed HTML syntax into SVG, as there are very few to no resources via Google on the subject); instead, it would be treated as text from within SVG’s own approach.

However, I’m certain that other images and image/video formats can be embedded in SVG, just as images can be embedded into HTML. So a CSS-based layout of the images and the text would work similarly to, albeit not the exact same as, CSS-based layout of images and text in HTML.

I think that now, from the recent addition of animations and transformations into CSS on WebKit, the main issue of discussion on CSS’s role in vector graphics markup centers around how CSS and SMIL can be appropriated within both HTML and SVG without getting in each other’s way.

Like CSS and unlike HTML, SVG and other markup languages, SMIL (a markup language, abbreviation for “Synchronized Multimedia integration Language”), ironically pronounced as “smile”, doesn’t have a “face”; in other words, an SMIL file doesn’t have a visible output except when it is used to determine the sequential display of elements in another markup language, like SVG (thus being akin to Flash Player’s ActionScript in terms of its “animation” capabilities). In fact, the main purpose of SMIL in a markup language is to determine how the elements in a markup page are supposed to “act” when the page is “played”.

Also, it is most used by multimedia players such as QuickTime and RealPlayer to determine (or, dare I say, “daisy-chain”) a pre-determined playback sequence of audio and video, hence known as “playlists”. Also, a subset of SMIL, known as the Multimedia Messaging Service, is used primarily in the mobile device media industry to provide a variety of multimedia (video, images, audio, rich text) for messages between device rather than just the infamous “text message” allowed by the Short Message Service (SMS) protocol.

But what can CSS, even animated CSS, do for SMIL? Or what is the best relationship between the two?

At the moment, I’ve found this W3C resource on the interaction between CSS2 and SMIL (possibly for embedding); however, it was published exactly 10 years ago, while CSS animations were introduced this year as part of the drive toward an eventual CSS3 recommendation.

CSS, like SMIL, doesn’t have a “face” unless it is embedded or “inlined” correctly in a markup language; and to an extent, it does determine an exact layout for the markup file’s inner contents and embedded material. However, unlike SMIL, previous standards of CSS didn’t include provisions for animation, although animation in CSS has been proven to work in previous years at a very rudimentary and manual, mouse-driven (:hover) level prior to the introduction of larger animation attributes to the CSS implementation in WebKit this year.

At the same time, even with this recent CSS animation implementation, it is still (albeit slightly less) driven by the mouse, as the :hover and :mouseover tags’ capabilities have simply been expanded into the area of transformations (in other words, the attributes that allow for translations and rotations of elements).

So I could see the CSS3 transformations being geared exclusively to single hover-driven elements (like mousing over a hyperlink to see it expand or rotate into a bigger form), while SMIL’s animations can be applied to elements in the page that aren’t hover-driven, but click-driven (like clicking “play” to play a video and “stop” to stop it).

But that’s the best that I can see as far as a relationship between a transforming CSS3 and animating SMIL is concerned. There’s still no word yet on what embedding CSS into an SMIL file can do for the latter (vice versa, I believe, is impossible).

Neither of them have “faces” with which they can smile or style.