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FeedMeComics Beta Launch

2/14/16

Over the years I have done a lot of experiments using HTML canvas elements, so when a friend told me there aren't enough good web comic aggregates it gave me an idea. Not only would I make a site where you can find links to all kinds of great web comics but you can also make your own!

FeedMeComics.com features all of the tools you need to get started making comics and sharing them on-line. You can either upload your own images or use the on-line drawing tools built by yours truly to make your comic and share it with the world. Also, membership is free and unlike some other websites I don't make any claim to your work, even if you used my tools to create it.

So whether you are an artist or just like to read some comics from time to time, sign up on FeedMeComics.com and enjoy!




Glen Bradley for NCGOP Vice-Chair

3/7/13
Glen Bradley for NCGOP Vice-Chair

I recently had the pleasure of teaming up with For Liberty Communication to make a web site for Glen Bradley who is running for NCGOP Vice-Chair.

My role was setting up the PHP/MySQL side of the site along with some simple Ajax/JavaScript tools. With our team work the entire site was done in a matter of 3 days.

Click here to view Glen's site.


Happy New Year, New Site!

1/1/13

Happy New Year! I have a new site layout! I was going for an increased display area, as well as using the whole page. It was back in 2008 when I design DonovanH 2.0 and have plans to make it still usable, after I finish up all of the details with the new DH 3.0. I still have a working copy up of my Flash based student site. There is a nice little tool I had on there for showing off type face on line though. It's been a while since I have messed with font making but have often hand drawn letter sets.

Last year was quite an adventure, with a lot of learning experiences and travel. This year I turn 30! So I have to plan for one of the most epic adventures around my birth date. I'm looking forward to making some more art and hopefully make more time to get my other experiments done. Anyways, stay tuned for more posts about the interesting things I do and experience.


Ana's Corner

9/26/12
Ana's Corner

Another in my latest works of small end websites. Ana Rodriguez is a very crafty lady who has made a small business with her skill and hard work. I had meet her through a mutual friend. When she was talking to me about her website she said she would rather refer people to her on-line PDF rather than to her website. I told her I would be able to offer he an affordable redesign and have it fixed up in no time. Well, no time is now!

We have already been discussing e-commerce options, a content management system, and SEO, in order to make the most out of her web space. None the less a good appearance is the first step to a good web site.

Ana's Corner is no longer running

Click here to view Ana's website.

ConstitutinalWar.org

9/10/12

Last week I did a re-design for the group Constitutional War. Originally the group purchased the name and used it as an event page. Now that they are on to other things they wanted to have a website that better represented them.

Constitutional War is no longer running

Click here to view the site

Midwife Advocates Website

9/4/12
screen shot from midwifeadvocates.com

Midwife Advocates is a small group that is trying to legalize midwifery, mostly in the state of North Carolina as they are still a small organization. When first moving to NC I found it quite odd that the practice of midwifery was outlawed. My guess would be lobbyists in NC's large medical industry might have something to do with that.

Anyways, I documented one of their events last spring and was recently contacted for web development services. The budget was small, but I'm a sucker for do-gooders. The design and structuring took me about 2 day and another 2 days to finish off their content management system (CMS). They are still putting in a lot of the content, however with their custom CMS, that should be no problems for them.

Midwife Advocates is no longer running

Click here to visit MidwifeAdvocates.org

Basics of Graphic Optimization for Flash

11/21/11

One thing that I have found in my years of editing and fixing FLAs is that most people seem to take little regard to graphic optimization. Graphic optimization is important in order to make your application as efficient as possible. The Adobe Flash Player (AFP) handles both native vectors and bitmaps. Both of these have specific reasons to use one over the other. I will not get into the visual differences of vector graphics vs. bitmaps, I will explain when and why to use one or the other and how to do so at an optimum level.

To understand graphic optimization for flash you need first examine the AFP and how it handles the two major graphic types. Vector images are built and calculated continuously on stage with their properties applied to them by the AFP. Now the important thing to consider is vectors are little more than an array of points and some extra properties such as stroke, color, and so on. This most always will make for a drastically smaller outputted SWF file. However if your application requires a lot of stage movement, rotating, and tweening than you must also keep in mind that the AFP has to re-calculate all of these points, which can be quite CPU intensive. So vectors might not be the best approach to graphics for flash gaming, unless used for simple static graphics such as menus or buttons.

Bitmaps are the tried and true format for Internet images. They are handled in the AFP with about the same efficiency as any standard web browser. On average using bitmaps will bloat the size of your SWF file, making for longer loading time. The advantage however is that bitmaps are much easier for the AFP to move around on stage. Instead of recalculating numerous points the AFP simply needs to know what the new (x,y) registration point is. The bitmaps are cached so duplication and tweening are much less CPU intensive.

Now it is true that you can cache your vector images as bitmaps. However it is important to keep in mind that this command happens when the object is introduced to the stage. Clearly this makes the use of cached vectors (or vectors in general) a poor choice for things like gun firing in a game or scrolling background objects. To curb the stress on runtime processing you can store your vector in a movie clip and assign that movie clip to export on the first frame, however the caching command will still process when it is called in your script.

Since we know the key difference between the two major graphic types and when they are appropriate, lets look at some ways of optimizing both vectors and bitmaps. While testing for optimal graphic performance it is advised to keep open a system monitor to track CPU usage for spikes. Another important thing to do is enable flash to generate a size report on export. To generate a size report select File -> Publish Settings -> Flash -> Advanced, then click the box for generate size report. After doing this you will get a break down of all of the images that are loading into your application, as well as the frame by frame byte usage.

To make vectors more efficient you remove unnecessary points from the graphic. This will not only reduce your SWF file size but also reduce CPU usage from movement. The key is finding the balance between efficiency and beauty. If you are dealing with complex vectors, such as the ones made when you preform a trace bitmap command, you may want to use the Modify -> Shape -> Optimize tool. This allows you to reduce many of the unneeded points very quickly. Also when using shapes, keep them as simple as possible and convert them to either a graphic or movie clip that you will then use instances of time and time again. By doing this you can re-size, re-color, and re-style several different copies of the same instance.

There are a number of benefits to having your vector stored as a movie clip or graphic. Both allow you to change the color and styles of the graphic, however movie clip adds many nice features for only a small increase in byte size. Movie clips can have several handy filters applied to them. Take advantage of these filters, if you are skilled enough you can really drop your file size and avoid use of several bitmaps. If converted to a class object you can export them to load on the first frame, for preloading, and as mentioned before they can be cached as a bitmap to move more efficiently on stage. Keep in mind several filtered symbols moving on a stage will severely impact CPU usage. Since we are on symbol types, I should say a word about usage of the button type. Don't.

In ways of optimizing bitmaps there is not as many options, but let's go over them. In your library you can right click and open the Properties panel for any bitmap. Here you have a number of options, but the ones we care about are the smoothing and quality settings. Smoothing will slightly blur the bitmap hiding pixelation caused by lowering the quality to shave off precious KBs of space. I find with smoothing on you can use around 50% quality and have good results.

Naturally graphic optimization takes time, especially on large complex projects, however the end result is happier users. Not much, aside from unnecessary sound, annoys users more than long load times and lagging. By taking the time to properly optimize your flash projects you can often eliminate these annoyances. Also it much easier on your server and bandwidth to deliver smaller files.


TDI Site Complete

10/4/10
screen shot from the Truck Drivers Institue web site

After some slight delay the Truck Drivers Institue web site is finally completed. I think I need to take a little break now and get back to my painting. Such is the burden of working so much, my art hangs over my should jelously taunting me to spend more time on it. Well art, now is your time again! Hopefully I can finish my next piece before I decided to take up more side work. We shall see.

This site has been redesigned by another party


AS3 vs HTML5 Drawing

7/16/10

So Cassie Lightfitz asked me about the new canvas object in HTML5 and at the time I replied that I don't know anything about it. I was aware of some of the new goodies in the future of the web but I am ecstatic with this new canvas object. The canvas object allows for scripted drawing on the fly, just like you can do in Actionscript. Now I naturally the question I had was ,"which one draws faster"?

So I made very similar scrpts using AS3 and HTML5 javascript. Going in I expected flash to be the fastest, as it natively handles vectors, however I became surprised when I finished both and realized that the HTML5 canvas object can be drawn to many, many times faster than AS3 can draw to a sprite. WOW! My attempt to capture just how fast the HTML5 drawing is processed seem to fail but at least the AS3 will return speed results, keep in mind all build time is in milliseconds (1,000 = 1sec).

Ok, what's one big difference? While AS3 draws in vectors the canvas object draws in bitmaps. My theory is that the canvas object actually caches a copy of the drawn star for reproduction while AS3 has to draw it every time. Try producing some stars for yourself. Warning, more than 100,000 might crash the HTML5 version while over 20,000 can crash the Flash version. If you would like copies of the source code to play around with, download the package HERE.

AS3 Drawing:


HTML5 Drawing:

Your browser does not support the canvas element.

How Many?

Center RegPoint?
Enable Rotation?


WeAreChangeDC.org BETA up!

6/30/10

So recently I have launched the BETA version of WeAreChangeDC.org after starting on the project waaaaaaay back in January. Why the delay? Well, I have been doing a lot of work with Artist Web Builders and have not had to much time to devote to the site. Also the first half of 2010 has been filled with many ups and downs. Im glad I have at least been able to devote more of my time to doing art this year.

Also coinciding with the launch of WeAreChangeDC.org , I have been working with the group to hold a protest of the Federal Reserve on July 3rd, in Washington DC, us locals call the place to District of Criminals. For those who are not in the know about the Fed I would encourage you watch the movie below. With that I thank you for reading and wish you a merry day.

Video no longer hosted @ http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1656880303867390173&hl=en&fs=true


SamMenkmeller.com is GO

4/13/10

Sites are no longer active

Over the weekend I managed put the finishing touches on SamMenkmeller.com. Once again aligning with the folks at Artist Web Builders, we have joined forces to make a web site that is both pretty and user friendly.

Now it is full focus on something that I have wanted to do for some time. Finish off WeAreChangeDC.org and restore the web site for We Are Change Virginia. Unfortunately for WACVA the web name WeAreChangeVirginia.org is lost, however yours truly owns the names WeAreChangeVA.com, WeAreChangeVA.org, and even WeAreChangeVirginia.com. I'm building both web sites off of the same engine I used for this site, so hopefully that can save me some time as I have the basic designs for both sites completed already. Wish me luck and GODSPEED!


AmbieMac.com is Up

1/5/10

Sites are no longer active

YAR! I just put the finishing touches on the functionality for AmbieMac.com and I am quite pleased with how the site turned out. This was actually one of the more stress free freelance projects I have worked on and yet one of the more feature packed. I would like to thank the folks at Artist Web Builders for acting as an intermediary and also for handling the general page content while I built all the other goodies for the site. So go check out Ambie's page and all the cool functionality, oh yeah, and AWB did rather well on the design.


Let Oklahoma Vote

5/26/09

A while back the Citizens In Charge Foundation contacted me and asked me if I could set up a web site for them. No problem there, but the catch here was that they need the site up in less than a week. Mind you I have been very busy, but because I like CIC and knew that they wouldn't be able to have this done in time else wise, I agreed to try and get them a site up by the end of the week.

Did I mention the site had to be using WordPress? Did I mention I hate editing WordPress, CSS? Did I mention they didn't even have anywhere to host the site? Yeah, so I hustled up a storm and ended up spitting out a workable -ok- looking site. Due to time constraint and the complications with WordPress CSS I couldn't really make the site shine, but non-the-less it does it's job. Click here to check it out if you feel so inclined.
letoklahomavote.com is no longer active


Free Paul Jacob

11/12/08

Recently I have been doing some design and development work for the Free Paul Jacob campaign. My latest task was to re-design the Word Press based blog site. I enjoyed this project even though I was not entirely impressed with Word Press due to PHP restrictions. For more information about Mr. Jacob and why he has recently drawn fire from Oklahoma law makers visit the site . Or just visit the site to view my pretty design :)

freepauljacob.com is no longer active


XML picture displayer

10/10/08

I am happy to announce I have come up with something truly useful for all of you who want to make a simple image slide show but don't want to do all of the heavy coding. My neat little XML based Flash app allows you to crate a slide show with an unlimited amount of images. Every thing is controlled through a nice little XML document that allows you to control the size of your images, positioning, and even offers a nice set of transition effects!
Though I still consider it in it's beta version, it is fully functional. I haven't had many outsiders test it yet, but hey that's what your for! So download it, try it out, and write me back telling me what you think! I need feedback to make this better.

Update!
Ok, one thing I need to add is an image pre-processor that loads all images in the beginning to allow for smother web based use. But as you can see it still operates ok without this feature, anyways, just to let you know, I'll be working on this. But PLEASE send me more ideas to make this better.


Flash Web Site Template

8/22/08
Ok, for those who are new to AS3 or would just like to download a nice template to throw info into, download my example site and you will see plenty of good code commenting along with an easy to use and update interface!

Afterdeployment.org

8/1/08
Our design and development team at Vigilant Services has finally launched the alpha version of afterdeployment.org . A self help web site for our veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. This has been the main focus of my work at Vigilant since I have started with the company. The site is a huge database of information. As a member of the design team I was mainly responsible for doing the workshop animations, however from time to time I aided the development staff with making some custom AS3 components to use in the workshops.

Gootropolis On-line World

...old

Gootropolis is the new site that me and a team of developers have been creating. The site fallows the guidelines of the club Penguin world where you create you own little avatar and walk around a virtual world, talk to other people, and play games. All games on the site were either brainstormed and created by me, or converted into AS 3, by me. Jump in and play at gootropolis.com.

gootropolis.com is no longer active


Ohio Valley Recovery Inc.

...old

I have started a charity job for Ohio Valley Recovery Inc. today. OVRI helps people in the Ohio Valley with recovery and staying off of drugs, by providing support and a place for groups to meet up. You can check out the beginnings of the site HERE.

Update!

I have finally completed my charity project for Ohio Valley Recovery Inc. This project means a lot to me as there is a large amount of addicts in my home town who need places like this to help them through it.

Update!

Well, since I built this site before I knew how to make any sort of CMS, and the OVRI doesn't have a web developer, it seems that have converted to using a wiki engine... Oh well, as always I have a copy of the site hosted HERE!

Update!

OVRI contacted me and asked I no longer host the old site I had developed as it was causing some confusion with people who were looking for their site. So,
No OVRI content is hosted here anymore


Symphony City

...old

A project that I have invested many hours into, and many more it seems to come. My roll in the development team is the programmer. While I don't get to do any of the fun design work, my skills as a developer have been getting tested like never before and I am learning a great deal at the same time. The entire game is coded in AS2, with a little tiny splash page using HTML and JavaScript. This on-line on-line educational game is successful at helping children identify with symphonies and classical music. So go ahead and Play Symphony City!.

I was the sole programmer for the site, and made the pass-code system for the login, that enables students to continue sessions, based off of the last level they have completed. This has been my first major web project I have ever tried to tackle

Update!
Phase one of Symphony City is completed! Try it out!

Update!
The game is no longer hosted but you can still play it HERE.


Challenger Learning Center Site

...old

This was to be the main web site for Wheeling Jesuit's Challenger Learning Center. I was the sole programmer for the site, and had participated in creating the main layout and site infrastructure. I worked along with Cassandra Ligthfritz who focused soly on the design aspect. Together our creative minds made what I believe to be a very pretty site.

Update!
...The site is no longer on line, but I'm still hosting it from my site for all you beautiful people to take a look at. CLC site


CLC, E-Missions Site

...old

A Flash based web page, done for Wheeling Jesuit's Challenger Learning Center E-Mission on-line games. I was the sole programmer for the site, and had participated in creating the main layout and site infrastructure. The overall design was done by Cassandra Ligthfritz, but I got a little of my style in there with background page transition effects and various scripted tweens.

Update!
...The site is no longer on line, but I have a copy on my server so every one can still view it, YAH!! E-Missions Site.