This week Tak and I attended the “Get A Job” event hosted by FITC and are happy to say we met some fantastic people and more importantly made some awesome friends.  Before arriving we really didn’t know what to expect. This was after all our first time at FITC but after just a short few minutes we were shaking hands and exchanging contact information with the best and newest the industry has to offer.

With that said, I’d just like to thank FITC for hosting such a great and valuable event. We hope to be there again next year.

Wow, it has almost been an entire year since I’ve posted anything on our blog.  I really don’t have an excuse for not putting up any content but now that a year has almost past there will be a lot of content share.  I don’t however, want to start posting everything at once so instead I’ll just share with you the most obvious news which is version 1.1 of our website.

Tak and I are really excited to share with everyone version 1.1 of alphaorganicmedia.com because it now hosts more of our portfolio including, banners, microsites, and interactive media.  Even better we’ve reworked the back end so that it will be easier for us to upload the site with more content more frequently.

Feel free to take a look at the new site and I ‘ll be back later with more posts.

Adrian.

Summer has been kind to us once again this year.  Business is booming and we are excited to share with you our latest work and our plans for the future.

In the web and interactive department last month Alpha Organic completed the flash work for SMART Technologies new micro site Love of Learning. This was a long intense project that we are proud to be a part of.  Recently we have also completed flash work on a new Sears micro site that will be launched with an up coming campaign.  Unfortunately, I can’t say much more.

In the music department we are happy to see our track now airing regularly on MenTV for Positive Livings new tech show, Gadget Girlz. You can watch it with the video here or visit the show case section on our home page.

In other news, Tak left early this week to Berlin, Germany for six weeks meaning things will be a little slower for the next month and a half while half the company gets some well deserved R&R with family.

In the mean time I will be doing some photo shoots, completing some additional web/interactive contracts still in the works, and with my free time take some courses at University as I am currently debating whether or not I should continue my pursuit for a PhD.  If you are interested in this topic you can follow me on my personal and losely written blog Adgezaza’s Posterous…who cares and twitter @Adgezaza.

Adrian.

Wednesday we attended Hogtown Homos, one of the events at this years LGBT film festival Inside Out to watch After directed by Mark Pariselli, a film that we had the privilege to compose the score for.  As you can see from the pictures the event was a sold out hit and after the show we headed down to “Buddy’s”, a local LGBT bar.

I have to say I walked out of that bar with a higher self-esteem then when I walked in but I also walked out with a broken heart for the the guitar player of the all girl band [that I wish I could remember the name of] that played the same night at the bar. She really knew how to play the guitar and had such awesome energy and I found myself “in a lovers trance”.  However, she was likely gay (or maybe I am assuming to much?). “Who cares”.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures. All I had was my point-and-shoot and my phone to take photography.

I was getting tired of the old layout for this blog so I decided to spend the afternoon looking for new themes.   I am a big fan of the minimalist themes and from when I first started using WordPress I couldn’t find  many good ones to start with.  That was two years ago.

Today all I had to do was type in “minimalist wordpress theme” into Google and right away I found,  20 beautiful minimilast themes! I think I downloaded half of them before I decided that the structure theme will be the starting point for AO’s next blog skin. It only took a couple hours in photoshop and dreamweaver to create new logos and modify the php to get the theme looking like what you see now.

I’ve been planning on creating a personal blog for myself (Adrian Maurer) and now, with all these themes at my fingertips, I am even more inspired to do so.  But first I have to get cracking on V.  Maybe I will use the WordPress framework for V? This is definitely something to consider. I really like the spectrum theme from WooThemes.  What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Great little comic that came up today in my reader.  I thought the open-source community might enjoy this.

http://xkcd.com/743/

Alright, in my previous post I taked about CodeIgniter which is a powerful open source PHP framework and how much it has helped me up to now in making a website for V.  I think now I’ve done as much as I can now with this framework, at least for my needs at the moment.  Later I plan to optimize my PHP and take better advantage of CodeIgniter however, my skill level is not at that level yet and I don’t want to over kill this site right now.

The next step than was to figure out my navigation methods and what language will best help me to do it.  Fernando, who I also mentioned in my previous post suggested that I use Mootools library.  I was all for it until Vladimir Drizhepolov aka Vovko aka “Voldemort” reminded my of the jquery library.  It didn’t take much thought to realize that jquery is more popular and will likely have more references on the internets to aid me in my programming – it also helped that it is open source and so I can blog about it on PlanetCDOT!

Now, rather than learning SQL and something called Rational Rose (bleh!)  I began writing my javascript to load my pages into my content div’s and animating transitions with Vlad’s assistance.

Here is how it turned out:

V – May 21, 2010 (screen cast)

Here is the code that helped me do it:

myscript (javascript that uses the jquery library)

Adrian.

This week I began building a site for V using PHP and MySQL technology. I’ll admit when it comes to PHP I am a complete noob but I was determined to write this site from scratch and by the end of it hopefully be a pro! But here is how it really played out…

I would say I got as far as parsing the header, body and footer dynamically into an index.php file before my brain seized up. I was stuck and so I decided to send out a cry for help on the internets. Lucky for me Fernando Ferraz, who fortunately just added me to FB after disappearing from the face of the earth for years and then comes back a competent programer,  answered the call.  His suggestion was, “Why the f*** are you starting from scratch you noob, use CodeIgniter.” He than began to explain to me that CodeIgniter (CI) is an open source PHP application framework that uses MVC (model view controller) architecture that I can install and use to build my site.

Ok cool but whats that?

In a nutshell it pretty much gives you all the scripts you need to start a secure, flexible, and easy to manage dynamic site and all you have to do is change a bit of text in a few config files. However, as easy as that sounds only after playing with CI and pulling my teeth out for 7 hours is really when I began to grasp the application and start to love it.

So why is CI so great, well its because of the MVC architecture I mentioned earlier.  MVC uses ‘controllers’ which are simply .php files that you can refer to in your code that will parse all your pages for you, as opposed to using the include function to parse different files, noob.  In other words imagine writing different modules of code that will contain different classes and functions that will be combined for you as you need them.  This is likely poor terminology but I’m calling it object oriented scripting!

I recommend to everyone if you ever decide to learn PHP definitely check out CI. And thank you to Hutch[S] and bwoodall at irc.freenode.net/codeigniter for answering all my silly questions!

Now to figure out how to create XML from the tables!…sigh.

Adrian.

Nicholas and I today shot the first interview for project V with local Canadian illustrator, Sabrina Scott of sabrinascott.ca.

In as little words possible not to spoil the interview I would describe the process as, “fun times” and with that said  I would also like to thank Sabrina Scott for being a great host and interviewee.  I’m excited for the next interview where we will be featuring a group of graffiti artist.

Check out the image below for a glimpse of the interview.

Adrian.

“If Michael Angelo were alive today he would be making games.” – Karren Ettouny, MM