Welcome to Davidcamarda.com
December 7, 2009
Finishing up on a move that involved a fairly large remodel to my old place. 2 stories and a basement have been upgraded and beautified. I should be at my desk 24/7 again in a couple of days. Working from my laptop at a Starbucks while on the road has not been fun at all, but I have managed. During this time I have completed work for Linktech International, doing the html/css for wwmediaonline.com. This project was completed over a weekend to achieve a stringent Monday morning deadline, which was met.
Working with Erick Anderson of Emoeba Design was a pleasure. We finished up two projects in November. Capsuleproject.com is up and running and awaiting client approval for design and layout, final tweaks before implementing HTML and CSS.
Erick also got the Fiscal Fitness Clubs design completed, which I did the html/css for. This was a fairly easy site to do, and the provided text has already helped it climb the search ranks in a short amount of time.
November 27, 2009
This has been a crazy month. Doing extensive remodeling on my old house while trying to keep project deadlines. I am not going to post a lot of info about this month as I am happy to see it gone and over with. Thanksgiving was a nice break as I only put in 4 hours of work that day. Thanks to everyone who hung in there with me during this busy month.
October 1, 2009
Finishing up work for Brian Howe of Clarity IT Web, who is the IT guy for Linktech International in Beaverton. The project involved setting up blank running Wordpress installations that could be made live and customized to a clients specifications with minimum effort. This project is running on an IIS server, so I am learning how to employ Wordpress installations
September 13, 2009
Mondays are always exciting. With a new week comes a fresh batch of challenges. I almost always spend a variable percentage of my weekend reading related industry news, doing research and avoiding my Facebook and MySpace pages. For me, being that my interests and attempt to master each is so varied, I am often overwhelmed, and I usually let my intuition pave the way. This last week The Beatles released remasterd CD’s and a box set of their main releases. I made a post with a small collection of observations from around the internet on this monumental occasion.
There has always been a lot of sensationalism surrounding the Beatles, and it is this sensationalism that has given them the fuel to be historically great. A symbiotic relationship with the public in which Paul McCartney was a direct conduit, allowing John and George to explore in areas that Paul would dared never to venture. Strangely enough, it was Paul’s bizarre sound recording experiments that John and George used on such (at the time) never before heard tunes such as Tomorrow Never Knows and Love You To
I have noticed a basic flaw in the perception in a lot of the criticisms in many reviews. This release is REMASTERED CD’s. This isn’t a new take on the mixes, this isn’t a down loadable digital format officially released to the public. These CD’s are meant to be listenable alongside today’s CD’s standards. That is all they are intended to do. Nothing else. When you read review globally online, every single author has to get caught up in the sensationalism, bringing in irrelevant information other than giving us a critical ear of the product. Price? Cost of any other CD. Does it rock on a $3000 Bose system in a Denali? Hell yes my brother! I love cruising through a parking lot with the top rolled back and the windows down cranking Sgt Peppers Lonely Heart Clubs outro at full volume, the way that rock and roll was meant to be played. Full volume. These newly mastered CD’s utterly rock on a good stereo system like modern track. Still dated tech wise, still true to the original ‘mixes’, but the bottom end is friggin thumpin. There is nothing like the Beatles cranked loud to get you going. Start your day with a cup of your favorite brew and ‘Drive My Car’. Lastly, I am going after the review of Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune’s review of this remastered set of CD’s. He is on the forefront of critics who are entirely missing the whole point. I will also provide a solid list of reasons why this man is not a Beatles fan, by defining what a Beatle fan is and should be.
Hey Mo.
September 8, 2009
I have been working closely with Lou and Pam Granata of 21st avenue publishing on the Wordpress conversion of Walkaboutmag.com. When we did the Northwest Renovation conversion, the search engines were indexing our work despite my nofollow in the robots.txt and other measures to keep 
the development under lock and key. I think I have nailed the problem down to a specific plugin, which reports to the search engines. Excuse me, but, duh. For Walkabout, I won’t activate the handy and powerful plugin until the site is ready to launch. I was hoping to eliminate the 301 redirects out of the .htaccess, but doing a quick link check in Google showed that there are still a lot of sites linking to the old pages of nwrenovation.com.
I have been toying with implementing feed material directly into my posts and tracking rank behavior and other data. I may have gone a bit overboard in my excitement. I now have Yahoo movies feeding directly into a post. Not just movies, but new this week, coming next week, most popular trailers, DVD releases and so on. I also have a nwrenovation.com feed on a post, and I am observing the behavior of Google feed ads. This update was written under the heavy influence of Phish, live at Madison Square Garden 1995, and yeah, headphones. If you have listened to it, then you know.
August 31, 2009
Before I get this update rolling, here are a few quick photos, ketchup - pepper – hammerhead – hummus - the cheque, taken recently at McMennamins on Broadway with a special friend.
Getting ready to launch East Portland News website this coming Wednesday. The old site was running on the old ktml platform, which to this day, is still a pretty decent system. It is however, undeniable that Wordpress comes with so many features, and new ones are added daily. The owner of eastpdxnews.com, David Ashton was quite fond of his ktml news site. He was able to upload photo and write articles in his sleep. After working for 3 years in that system, it was effortless. Converting to Wordress has been fairly mild as we have done it over time, which allowed us to familiarize David with the new system.
I enjoyed working this last week with Haley Howe of Web Heads on a real estate Wordpress project. The project has a lot of features embedded, and I had to get familiar with thee highly modified Wordpress themes and the features, and implement different changes, feeds and forms. I hope to work with Haley again in the near future.
A special treat, an upcoming project, I will be working with Erick Anderson of Emoeba Designs. I get to work with him once a year, as his design work ventures into the area of the web as often. His website is one of the most unique sites out there, including his blog, which is packed with must read goodness and observations you aren’t like to find anywhere else. All from the mind of a higly talented designer. Look forward to working with you Erick.
It would seem that despite my initial reservations, Twitter is becoming a standard business tool. Yes, yes, I tweet. Not as much as I should, but I am still coming up with a Twitter strategy. You can follow my tweets at twitter.com/davidcamarda.
Lastly, I have updated a few photos, and changed the look of my theme. It is quite simple. Drop in a header image, change a few line in the main style sheet, presto, fresh look. I took the images from a recent trip to McMennamins, you can check out the images here.
August 20, 2009
Yeehaa, breaking ground on the Walkaboutmag.com conversion. This site will have a store as well as the wealth of articles and products reviews that have made this magazine and website a Northwest favorite for the last 5 years.. I have also added a Windows 7 pricing guide. Unfortunately if you missed out on the pre-order savings, you can still order and you will not be charged to your card until the actual download is successful to your computer.
August 14, 2009
Launched the new Northwest Renovation Magazine on August 12. According to Google Analytics I am doing something right. I honestly haven’t seen numbers like these before, but here it is. The site has 400 plus unique pages with 600 to 3000 words per article. We are going to add a store, surveys and many other goodies in the near future. This is and will continue to be a popular site. The challenge remains, how far can we push it?
Today I am going to take a bit of time for myself and put up some new material in the Music section, specificly, Readymade Memories and Pink Floyd.
August 4, 2009
This is my personal blog with articles and posts related to Internet, IT, search, CMS, design, Windows, SEO and other personal interests. I have been a musician most of my life, so the blog will be lightly peppered with tidbits related to music, instruments, composer and more. I am also an amature photographer and I will give tips on how to shoot cool shots for design. I am also following the battle of two Northwest giants, Microsoft and Intel with the European Union. These companies have been fined billions, I dig in and find out why. I am an avid fan of both of these companies, and although I may not like all of their products, I think they have been good for the end user and the world market in general. Being king of the hill isn’t any easier than wanting to be king.
On a cowardly note, I am having an intensifying fling with Safari. Even tho this a CrAppletosh product, I have to admit that the interface is addicting and a joy to use. Opera had a leg up in the ‘multiple page view’ department, but clearly, Safari has refined it into an art. If you want to see multiple blogs, and their respective admin pages, this browser is the tool to use.
July 31, 2009
I love photography, well, my kind of photography. I am not properly educated in photography, so my techniques and eye by nature are unorthodox. I started the first post of my work. I will try and keep it simple and easy to view. Eventually I will have to add a gallery. I have a nice Wordpress plug in that I have used on other sites, and it works great, has lots of options and features, even for the visitor.
July 26, 2009
Indevgroup.com is currently finishing up the nwrenovation.com Wordpress conversion. You can preview here nwrenovation.net. East PDX News is almost complete. Working with Windows 7 on all of my computers now. I have run into a few small issues with this OS, but over all, it is much better than Vista. As a matter of fact, I took a brand new Dell laptop I just bought in June and formatted the hard drive and installed Windows 7 and i didn’t have to install a single drive. Uh, that is seriously sweet. It is also running on an old Dell 5000 series which only has 512mb of ram (yes, I am gonna stick another gig in it) but the point is, it runs fine. Aero won’t run with the 32mb video, but still quite impressive.
I started adding to the music section with posts on Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd. My musical tastes are wide and varied, and I chose to start here because the first 5 Floyd albums are currently on my playlist. It was either Floyd or Chopin. I am going to do the studio albums up through Dark Side before I switch to another topic. I might broaden the scope and cover the best psychedelic bands of the late 60’s, and then move on to classical.
Gradually tearing down this Carrington theme to make it my own. I generally pick a theme that has the geometry I want, but it really doesn’t matter. I throw up a freebie, add a new header background, just to get going, and make changes over time. One of the most important things in a theme is a clean style sheet. A style sheets that calls on other style sheets are completely ridiculous. I start changing the fonts, hack the sidebar, and soon the theme is nothing of it’s original. Completely unique php pages for archives, single, page, index, search results are not necessary so long as the code is there to make it quicker to arrange things as needed. I will often make a copy of the page or index file, save it as archive and make a few adjustments, maybe place google banners in different spots.
I finally got around to getting my youtube.com/davidcamarda up and running. It has a silly video, but there will be more to come. I have some funny ideas, and anyone who knows me knows that I am quite lite hearted and enjoy laughing and humor than anything. Well, almost anything. That is it for now. Quicker updates in the fuure.
July 1, 2009
The first computer I owned was a 286 with a MS-DOS 5.0 operating system. For word processing I used the famous Word Perfect 5.1. A was doing spreadsheets with auto summing just like you do in Excel now. I had a good size collection of 5.25 floppy disks with games, utilities and other goodies. I have fond memories of that computer. It is a bit strange seeing it in the computer museums now.
The next computer that I owned was surprise, a 386. This was a huge upgrade. This rockin little desktop box had Windows 3.1 and a mouse. I used to look at my reflection in the window and watch myself using a mouse. I felt I was on the cusp of technology. From this computer, I upgraded to a 486. Now this is where things really started to get interesting, because I could run AOL on this machine. My first modem was a 2400 baud antique that wouldn’t stay connected. I upgraded to 14.4 and I was in chatroom heaven. Being a musician, I would spend hours talking with other musicians about guitars, basses, amps and more. I didn’t venture outside the AOL environment, so I didn’t know I was missing out on the whole Internet thing, news groups, message boards, Amazon and EBay. I can still feel the excitement of the ‘You’ve got mail’ voice, and of course this was long before there was spam. It wasn’t until 1996 that I installed Netscape Navigator 3 and IE 3 and connected to the internet with a weird little program Winsock some version or another.
This was like learning that the earth isn’t flat. The earth is actually quite round, and the internet is vast. Even in 1996. The internet did work on Windows 3.1 I was of course by this time a PC guy, even though the term wasn’t what it is today, with a fierce line drawn in the sandbox, with adults hurling ‘am to0, am not, am too, am not’ insults back and forth at each other over your preferred operation system. I enjoyed PC’s and for a brief period, Linux, because you could build your own. Holy cow this was fun. Build a computer and get on the Internet. Life was simple and exciting back in the day. In 1998 were playing Quake2 in clans. It was tuff playing with high pings of 300 plus coming out of our 56k modems! The competition was still insanely fierce. I still load up Quake 2 once in a while, just to reminisce. The only games I get to play anymore is a bit of Wow. I am seriously anxious for Diablo 3 to launch. The Diablo versions are usualy 5 years apart. It will be worth it, you can watch the latest vids here.
