The blueprints made it difficult to plan which sections of wall and ceiling needed fire barrier so we made this short animation to help.

Short and simple, this little project helped the building stay true to code
and avoid unnecessary rework.

DIY Gadget Pad from Ignertia on Vimeo.

As a group, working together in Portage, we had a desire to be part of the downtown Kalamazoo community. When the former Smartshop building became available we knew it was time to seriously consider the move. After months of talks, negotiations, and due diligence we finally closed on the purchase of the building on December 15, 2010.

The redevelopment project consists of our vision to transform the former Smartshop building into a mixed use facility that will include commercial and office space, residential units, as well as provide auxiliary recreational use.

We’ve put together a website so everyone can follow our progress and learn more about the project. IgnertiaInTheZoo.com

Below is the The Smartshop prior to redevelopment.

Here’s an example. I love the Detroit Lions… yes, I’m a glutton for punishment So, I could set up a Google Alert for the Keyword “Detroit Lions.” However, now I will likely receive quite a few alerts whenever anyone blogs about them, or comments about them in a forum. If I would like to narrow down a little, I might instead do two alerts that are more specific to what I’m looking for. For instance, if I mostly want to buy tickets and find news about the Lions, I could enter “Detroit Lions tickets” and “Detroit Lions News.” This would reduce my number of emails, and give me better results.

You can apply this technique to many of your favorite hobblies and interests. Google Alerts make it easy to follow people, events, topics… even your own name! But how does it help your business?

Well, first of all, you can track your business name. Anytime someone uses your name, whether in a positive or negative manner, you’ll know. Similarly, you can track your competition as well. Everytime they launch a new product or make news headlines, you’ll be on top of it. You may wish to receive alerts for topics related to your industry in general. You could be the first to know about trade shows, new technologies, and new competitors in your area.

There could even be a special niche alert specific to your business. For example, we have a client that wanted to be able to learn when specific websites posted RFPs. Unfortunately, there were thousands of these particular websites and no communication given to our client as to when they would post this information. So we helped them create a series of Google Alerts all aimed at finding these postings. The challenge of course is identifying the keywords these websites are likely to use. And therein lies the challenge for all Google Alerts. A little research along with a little guess & check is certainly required.

There you have it. Whether work-related or not, Google Alerts is highly useful, and possibly even profitable for your business!

Because Ignertia always tests our clients’ sites across multiple browsers, IE6 included, this affects us and our clients directly.

Knowing general usage rates for browsers helps inform our decisions and priorities with regards to site functions, features, and interactivity. So, I decided to check in and see what general data was out there regarding IE6, and what I found was encouraging.

According to StatCounter, IE6 usage globally fell to below 5%. This is good inasmuch as it is a step towards letting go of IE6 for good. These numbers are almost a year old now, so with any luck IE6 usage is even lower.

Of course, it is not that simple; it never is! Who’s to say that 25% of Kalamazoo residents don’t serf the web using IE6? Perhaps your Kalamazoo funeral home website happens to have an older demographic that also happens to not update their computers? If this was the case, you’d be hurting yourself to assume that the 5% global statistic reflects your target audience’s browser usage.

The best way I know of to know if your Kalamazoo-based business (or your Kalamazoo-based website designer/developer) should have a website compatible with IE6 is to look at your own statistics….you do collect browser information, don’t you?

If IE6 compatibility is a concern for your business, you could use netrenderer to see how your site looks in IE6. I’ve used this on personal projects, though Ignertia uses other software for browser compatibility testing.

Either way, you should know that browser compatibility is an issue, and should make sure that you and/or the company you hire to do your website does cross-browser compatibility testing for those browsers that are appropriate.

Recently, Matt Cutts at Google launched a competition for Kinect-related open source development. The possibilities seem to be endless, but one of the winners was a “DIY motion capture system.”

XBox Kinect OSCeleton from SenseBloom on Vimeo.

It seems to be a bit crude, and it appears to me that it isn’t just a matter of dancing in front of the Kinect and plugging it into your iMac (the instructions themselves are quite the read!). However, it does have interesting implications for possibilities in animation, bot 2D and 3D. I could working on a project and, instead of controlling the animation keyframe by keyframe, you could choose to get up from your seat, and just DO the motions you want performed. The computer captures it, applies it, and bam….no more need for frame by frame monotony.

Of course, I’m not saying that we’ll be doing anything like this in our living rooms anytime soon:

But, maybe this could make it easy to do a video blog, where you don’t actually appear in the blog, but rather your animated avatar or something. This doesn’t really save time, but maybe you’ve got a lackluster-looking client and you want to replace them in the vlog with an attractive, animated substitute! Or maybe you just don’t want to appear on camera, but instead want to insert your super-confident, super-compelling, super-good-looking XBOX avatar instead!

Glad your back. Now I’m not going to take a whole lot of time explaining this…the concept is easy to grasp. Once you claim your listing and add all the images, videos and information that is useful to your potential customers, it’s inevitable that you will eventually receive a review. Until August of this year, it was impossible for you to respond to such reviews, even if you had claimed your business.

Google’s official blog post on the topic does a great job of explaining the concept, and has an image of what your response will look like. It also links to some good advice and instructions on how to approach your response, whether it’s a response to a positive or negative review.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/08/respond-to-reviews-for-your-business-on.html

As an aside, now may be a good time for you to encourage your customers to leave reviews on your Place Page.

Happy claiming!

At first you may think that it would be as simple as downloading the video from the website, starting a YouTube channel for the client, and uploading it there. In fact, it is just that simple. But since the video was in Flash format, what I didn’t realize is that downloading the file I would need could actually be a little tricky; still, I didn’t want to have to hassle the client with getting me the original video file. So, here’s some of what I did to download the Flash file from the website. I hope it can be of use to others.

1. Using Firefox, go to the URL of the webpage where the video is located.
2. Go to: Tools > Page Info
3. Click on the “Media” button at the top.
4. Here you’ll see a list of URLs for all the images and other content on the page. Hopefully, you’ll see a .swf file somewhere in the list. Click on it.
5. You’ll see that you can click “Save As…” and save the media component to your local computer. In my case though there is yet another problem: the .swf file is basically an empty link to an unlisted .FLV file! Uh oh.
6. Don’t worry, it’s not a dead-end just yet. Copy the URL of the .swf file, and paste it into a new browser tab.
7. You’ll notice, if you hit “Enter” on the keyboard, that it loads the .swf file full-screen within the browser window. This isn’t what we want…we want the .FLV! So, in my case (and this won’t be the case every time), I just edited the URL, removing the .swf extension and in its place typing .flv. Hit “Enter”.
8. Bingo, Firefox prompts where to save the file. Now I can either re-encode the file myself, or just upload it to the YouTube Channel and let it do the re-encoding.

If this doesn’t work there are some paid-software alternatives that are available that claim to be able to grab .FLVs from the web, and there’s likely some free ones too. Also, I’m sure some of you web guru’s could possibly just navigate the folder structure of the website itself, find the .FLV, and download it…but this is a video blog after all.

I hope these steps can help you download a .FLV or .SWF file from a website. Feel free to leave me a comment if it helped (or even if it didn’t).

I’m talking about Claiming your Google Places page.

Even if you don’t know them by name, you’ve likely visited one. When someone uses Google to search for a local business like “Chicago Lawyer,” a map will appear in the search results with a list of businesses next to it. You will notice a link for many of these businesses that says “Places page” or “more info.” These links take you to the Places page even if it has not been claimed. You will know that it has been claimed if it says “Owner-verified lisitng” at the top.

Claiming these pages allow you to add information and photos, as well as fix any incorrect information. In many cases, the business hours, descriptions, or contact information will be wrong because Google is pulling this information from other websites that may have old or inaccurate data.

Once claimed, you also have access to analytics that shows how much traffic the page is receiving. You may be surprised how many people are already contacting you from this page. Adding or correcting your URL can send much of this traffic to your website without costing you a penny.

So there you have it… a simple and quick marketing effort that can make a big difference. Claim your Google Places page now!

- HDR
- Node Based
- Multi-Platform (Windows, Linux, OSX)
- Free

Unofficial splash screen.

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