Our 11th Hour is playing three shows in the next few weeks around Syracuse. The dates and times are as follows:
Friday, December 26th @ The Mill in Syracuse, at 8pm
Friday, January 2nd @ Station 58 in North Syracuse at 8pm
Friday, January 9th @ The Lost Horizon in Syracuse at 8pm
With Cursed From Birth and Paricia
$5 Ages 21+, $10 Under 21
http://www.myspace.com/our11thhour
http://www.our11thhour.com
My “Untitled” self-portrait has been featured in the DeviantArt compilation Best of Random Deviant Hello: Volume 8.
Groggie.com has received enough traffic to be ranked by large web traffic websites such as Alexa! It may not be in the top 10,000, but is under the 1,000,000 mark (That’s good for something, right?)!
Check it out on a few of these stat-tracking websites:
Alexa, Technorati, Compete, Yahoo! Site Explorer
Additionally, I’ve decided to add a few options to advertising on Groggie.com. Nothing intrusive- so the main focus will always still be the content. To see what kind of advertising options are available, check out the Advertising page (the link is also available in the top nav bar on the right side).
The Google Pagerank is currently messed up because of some downtime problems I was going through at the end of November. Here’s the post about that.
I was featured in another online article on DeviantArt for my design “Integrate the Type.”
http://news.deviantart.com/article/64102/
Our 11th Hour is a post-hardcore/metal band from Syracuse, NY. Their debut EP demonstrates the ambitious writing style and technically difficult playing skill. With award-winning members and innovative music, Our 11th Hour hopes to begin turning heads before their first full-length album, “Of Halos & Hand-Grenades” is released.
The album will soon be available on iTunes, Amazon, and many other online retailers. You can download “Falling For You” for free here, on our official website, and on our Myspace profile! Come see us at a show if you want to buy a CD, and soon enough we will have other merchandise available.
01 - Bleed Me Dry
02 - Falling For You (Free Download Here)
03 - Untitled 2
04 - 11th Hour (Part II)
05 - Epilogue
06 - Falling For You (Acoustic)
I had some issues with my domain late last week, but have finally solved them. I always seemed to have a day or two of downtime every year when it came time to renew my domain name, but now I’ve fixed it and should not have the annual problems that I have previously encountered.
(12/09/08 Update) It would appear that the few days of downtime has adversely effected my Google Pagerank. Unfortunately, I’m no longer listed, but hopefully it will be back shortly when Google indexes my site again.
I just picked up my brand new 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer today. It’s a 5-speed manual and is impressive to look at to say the least. I will update this post with some pictures when I get them uploaded.
So here’s an acoustic cover that has been in the works for quite a while. I recorded it around early/mid-2007 and finally found Jon IX to sing it. We were planning on doing a bunch of select songs from Drowning Pool’s first album, but it sort of fell through. Anyway, here’s “Sinner” featuring Jon IX on vocals.
1.) Sinner [Drowning Pool Cover] / 2:45 / 5mb
I know a lot of people like my directory of desktop wallpapers, so I just added almost 200 more images to it. It now has 325 wallpapers in it. Many of the images are t-shirt designs from Threadless.com that I’ve turned into desktop wallpapers. A bunch more are from other online t-shirt retailers, and the rest are just a collection of funny pictures, other wallpapers, and a few of my own designs made into wallpapers.
Feel free to send me links to awesome designs or wallpapers that I should add to my collection! Anyway, here is the directory:
http://www.groggie.com/wallpaper
On November 22nd, Our 11th Hour will be recording their debut demo EP at Subcat Studios. The tracklist will include “Bleed Me Dry,” “Falling For You,” “Untitled 2,” and “11th Hour (Part II).” The demo will be available for $5 at any show, but for the release party, a set number of copies will be given away for free. It will also be available on iTunes and Amazon which will include a free acoustic version of “Falling For You.” “Bleed Me Dry” will be available for free on the band’s Myspace profile and official website.
I created an updated identity system for Syracuse Label. It is still in the preliminary stages, but this is the general idea of it. I modified the existing logo (which looks somewhat similar to the black “peeling away” label in the center of the new version) to incorporate the new name. It uses the negative space between the shapes to complete the background of the old logo, which I think worked out very well.
I found an old file that I was messing around with earlier today and edited it up a bit to experiment with vocal effects. It’s a short version of “Hear You Me” by Jimmy Eat World- just the first verse and chorus. It’s composed entirely of vocal recordings with effects placed on them. I think it turned out pretty well.
1.) Hear You Me [Jimmy Eat World Cover] / 1:13 / 1.4mb
Throughout the years, I’ve accumulated a handful of tips for making a successful web portfolio (from designers to photographers among others). By no means are these end-all rules, just suggestions that I’ve seen given to people from all over.
Be overly simple. When time means everything, you don’t want your viewers to need “training” on how to view your website. Don’t overload your visitors’ senses- instead, decide what they should be focusing on. This is easliy done by reducing the elements of your page to their bare necessities.
Your grandmother should be able to navigate your portfolio. Whether you plan on showing it to elderly people or not, you need to make sure that your navigation is so mind-numbingly easy that anyone can use it. Not everyone with the power to hire you knows how to use your complex multiple-dropdown flash-based rotary 3D psycho-nav. If your portfolio has a set of instructions of how to navigate the site, then it’s too complicated. Sometimes simple scrollbars (perhaps with anchor links) is the best route to go.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today I implemented a targeted custom Google search at the footer of every page. It’s cool because it gears your search string to the creative arts such as design, photography, animation, and writing. Best of all, it returns search results right within Groggie.com! Give it a shot and let me know if you have any other ideas of cool updates to make.
I finished recording and editing a song that we’ll be including in our first full length album which is now called “Of Halos & Hand-Grenades” as a hidden song at the end. It really pushes the stylistic ambient theme we use to represent the “afterlife” in the album (or at least our character’s perception of it).
Download the demo of it here for free:
1.) Epilogue / 4.2mb / 4:31
Here’s a fun trick you can do somewhat easily with Photoshop. I love the subtlety of this photo manipulation because many people don’t realize it has been taken under the “knife.” In this tutorial, I will teach you how to make your camera disappear and trick your viewers with this optical illusion.
What you’ll need is a camera, a big mirror and a basic knowledge of Photoshop. The theory behind this image is that you’re combining three photos into one. One of each of your hands and a third of your head.
Holding the camera with your right hand directly in front of your face, place your left fingertips against a mirror. Take a few shots because the framing will be difficult with the camera so close to your face.
The henge made of grean beans and mashed potatoes in the dining halls of SUNY Oswego has found its way onto the Smithsonian HD channel. It is part of a intro segment for a Stonehenge Documentary they will be airing on Sunday, September 21st at 5:51pm, 7:50pm, and 9:51pm. If you subscribe to DirectTV, Dish Network or Verizon FIOS, be sure to look for it.
I’ve finally coded up a layout that I’m happy with for my professional portfolio at www.christopherblakley.com. “Finally” is an understatement- I’ve been trying to come up with a design that I didn’t shudder at after mocking up since the old design. It’s tough to create something that is user-friendly with a relatively simple design without really going overboard with innovations and cool features.
Please let me know if there are any glitches or anything. I’ve triple-checked it (several times), but things do fall through the cracks.
http://www.christopherblakley.com
“A Darkness” has been accepted into the Anton Art Center’s exhibition called “Buy This” in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. It will be featured from September 12th until October 3rd.
C’mon Myspace, you’re the biggest social network with the largest userbase. That doesn’t mean you’re excused from having a decently designed website. Your layout is just awful, your code is bloated and slow, and it seems like the only kind of advertisments you allow are intrusive ones. Here are ten things you need to accomplish to be socially accepted in the design community.
What is your excuse for this?
It looks like someone was mocking up an idea in MS Paint and just decided to forget about taking it the extra step. The rounded ends on the font was a big mistake because now you’re allowing for the comparison to Comic Sans. You can get rid of the “.com” in the logo- everyone knows it’s .com, and your userbase is large enough where if someone did a google search for “Myspace,” I have a feeling they’ll find you.
I don’t mean to overdo it and get a totally “Web 2.0″ logo either. Just make it something that doesn’t look like a design an 8th grader could come up with.
When Facebook allowed people to show their status, Myspace copied them. When Facebook added applications, Myspace added applications. Youtube getting popular? Introducing MyspaceTV. Facebook let people tag their friends in photos, surprise surprise Myspace does the same thing. Remember the older Myspace Classifieds when it first came out? Well, it looked like a carbon copy of Craigslist.
Once you start coming up with your own ideas, you can be taken more seriously. What about having custom profile boxes that can be added from a list to the profile, so that everyone doesn’t have to have the exact same profile with different styles. Music networking would greatly improve from something like this- Discography, Concert History, Other Bands (That we pick! Not to be used for advertising), Merchandise, etc. On that note, allow us to get rid of existing boxes like “Groggie is in your extended network.” Whoop-de-do, that doesn’t need to be that big of a box, and furthermore doesn’t need to be there at all.
Come to think of it, even the idea of starting Myspace as a social networking website was just a stolen idea based on Friendster. Read the rest of this entry »
