I’ve been writing about Facebook more than I used to and I’ve been creating custom Facebook tabs for clients.

After tediously emailing potential clients the links to Facebook pages I’ve worked on, I finally took some screenshots and made a portfolio of them using NextGen Gallery. I’m always working on other sites and rarely stop to update my own.

If you are interested in having a custom tab created for you, please check my services page and contact me.

WestCoast Children's Clinic

Image Media

Appeler

Association Volunteers

Buzztag

Sabrina Jeffries

Southern Expressions Photography

Rick Morgan Consulting

(Anti) Social Development

Greenhouse

St David's Women's Center

Law Office of Eric Habib

Fondespwa

Inbound Zombie

J. Damico Marketing

Just Ask Leadership

Andertoons on Facebook

Thoroughbred Futures

photo credit: tricky ™

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Facebook Portfolio

This week I have links about being nice, job fairs, WordPress, plugins and consumption.

• How to be Genuine and Nice in a Web 2.0 World and Why It’s Important – An article about how your online reputation can be damaged by things you say and do and why it’s important to be cautious, exercise restraint and to be kind.
• Seven Observations from my Day at the Job Fair – Recently Dawn volunteered to review resumes at a job fair. She has some interesting observations about the job seekers. It’s also surprising that people don’t even do obvious things like bring a copy of their resume to job fairs.
• Free HTML 5 WordPress Theme – Jeff Starr has released a free minimal theme build with HTML 5. If you are interested in HTML and building WordPress themes it is worth checking out this theme.
• 15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Portfolio Sites – Recommended plugins for a WordPress portfolio site.
• Does Recycling Give Us an Excuse to Over-Consume – Are people more likely to buy products they don’t really need if they are green and recyclable? I think we frequently forget that recycle is the third part of reduce, reuse and recycle.
• Cute Little Squirrel
  
• Fireworks and a Microwave
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social-Lists 7/5/09

Last winter I wrote about photoblogging plugins for WordPress. Recently I’ve been using NextGen Gallery with clients and have become a lot more familiar with the plugin.

My friend Manshu also brought it to my attention that the screenshots on my portfolio were outdated. For example, we had installed Thesis on his site but my screenshot still showed his old theme. I decided to redesign the layout of the portfolio using NextGen Gallery. This gave the portfolio a new look and gave me more experience with the plugin.

Steps to a New Portfolio

1. Install Next Gen Gallery and activate it.
2. Please note that NextGen Gallery only works with WordPress 2.7 +
3. Visited the sites that I worked on and took screenshots. (I use the print screen button on my keyboard and do basic edits with Irfanview – nothing fancy here.
4. Gallery will be added as it’s own menu item in the WordPress navigation menu.
5. Click on Gallery > Add Gallery / Images. Before you can add images, you need to to create a gallery and give it a name.
6. You are then ready to upload your images. Add Gallery / Images gives you 4 tabs; Add New Gallery, Upload a Zip File, Import Image Folder, and Upload Images. I usually use Upload Images – what’s cool is that you can select multiple ones from you computer at one time. You will be select the gallery that the images will be uploaded to.
7. The plugin does it’s thing, uploads the images and creates thumbnails of them. If you are uploading a bunch at once the processing can take some time but it isn’t too long.
8. If you haven’t already created a new page for your photos, gallery, portfolio make one now. You can put some text on if you want or you can leave it blank. We will be adding a simple piece of code to the page.
9. Each gallery will have an id number. You will want this for the code that you will using for your gallery page.
10. If you are using the visual editor, you can click on the button “Add New NextGen Gallery”.

    
    And then select the Gallery and click on Insert. The code will be added to your page. Save, Publish and you’ve got your new image gallery.

    

11. If you are using the html editor, you can insert the following code on the page and you’re done.
    

    nggallery id=x
    surround this in brackets []
    x=the id number for the gallery
    

12. I recommend changing the pop-up lightbox setting to Thickbox under Options >Effects. Maybe it’s just my preference but I think this one looks the best.

This is just a teeny amount of what you can do with NextGen Gallery. You can create slideshows, adjust the image and thumbnail sizes, create and display multiple galleries, create albums, use single images from your galleries in blog posts, and much more.

My new portfolio page still links through to the old one through the link of the site name under each image. I’m not going to keep it this way but still wanted information about what I did on each site and the testimonial. I just haven’t decided yet how I want to manage this page – I might want a separate one for each site …

Do you think this plugin would be useful for your site? Do you think it’s a good way to manage a portfolio? If not, how would you do it differently?

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

NextGen Gallery Plugin for a WordPress Portfolio

Two weeks I encouraged you to spring clean WordPress by making backups, upgrading, removing unused plugins and more. I have finally decided to take my own advice and have done some (Anti) Social Spring Cleaning.

I hate to admit it but I often give advice before I actually follow it myself. But there, I’ve admitted it. Between writing articles and working on other’s sites, maintenance on my own site often falls to the bottom of my todo list.

So, here’s a list of the the spring cleaning I did here at (Anti) Social Development.

1. Upgrade to 2.7.1 – I was still on 2.7. I wanted to upgrade but the auto-upgrade doesn’t work with my host and I didn’t have a block of time to do a manual upgrade until recently. It’s really nice to not be looking at the upgrade notice at the top of my WordPress screen.
2. Removed Unused Plugins – I had a couple of plugins installed that I wasn’t using. I kept them around because I thought that I might need them again but finally decided to delete them.
3. Upgraded All Plugins – I had 5 or 6 plugins that needed to be upgraded. One of them was cforms – I always put that one off because it just seems like too much work. I had two plugins that didn’t want to be upgraded through WordPress so I upgraded them manually. Well, cforms was also upgraded manually – it’s the best contact form but it’s fussy.
4. Updated my contact page – I added a little bit of text above the contact form and social networking icons and links. I think it’s more user-friendly now and prettier.
5. Updated sidebar on blog – I have different sidebars on my blog and on my services/about/portfolio pages. I updated the blog sidebar to include social networking links and icons in the Get (Anti) Social area. I also added a Facebook badge, which I’m not sure I’m going to keep. I still want to do more to this sidebar but, again, can’t decide on what exactly that is.
6. Updated other sidebar – I updated the sidebar on the services/about/portfolio pages. I added 2 new reviews of my work and changed the colors of the review block. I’m still not happy with it but can’t seem to make a decision.
7. Bookmarking Links – I removed the Sociable plugin and added the Tweet This plugin to the bottom of my posts. I decided to use the buttons for Twitter, StumbleUpon and Delicious because those are the networks I am most active on. Feel free to use them ;-) I’m thinking about adding Facebook Connect but am still mad at the new facebook.
8. Portfolio – I added two sites and testimonials to my Portfolio page. (I also removed one because the link to the site was bad). I’ve been doing work for Manshu at OneMint since last fall. He wrote an awesome review for me so I added him to the site. I also completed one of my biggest projects to date at Socialize Mobilize. Lisa also wrote a really great review so I just had to add it.
9. LinkedIn – I did a little bit of work in my LinkedIn profile, added new contacts, and got three new recommendations! Feel free to connect with me.

This reduced my site todo list considerably. There is still a lot I would like to do but I am pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far.

I also found solutions to some annoying WordPress problems that I’ve been having. But those are just SO special you’ll have to wait for the individual articles.

So, what about you? What WordPress spring cleaning did you do on your sites?

photo credit: sidewalk_story

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social WordPress Spring Cleaning

There are a number of online tools to assist in building an online resume or portfolio. Here I will be discussing two of them and showing the examples that I made.

They are Krop Creative Database, and VisualCV. I considered adding LinkedIn but I think most people have heard of it and may devote a separate entry to it.

I’m sure you have at least a familiarity with LinkedIn but have you heard of the other two? Before I started doing research for this article I had only heard of LinkedIn and even though I have a LinkedIn account I have not used it to it’s full potential.

Krop Creative Database

Krop has a free and a paid version of it’s online portfolio. With the paid version you also get different styles and headers, domain mapping, unlimited image storage and RSS. Both accounts give you a pdf export from the online resume and your resume is included in their job database. Krop, however, seems designed for Web Developers and Graphic Designers. I suppose it is intended for the online artistic types. I did not realize this until I was setting up my profile and needed to fill in the professional information.

Create Account Screen

Enter Professional Information

To test this tool I only entered minimal information but you can view what I created.

• Portfolio
• Link to Resume

Krop also has a screencast that can be viewed below.

Screencast – Portfolio Hosting at The Krop Creative Database from QBN on Vimeo.

VisualCV

VisualCV is an online resume tool for job seekers and networkers that turns a flat paper resume into a visual and interactive one. Photos, charts, etc can easily be added. It is completely free. The sign-up is one quick screen and after that you login and start building your resume.

I was then presented with the following screen. I was not completely sure how to get started. I was half tempted to use the option to email VisualCV my resume so they could start the process for me (I didn’t see a charge for that anywhere) but it takes up to three days and I didn’t feel like waiting a couple of days to finish this article.

Ok, so you click on #3, which says Start. I guess that was kind of obvious and I am just being a little dense right now. You are then presented with the Edit Screen. You can add a photo, select from a number of styles, add work history and education information.

You can upload an image of yourself, other images, video clips and slideshare presentations. I was surprised by all of the options.

On the right is the portfolio section although you can move the columns around. This was very cool. You can add an image or a video and link it to a site. I added one image for my elephant site but once I flesh this out, I will add images from sites that I have worked on. So far, this is much more impressive then Krop’s portfolio system.

Editing the rest of the fields is straightforward and I think the best way to get started is to copy information from your current resume.

Here is the edit screen with some of the fields filled in.

And then when you preview and leave the editing screen it looks like this.

Like Krop, you can also view and save as a pdf.

If you would like to view what it looks like online, it is at Kim Woodbridge’s VisualCV

Conclusion

As I mentioned everyone knows about LinkedIn and LinkedIn differs from these tools as it as social resume. You can add contacts, join groups and network. But if you just want to create an online resume and portfolio VisualCV and Krop are better suited for that task. After trying the two I would have to say that I like VisualCV much better. I was confused about how to get started but once I figured that out it had a lot more features and was easier to use. I also prefer how it looks when it is finished. Additionally, Krop is better suited for Artists and Graphic Designers.

Does anyone know of other online resume and portfolio sites? If so, let me know and I will try them out too.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

2 Online Resume and Portfolio Builders