Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

There are some interesting new things going on the world of web site layouts with CSS and JavaScript all the time. Tricks and tools to add to a client side developer’s arsenal for making flexible, content accommodating navigation, layouts and presentations. Though I wouldn’t give away any of our progress, I can’t help but wonder if sometimes the amount of work we ask a visitor’s browser to do is overkill. One way to shift this workload off the browser — without placing undo burden onto the site management staff or its budget by requiring a high level of technical expertise with each site update — is to move the it to an offline or backend CMS tool creating static code for publication. This is particularly useful when doing multiple site deployments with a similar theme or building different localized site versions where the need for flexibility in type doesn’t change from user to user, but from content update to content update or deployment to deployment.

Through the use of fairly simple to create build tools we can create ‘static’ CSS for deployment and consumption and trim the amount and complexity of layout code sent with each page.

A while back I posted instructions on geotagging photos with any GPS capable cell phone or device. Prompted by a question from one of my students (oh hey, I should talk about my new gig sometime!) and the fact the post is one of the more popular around here I thought the post deserved revisiting.

Since 2008 I’ve updated my camera body, gotten an iPhone, and streamlined both the number of devices I carry and the workflow for getting geographic data into my photos. Still, the premise of the old post hasn’t changed — you can encode any photo you take from any digital camera you have by syncing the photos timestamp with your saved GPS information.

Here’s how I’m currently tagging photos from my Nikon D90 with information saved on my iPhone using the RunKeeper Pro app.

Commercial photographer and serial iPhone camera user Chase Jarvis has recently popularized the idea that “the best camera is the one that is with you” in a big way. Armed with a camera small enough that you’re willing to carry it everywhere you become free to capture moments, record mental notes, and other save images that would have otherwise passed you by. Though his weapon of choice is a cell phone camera my weapon has recently been an artifact of a decade ago picked up off of eBay — the Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. Though it only takes postage sized [120×120 pixels] black and white images it does so in a way that satisfies my bestcam needs.