Another one of the Academy of Art sculpture graduates commissioned me to do her website. Jessica's work focuses on textures and emotions. Her pieces are generally very large, with one piece taking up the same dimensions as a large entertainment center. Amazing artist and a very sweet person. For her website, I went for a little more involved look than with Clayandsteel.com. I chose to make it relatively simple for the sake of the type of visitors the site would attract. People visit an art website to look at art; as such, I've made the art the main focus of the site. For any visitor wishing to know more about the artist, links are displayed in the navigation section so as not to take the focus away from the art.

The site is still a work in progress. I will update this entry as soon as it's done. The live site is here: jessicapyron.com

The wonderful add-on for Firefox, DownThemAll is great for times when you want to save an entire website worth of pictures, movies, or documents, but you don't want to save each one individually.

To accomplish this, we utilize the under appriciated "Links" panel and Opera's nifty "Save to Download Folder".

Notes:
1. Be sure you know where your download folder is! Generally it's under C:\users\[username]\Downloads for Vista and "My Documents" in XP.
2. The steps below were run on the 32-bit version of Opera 9.6 for Windows Vista but should work for every platform and Opera version since at least 8.0

Step one: Find what you want

This part should be easy. Go to your favorite porn site/web site/whatever site and find a list of filetypes you can "right click > Save As..." Here, I've found some strangely identical renderings of Ferraris. Sure, let's grab em.

Step two: Finding your files

Take a look at the tooltip that pops up on the set of files you wish to download. I've circled the paris-speak that we will later use to uniquely identify this particular set of files

Part three (Optional): Filtering the noise

Now that you know what it is you want to download, find a way to narrow it down using Opera's quick find feature in the Links panel. Note the tooltip you get when hovering over a link and look for something that is unique enough to narrow the results. In this case, the crazy paris talk should be unique enough to drill down the entire set of identically posed Ferraris: "ecran".

Part four: Selecting the series and getting the goods.

Here's where it gets a little tricky and I have to assume you know about Ctrl / Shift selecting and the likes. The list in the links panel are all hyperlinks just like a regular webpage so a single click usually opens the file. (unchecking the "Hotlist Single Click" box in Opera's preferences editor will make this a bit easier). Select the files you see and right-click to bring up the context menu. Select "Save to Download Folder" (Quick Download on earlier versions). Do not select "Save Linked Content as..." unless you want to hit OK for every damn file you selected.

Congratulations! You now know how to leech files like mad

Word of advice though, the links panel is focus sensitive... meaning if you switch to a new tab, the links panel will follow and your downloads will stop if they were not completed! Simply hit the "Lock" button before moving tabs and you're golden.

Unlocked:

Locked:

My wife Celeste's artist portfolio site. This is what got me a great deal of interest from the Academy of Art University sculpture department. Several students are asking that I create a site for them. Simplistic design, but i've grown out of CSS trickery for trivial things. Generated content is nice, but too involved for simple things. This site has a few bugs in the (as of writing) alpha version of IE8, but every other rendering engine gets the picture.

Link to live site: clayandsteel.com

Because he liked my approach and design so much on his son's project QTReporter so much (?), the owner of this ill-fated site requested a website for his pet project, an online bookstore for the topics of Nubian culture within the UK. The site was never populated with products and as of writing, is no longer a valid domain name.

The site was run off of a shopping cart package called ZenCart which was free and sure showed it. <table> tags roamed freely. Although I have much love for the idea of a free eCommerce package with such extensibility, ZenCart was, in essence, a horrendous mess. The difficulty in simply getting a USD to GBP locale conversion set up was compounded when the software wouldn't recognize a UK postal code with it's wacky numbers and letters and whitespace characters.

The ZenCart community was very small but helpful and in the end I was successful. Even had a root certificate running.... but never got a phone call from the client after that. Lost interest I guess.

I was a bit frustrated and took the site off of my hard drive, but managed to find a near completion .jpg from an AIM conversation we had: Nubianbooks.co.uk

A Quentin Tarantino Fanboy's site for all he deems worthy. This site was pro-bono, as such, he was niether too serious about it's usage, nor it's current upkeep.

Naturally, he's since taken the site down, but I've preserved at least some of it here.

Link to archive of the site: QTReporter.com