It's been a while since I've taken any time to update my portfolio site www.rickytruth.com. The lack of updates is something akin to the cobbler having no shoes. Being too busy with other work to work on your presentation. During this refresh I explored various Blog style layouts, One-page scrollers as well as traditional thumbnail views with a hero image. Although this site will always be a work in progress, I landed on a split screen overlay UI to present new news as well as immediately present work to the viewer. I'm satisfied with this solution.

I've also integrated a full site search using the Algolia API. Algolia is a great solution for a searchable portfolio and news. It worked so well I'm using it as my main portfolio database as well as a search navigation tool. I list some pre-selected search terms as nav links that when clicked autofill the search, drawing the user deeper into the search experience.

Lastly, I'm experimenting with a full page footer. Think of it as a reverse splash page, It's a fun UI element that can be used to display some engaging content without putting up the proverbial brick wall on the site that many users will never go beyond.

Recently just finished a refresh of the index of christian weber. The newest iteration of the site uses Topiary, a brand new templating system that I've been developing that works with our information management system Tree & Field.  

Topiary is an extremely light weight, flexible, mobile first & SEO friendly one page web application that runs of local JSON objects published by Tree & Field. It was extremely enjoyable to work with vs. the previous version of the system & compared to other bloated front end CMS framework combos that are popular these days.

I'm currently working on one other site using this new system and hope to polish it up in the coming year.

Just received my new cards from the online printer Moo, really impressed with the quality. I've tried other online printing services like this and have never been satisfied. Moo specializes in four color print, short runs, nice paper stock and premium finishes.

I had to compromise in the design and go with a rich black instead of color, so I could avo_id the dot pattern to get the smooth Pantone print look. However, the gold foil is on par with the quality of a traditional print house. Excellent service for quick short runs that need to look great.

So I try to avo_id Wordpress, however... every once in a while I will build something in wordpress when required. This project was strictly development with an understrap wordpress theme. Strange because you are using node for wordpress just to use sass. There must be a better way to use sass on this platform. Too many plugins a real cluster fuck compared to Topiary. Put some lunch money in my pocket. Kept me indoors a few more months basically. The website has still not launched. Why? No content. No one can seem to track any of it down. I don't think they give a shit really which is the trend in the industry. No one cares. Why no ownership. Too much compartmentalization. Too many people working on one thing. Too many changes. Too many updates. There is no reason to care. 

I've been working on a niche version of tree & field specifically for content collection and organization before launch. Content party. However cash flow is low so it's stalled out. Much like this project.

http://chapmanmarket.com/

I've updated the cantos. A selection of in progress and unfinished pieces including: Product Creation, Creative Consulting projects, Custom Coded Technology & Visual Collections. 

http://cantos.rickytruth.com/

Almost launched a new website for rocketcom.com after a long drug out process and a tedious search for content the project was canceled just before launch. The in house team took over and finished up. Looks like they put it up. As always design by committee screwed up a lot of the layout and functionality. But 86% of what I d_id is there.

Rocket communications website.

Things are very quiet. All my work has come to an unexpected stop. Retainers ended suddenly. Projects canceled unexpectedly. Currently working on some long term internal projects and looking for new opportunities.

So I googled "suncandy" the other day. To my surprise, Revlon has created a nail polish with the same name, and a similar logo to my masthead / logotype. I've definitely inspired someone working for Revlon...

I've owned suncandy.com and run the SunCandy phot blog for nearly 15 years. --> Suncandy on the wayback machine 2001

In that time I've been working in the creative profession and worked with a few fashion and beauty brands.

Here's my best guess either someone I've worked with in the past, had some type of position at Revlon and used my logo as the springboard for the nail polish logo. Or... the designer googled "suncandy" saw my work, and made it cuties wootsie for the nail polish.

Either way fuck Revlon Suncandy nail polish.

If you want to get your nails d_id use super black.

Yesterday all my e-mail and sites went down while I was at an interview in silicon valley. I later found out the person I was partnering with for over 15 years on the server had canceled the account on that exact day without any prior warning. It felt like sabotage to me. I don't have any hard ev_idence but for all intents and purposes it had the same effect as sabotage. It Took several hours of work to get back up and will require many more hours of work to repair anything.  It also gives the few existing clients a negative impression of the products and services I prov_ide.

It's very disheartening that all these long term business relationships are simultaneously ending in such a negative way. 

Introducing Alpha Kong. Guerrilla Marketing. Reputation Management & Targeted Solutions.

http://www.alphakong.com/

I've mananaged to burn through my saving over the past year and a half. I'm looking to the horizon of a financial and professional trainwreck. May be distasteful to share, however I have nothing to loose by being honest. 

I've had the opportunity to try out the ionic framework on my last mobile project. Having had experience using Apache Cordova, as well as Adobes version of Cordova PhoneGap I was skeptical about Ionics performance claims. Previous hybr_id Cordova projects I have worked on have always had a few nanoseconds of sluggishness which is frustrating. As I'm coming close to the goal line on my current project, I have no problems saying I'm very impressed with the performance of this framework. Ionic delivers native UI performance, which is fantastic.

Ionic is a Cordova-based framework, & works with most Cordova CLI plugins. What's special about Ionic is its integration with Angularjs, it's optimized to use hardware acceleration and perform minimal DOM manipulations. The Angular integration gives it that snap and native user experience that is sometimes lacking in Hybr_id mobile applications.

Ionic comes with a very useful set of CSS Components, Icons & Javascript modules. It took a day to familiarize myself with the framework and get used to the Ionic way of doing things. But that is pretty standard with any framework. All the components are highly customize-able with SASS or even plain CSS if you like. The only thing I found lacking was a time-picker / date picker component. Nothing is stopping you from writing your custom components or finding open source community created components with a quick google search. I found a time-picker / date picker I could install through the CLI & with a few tweaks met my needs perfectly.

Ionic get's you half way there overnight...

Before making the decision to use Ionic, I started this project out by creating a screen by screen wire-frame using Adobe Illustrator. After screen and interaction approval, I was able to browse through the Ionic docs and with a few minor adjustments in the wire-frame Ionics pre-built components met 95% of the UI requirements. Ionic get's you half way there overnight, which helps get momentum going at the beginning of the project. Then it was on to the not so exciting multiple client revisions, new feature requests, and the obligatory IOS upgrade during the m_iddle of the project. Overall it was a great experience using the framework & and gave me much more conf_idence in the viability of Cordova-based hybr_id apps.

So unfortunately I've lost a client of 9 years over a $150 dollar dispute. After hours on the phone frustration and a bad experience on both ends of the agreement I had to let them go. This all could have been avo_ided with a simple and affordable maintence agreement to allow us to be proactive in discovering and updating code to keep up with changes in technology. 

Great work by christian.

http://christianweber.net/

For this new site I developed a brand new CMS which has a lot of potential. A very intuitive and flexible way to track and organize huge amounts of information. Using a NOSQL database which make a lot of the advanced features possible. Very exciting stuff.

Problem: The inherited code base of the GIA 4C's App Suite was developed in a way that created a huge bottleneck during deployment. All the content was either hand coded or lived in a local The Suite Consisted of two Applications Consumer & Retailer with two localizations English and Chinese on Two Mobile Platforms iOS and Andro_id and to make it more interesting the Andro_id flavor of the Application was deployed on both Google play and Amazon. This meant that any content update would require 16 different App deployments. Device testing for layout discrepancies over a range of devices, operating systems, os versions and screen sizes a very frustrating time consuming and monotonous task. Now Factor in my team dealing with a client facing agency, dealing with the bureaucracy and departmental compartmentalization of a large corporation like GIA and you can imagine the frustration, waste, and inefficiency making a small update to the Application would be.

Requirements: First, we needed to be able to update the application without redeploying. The CMS needed to be user-friendly and accessible to someone with no technical experience, a copywriter, or a social media consultant. All the image text and v_ideo content had to be updatable and work offline in the application. Last but not least, Making an update to the application needed to go through a staging and review and approval process before being pushed live to the userbase.

Solution: The solution required an application update as well as the development of the CMS. We proposed A user-friendly CMS UI powered by an NOSQL database; the apps localization was done using local JSON objects so using an NOSQL database streamlined the process of storage and retrieval cutting out the translation from another database and code base to JSON. Another major obstacle was devising a way that GIA could internally review and approve the updates before they were pushed to the user base. We proposed creating a white list of internal Device _id's. Devices on this white list had an additional screen that could be used to toggle between staging and live data. On Launch and at periodic intervals the app would call home to the CMS checking a time stamp to see if approved updates were ready. If Approved updates were found, the Device would prompt the user to enter an update screen where new content could be downloaded to the device. This process allowed the app to work offline with the new content.

I recently had a chance to work with the Shopify Java-script API to refresh Dead Celebz website. The goal, put up an e-commerce site as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. The Shopify API is incredibly powerful for quickly putting up a cart and check out experience. I was impressed at how easy it came together. Although the lite version of the plan is missing some major features especially in shipping calculation, it's a great way to get up and moving with a minimum viable product.  

I've lost two long term clients to DIY web building systems. Christian Weber a 20 year relationship was lost to WIX. And Storm Interiors a 10 Year relationship was lost to Square space. These were both clients who needed expertise in UX, someone with an understanding of the aesthetics of luxury and some one they could pick up the phone and talk to when they needed support, maintenance or updates.

There new sites are cheap looking & buggy in my opinion. And they are stuck in the frameworks of the site builders. But that is the trend in the industry now. Good luck to them. C'est la vie.

As part of an ongoing Holistic self-promotion, I had a chance to integrate the Algolia search engine into my website. "Search, Ricky Truth" is the call to action for a campaign of print and e-mail outreach pieces combined with an SEO effort I am currently working on. In addition to the campaign, I thought a site search engine and search navigation on the site would tie the _idea together.

I researched several possibilities Google Custom Search Engine, Elasticsearch, Solr, and Algolia. Google Custom Search has no free version and the UI/UX for the service (and the majority of google's projects) is incredibly unintuitive and frustrating. I've had some previous experience with Solar the installation process and setup are too time-consuming for this project and it's indexing and crawling can be very resource intensive. That left Elasticsearch and Algolia I choose Algolia because I liked the format of the documentation much better and the Github single sign on made signing up for the service a single click. Easy.

I began a test integration in Angularjs using the Javascript API. My data was already being hosted on Cloudant in JSON format so adding an index to Algolia was as simple as copy & pasting my _alldocs view on Cloudant into a text file and uploading it. I was searching through my data in a minute or two; I'm impressed at how fast the API connection is. You get keystroke filtered results in microseconds.

I experienced a small speedbump in the learning curve when I started working with ranking and display. For some reason when I wanted to filter the search with "facetFilters" no results would return until I added an arbitrary value to the "Attributes to highlight" section of settings, weird. The only other negative experience I had with the API was that it requires add, edit, and delete API calls to originate from HTTPS. That meant I had to install an SSL certificate on my local server just to test out those calls. That nearly made me ditch the service; that's incredibly un-userfriendly for someone researching a service. I went through the extra effort and installed a local SSL, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

That being sa_id Algolia is still an excellent service and one I would recommend, try it out, Search, Ricky Truth.

SunCandy was a photo blog I maintained for 12 years. A picture a day from 2001 until the end of the Mayan calendar and the end of the world in 2012. In many ways my world d_id end around that time. And now I'm dealing with the frustrating new existence. However life goes on completely changed and superficially unchanged.

I'm in the process of rebuilding SunCandy as a blog and news site.

Stay tuned.

I don't like instagram for two reasons. The first and most important, all the images are squares. L7. I realize the instagram format is a Polaro_id metaphor and the images are meant to mimic that classic format. The square format limits all the compositional variations that can be had from cropping.

The Second, I spent 12 years making my own personal photo blog.

So I have a biased opinion.

New updates are in the works.

I've been busy with several s_ide projects as well as architecting & programming an iOS app for people with a heavy NDA... To many time consuming activities.

Just completed a clean & simple refresh of Storm Interiors using our new front end angular templating system Topiary. The back-end is powered by a streamlined version of tree & field using flat file JSON publishing and customized UI for the storm site.

http://treeandfield.com/

User Experience, User Interface, Rap_id Application Prototyping, Custom Coded Solutions.

Focusing on Delivering progressive web applications for FinTech, Blockchain, Medical Technology & AR/VR.