Finally, the design of my website is complete! There’s so much more that I need to do to it, but for now, it’ll settle. I’ve been too busy with other school, work, and personal projects to devote that much time to redesigning my own website.
Feel free to let me know what you think! 
Dan's Blog
New Redesign!
March 14th, 2010Twittering to Fight AIDS
December 3rd, 2009Tuesday was World AIDS Day, and everyone was celebrating. Sites were turned red, people added ribbons to their avatars, sales proceeds were going to AIDS research, deviantART started art contests, and people were donating to (RED), a campaign to fight AIDS in Africa. I wanted to do my part and donate, but I didn’t know how much to donate.
I decided to let Twitter users decide the donation amount. I would post a “(RED)” tweet, and for every retweet it recieved within the next 2 hours, I would donate $0.25.
My good Twitter buddy @zachx agreed to match the entire donation!
Before the two hour period, I posted preliminary tweets about how it all worked. @drDanRyan replied and said that he wanted in on the matching!
After 2 hours, 204 people retweeted the tweet, bringing the donation total to $51, and with @zachx and @drDanRyan’s matches, the total was $153.
It felt great to make that donation, but what’s even more important is the 204 people who reposted it to their followers, reaching a potential tens of thousands of people to raise awareness about AIDS.
@zachx and his $51 check:
People were very supportive and reposted it promoted it:
We even got some people to participate who wouldn’t normally:
You can donate to! join (RED) and learn how you can help to fight AIDS!
Follow us on Twitter: @danlev, @zachx, @drDanRyan
Website Revamp in Progress
June 2nd, 2009I’ve been really busy lately with work, and working on my own pet projects, so I haven’t really had a chance to update my own website.
For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a design for it, but now that I have a few weeks free between school and work, I’ve been working on my new site, so it’s coming soon!
Get $100 in Facebook Advertising Credit
March 3rd, 2009The Visa Business Network gives everyone $100 in Facebook Advertising Credit to people who add their Facebook Application and sign up with the business network.
It’s simple, and takes a couple minutes.
$100 is a lot in advertising dollars. With my ad campaigns for BookMaid.com, an RIT Textbook Exchange on Facebook, I can get about 900,000 ad impressions for $100.
Baby Seal Hunting
March 14th, 2008Baby seals are the cutest things ever.
But their cute little heads are bashed in, and they’re beaten to death. Their fluffy little newborn bodies are ripped apart. Their undeveloped skulls are sliced open with a metal hackapick and dragged back to the ship, or skinned and their carcases are left to rot. Each spring, about 300,000 baby seals, between 2 and 12 weeks old, are clubbed or shot to death.
Check out this video:
It’s such a sad thing that people can actually do something to a creature like this.
Check out Humane Society’s Seal Protecting Site and seal hunting on Wikipedia.
Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity
February 17th, 2008On May 3rd, 2008, RIT is hosting an festival called Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival. They plan to attract 30,000 people.
The festival will be a showcase over 150 different exhibits of student and faculty work and innovations at RIT. From space exploration to eye tracking devices to innovative websites. See the full list of exhibit titles.
An exhibit for my website, BookMaid.com has been approved so I will be at the event.
Self Referencing
January 18th, 2008Under only very rare circumstances should the web be self referencing.
Self Referencing Links
For example, here are some bad examples:
- Click here to see my website.
- visit this link to go to my website.
- visit dan’s portfolio website here: http://www.dan-lev.com.
Instead, use:
- Dan Leveille’s Photography and Design Portfolio.
- visit Dan Leveille’s Photography and Design Portfolio.
- visit Dan’s Portfolio.
Why? If someone has gotten to your website, they obviously know how to use links. You don’t need to tell them that it’s a link or that you need to click it.
Links should never need to specified that they’re clickable. Use standardized styles - different colored or underlined words/phrases are links.
Who cares? Google does, for one. Google reads what the links say, and then classifies those terms with your link. For example, “Please visit Dan Leveille’s Photography and Design Portfolio.” When Google sees that link, it remember the terms “Dan, Leveille, Photography, Design, Portfolio” that are in reference to www.dan-lev.com. Now when someone searches “Photography potfolio,” Google will display www.dan-lev.com a tiny bit higher in the search results. A few links will obviously not make a difference, but keep doing it and you’ll see a difference.
This is why searching “failure” on google used to return the White House’s biography of George W. Bush as the first result. It’s called a Google bomb, because so many people linked the site using the verbiage “failure.”
Self Referencing Pages
- Welcome to my website!
- This page outlines the uses of this product.
- Below is a list of links to other blog websites:
Instead, use:
- Dan Leveille’s Photography and Design Portfolio
- Product uses:
- Other blogs:
People know they’re on a website, or on the “product uses” page.
Never use “Welcome to”. People don’t need a welcome. Who cares? Google does. The terms in headings are very important in search engine optimization. No one needs a welcoming. What if they go from the contact page to the home page, they get welcomed again. That’s uneeded.
I Hate Windows Vista
December 28th, 2007That’s it. I’m sick of Windows Vista. I’ve decided that I’m going to upgrade to Windows XP.
The warnings “WARNING: Are you sure you want to change your resolution?” were annoying at first, but now I don’t get them anymore. Vista was fine. It looked better than XP, had a nice search, and felt nicer, until I ran into some problems:
- My microphone doesn’t work
- Applications constantly stop responding. After waiting a minute or two, they become responsive. SOMETIMES. Other times, they’ll crash. It’s great when you’re typing a long message and haven’t saved/sent it.
- Videos don’t work - I’ve had to download so many different codecs and stuff, and some still don’t work. Some don’t have audio.
- Control Panel dialog boxes sometimes take minutes to response. If I open “Connect to a Network Connection” or other dialog boxes, It will show a blank screen. 3 minutes later, it appears.
- Sometimes the task bar doesn’t work and when I click on an item, it doesn’t maximize or minimize.
- It won’t let me install Adobe Camera RAW
Those are just a fraction of the problems I run into. I’m sick and tired of it. So I’m going to finish backing up my files and then I’m going to uninstall Vista.
Conclusion: Vista sucks.
UPDATE: After posting this blog entry, only seconds before I was about to close Firefox for the last time on vista, I got a “Firefox is not responding” error and it crashed Firefox. Yeah, it’s time.
In other news, Verizon decided that I didn’t need cell phone service. So I do not have cell phone service in my home town (or neighboring towns.)
Like this blog? You may also like I Hate Dell.
Some Rights Reserved
December 20th, 2007After watching a presentation at my college, Rochester Institute of Technology, by Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, I’ve decided to license all my artwork under a Creative Commons license.
I’ve licensed all my artwork (in my gallery) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I think that everyone should do this to at least some of their work. It helps people avoid copyright problems and helps promote the sharing of information.
RIT Opening Campus in Dubai
December 5th, 2007It was just announced today that the Rochester Institute of Technology is opening a campus in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, opening in the fall.
It’s going to be called “RIT Dubai” and it’s part of the a huge complex in Dubai, called the “Dubai Silicon Oasis”. Apparently they’re not offering full-time enrollment at RIT Dubai until 2009. They’ll be offering electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, finance and service management.