My name is Clayton McIlrath and I am an entrepreneur currently living in CO. I personally enjoy the process of learning, exploring, and doing all things creative as well as sharing my experiences with others. Being an entrepreneur and business owner, I hope that my experiences may help someone else start their own venture and find success and freedom as I have! Feel free to contact me anytime for questions or opportunities.
A question that is brought to my attention almost daily is, “how do i succeed in this rough economy?” .. well today, I’ve put together a simple article for you (which is also going to be printed in our local newspaper), which should serve as a simple reminder and nothing more. YOU have the power and tools to change your circumstances, these notes will just remind you where to start.
sIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement): allows for dynamically-generated snippets of text to use any font supported in Flash using a combination of JavaScript and Flash embedding to replace characters on the page.
In my last post regarding sIFR, I compared sIFR against Cufon and FLIR. Since there is a great deal of interest in them, I decided to go deeper into what I believe is the superior out of the three..
Everyone has opinions and advice for starting a business, but most advice tells you how to start a business with a capital investment or loan.. but when we started Chosen we didn’t want either.. we wanted to follow the same path that 37 Signals traveled by “getting real” with development and work-flow and then finding ways to have your money work for you rather than surviving on income alone. So we with little capital and a lot of heart we dove into this business head first…
A while back, I developed an application to automate our workflow and gather information from potential clients before meeting with them. This was a pretty basic RFP form, but I had many people tell me how interested they were in it, and that they wanted to use it for themselves. Within a few weeks of launching that RFP we had finished our new brand and it was already outdated. Rather than updating and re-skinning I decided to start from scratch and share the old one with whoever wants it. You can customize this application as necessary, but please give credit to Chosen with a link back to this site or the main Chosen site.. even if the link is hidden, we still like it there for SEO.
There are SO MANY articles out there that get very deep into web development and programming concepts, but not many people know what to start learning if you’re just starting in this field. I’ve put together a well-rounded list of resources and websites to read on a regular basis and learn as much as you can. If you become familiar with all of these websites, you’ll quickly be the best in your field. All the information is free to anyone with a passion or desire to learn.
I love learning new programming languages, especially if it solves a need that I have and automates my process a bit more. I spent a couple hours learning AppleScript which is a programming language for Mac that let’s you access the API and make basic function calls to cocoa based programs and applications. One such need that I had is compressing my JavaScript and CSS files before uploading to the web server. There are many applications and ways to this online, but they all are three or more steps to get the compressed file. A while back I downloaded the YUI java applet to do the compression on my desktop via Terminal, which sped up my process a bit, but since I only used it once in a great while, I’d always have to look up the parameters that I needed to pass to it. So today when I went to look it up, I decided I was going to be adventurous and try something new. That adventure led me to a solution that I’m happy with, and you may enjoy as well.
