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.
Combining a poor economy with an ever changing web makes it challenging to stay on the cutting edge. With multiple web languages, platforms, and techniques it’s important to dedicate your time to being versatile and flexible while not wasting time learning skills that you won’t use. In the past 2 years I have learned and mastered many tools and techniques, and I’m here to share what has been valuable and where you can trim the fat from your day.
In the past few years we’ve seen a growing trend towards forcing new typefaces on the web. CSS defines a property for browsers to support a property called @font-face which lets the developer define new typefaces and include the original font file for the browser to download and render the site with. Support for this feature has been implemented in Safari and is due to release with the next versions of Firefox and Opera…
Learning Flex has been a fun but challenging experience for me thus far. The concept, the classes, and even Actionscript all make perfect sense to me, but though I may understand the logic, learning the syntax can be incredibly difficult. I decided to make my first application in Flex a blog RSS reader and Flickr thumbnail viewer. I still have a ways to go (with the flickr portion especially) but here is the source code for this Adobe Flex Application thus far
Learning keyboard shortcuts helps you improve efficiency and performance in any almost any program. I find this especially true for Photoshop since much of the design process is done with a mouse, it helps to train the other hand to use shortcuts and type in small amounts. In posting this, I hope to reference it myself to memorize and learn these shortcuts, and hopefully others will bookmark and reference this page as well.
Wordpress is jam-packed with some great features out of the box, and has been developed to make customization simple. However, Wordpress started out as a blogging CMS, and still has a way to go before some features are one-click or drag-n-drop easy. One such feature, custom fields, are a powerful and great tool to make your WP theme a little more creative. However, to take advantage of custom fields, you’ll need to get dirty with the code.
There is so much to be said about Javascript Libraries (JavaScript Toolkits or JavaScript Frameworks, if you prefer those terms, they’re all pretty much the same thing in regards to what I’m writing about). What is a JavaScript Library JavaScript Libraries were born as demands for JavaScript rose to create more interactive and dynamic websites. [...]
