Bengfort.com

My QR Code- Scan It and See!

QR (Quick Response) Codes are a two-dimensional matrix barcode format that were first developed by the Japanese Corporation Denso-Wave for manufacturing. However, because of the speed of reading these types of codes by convential devices, especially cameras, they have come into widespread use in Japan as a way to quickly exchange information. Thanks to the growing popularity of the iPhone and Android phones in the U.S. they are becoming more widespread for use in the west as well!

There are a number of apps both in iTunes and in the Android market that enable the camera to read barcodes. What you may not know is that QR codes are a quickly developing mobile standard that are specifically being taken over for use by mobile smart phones. I know some of my family have already begun using mobile boarding passes for air travel, which incorporate QR Codes. Additionally you can pass contact information, URLs, calendar information, even secure WiFi network access with a QR Code! QR Code reading is even built into many Android devices, allowing for instant browser redirection, instantly calling or emailing a contact, or instantly connecting to a wireless network!

Today, I discovered QR codes, and when I realized their scope, I was astounded. Put a QR Code on business cards so people can import your contact info directly? Absolutely! Get some stickers with your wireless access info and place them on routers? What a great way to securely ensure that everyone can easily get your wireless details without having to look for a post-it somewhere! How about in the real world? Well, this is already being used for coupons, virtual augmentation in magazines, even on outdoor advertisements and store fronts! All you need is a camera and some software to read these things!

Imagine a game that used these codes in real life. Talk about a really great scavenger hunt! Just encode position location information into the QR codes, and when people scan it they can find the next way point. Otherwise they can “collect” goods in a larger role playing game. Because these codes can be read off of screens, they can be generated by computers on the go, no need for stickers!

I just discovered that I can in fact share any contact or calendar information on my phone with my Barcode Scanner app because it will automatically generate a QR code for me. If you do want stickers, though- Moo will make a pack of 90 for you for only $9.99. What an awesome thing!

Looking for my contact information? Find it here: http://bengfort.com/scan/

Want to generate your own QR Codes? Go here: http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

Want to print some stickers? Use Moo: http://uk.moo.com/en/products/stickers.php

Android App: use Barcode Scanner by Zxing http://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/GetTheReader

iPhone App: use Barcodes by Zxing http://itunes.apple.com/app/barcodes/id292197557?mt=8

Well, as you can see above, I have just posted my first ever attempt at a video blog or “vlog”. It’s not great… Pretty much, I look stupid on camera, and I can see why no one takes me seriously, I kind of feel like a buffoon! Most of the vlog is pretty self-explanatory, but I just wanted to share a few comments here below, for those of you that are still interested after 8 minutes! (Only a unique few who have to love me, I’m sure…)

So first off, for those of you who may be on a ship or have a poor internet connection, I’ll get a transcript posted when I see how good YouTube’s machine transcription is. I’m not sure if I’ll add that to the end of this post, as an attachment, or as a separate post. If you have thoughts, let me know in the comments.

Next… I hate Windows Live Movie Maker. This is the software I used to edit the video, and as you can see it did a bad job. What I saw in my little preview video before publishing is not what the final video turned out to be. There were some awkward cuts, etc. I think you know where they were. I originally downloaded it because I thought it could capture from my webcam directly… turns out that was Windows Movie Maker (nee “live”), and the new version no longer does that (just because you’re free, doesn’t mean you should be cheap!).

Then I had some problems after I uploaded it to YouTube, because YouTube tries to re-encode the video. I tried again, and cut it with Adobe Media Encoder to a better format. Still it doesn’t look great on YouTube, so obviously I have some lessons to learn. Unfortunately with a 15 minute encoding time, both from Windows Live Movie Maker and Adobe Media Encoder for an 8 minute video… I’ll pass on doing it again. Lessons learned for next time, right?

So this was my adventure: what I thought would be an hour or two tossing up a video onto the blog turned into 7 hours (1pm to 8pm); seriously I have 200% more respect for vloggers now!

5 Posts Fiver Authors!

Well we did it! Today, January 12, 2010 we got a 5 for Fiver- 5 posts from the Five authors of Bengfort.com! As you can see, we cracked the Moet and cheers to you guys! New Years Resolutions resolved! One big problem, about this though, is that the five posts are kind of buried beneath the last one (and now this one). Until I can get the separate authors page, I thought I would put the links here up front so everyone could read them:

5 Posts/ 5 Authors/ 1 Day:

Book Review- World on Fire by Bethany Bengfort

Big, Intimidating, Necessary? by Devi Bengfort

… And Doubly in the Bubbly by Jacquelyn Bengfort

Boredom by Winston Bengfort

Quick Note from Ben by Benjamin Bengfort

Please read and enjoy! Nice work everyone!

Just a quick update: I realize that after our extremely successful conversation during our “Bengfort.com Seminar” we came up with a number of action items for the site that I have yet to follow up on. I want to assure you that I’m working on these things, and I just want to give you a status report.

Guyana Cooking Video- still in edit. I haven’t had much time to look at it, but when I did, I realized, I’m not such a pro! I’m hoping to have something together and posted by the end of the month, probably via a you tube stream and an embedded link. If you guys have any suggestions, I could use the help!

Individual Author pages. I have been exploring the following three solutions:

• WordPress MU/Buddypress
• Theme edit:
• Site Design edit

As I mentioned during our seminar, these aren’t necessarily hard tasks, but they aren’t very easy either. I would like to get a quick solution, but I also want to do it right. You will see more on the virtues of each of these options in future posts. In the meantime, I have done the DNS legwork, so that the following:

• ben.bengfort.com
• devi.bengfort.com
• bethany.bengfort.com
• jaci.bengfort.com
• winston.bengfort.com

Are all valid, but they just point to the main webpage right now. Soon those will take you to your own author pages depending on how we do it.

Old Post Import: So I have got going on this, you will start to see your old blog posts starting to trickle back into the site. For instance, most of Jaci’s old blog posts are up, but they are password protected (email me if you want the password). Winston’s are all up now too. Bethany, Devi, and My blog posts are sans pictures unfortunately, but we can discuss how to remedy that.

Avatars/Email/Other: A few changes have been made to the profiles section (avatars are now up, you can edit them in your profile if you wish). If you’re having problems with your @bengfort.com email, let me know. I still haven’t found a dashboard style program yet. And if there is anything else, please comment!

I just want to thank you guys again for so lovingly putting up with your technical support geek- I’m really proud of our site and the effort you guys have put into it!

On Tuesday my Dell Poweredge server will finally be installed in a Baltimore data center. It will be pre-configured with Gentoo Linux, Apache 2.2, MySQL, and PHP (as well as some others) and is essentially the backbone server of every website- a LAMP. I am very excited about all the new possibilites that having the server brings. It is going to be an expensive addition to the Bengfort.com lineup, but I think the redesign and work on the site will make it worth it.

As of today, I have started the redesign of the site (more on that in upcoming posts). And begun by drawing sketches in my notebook to help me get organized. More than likely there will be a new design and some new features, as well as removal of some of the old silly ones (goodbye “Converter” pages!).

If you do have any notes, I am going to be spending the weekend in Starbucks doing design and configuring my development environment (Apollo) then please email me!

Just an update for those of you still reading, the Bengfort.com Dell Server has shipped after some delays and contract negotitions with AtlanticASP (or possibly the Canton Group, I don’t know which). Needless to say, I have signed a 2 year contract for around $2k per year for a dedicated server on an education related plan. This means that I am going to be spending July and August working on revamping the site and making changes.

Probably in the next week or so the Server (which is going to be a Gentoo Linux LAMP) will be installed and I will be given SSH access to the server, then the interesting work will begin. For the time being, I am going to have development happen on a development server, while keeping the site as it is up. I will then slowly insert the new parts of the site into the exisiting site, so there may be some design incongruities, etc.

As for the plan for my development, it is as follows:

Phase 1: Revamp blogs, create blog engine, migrate existing blogs to blog engine. Initial redesign of individual blogs.

Phase 2: Revamp homepage, and smaller accessories to the site (meet the family, etc.)

Phase 3: Revamp the albums page, allow a more facebook like use of album uploading and downloading, etc.

Phase 4: Revamp the cookbook pages, allow for better sharing of recipes, etc.

Phase 5: Design integration- tie the site together visually.

Phase 6: Add-ons, including twitter and other applications, security review.

So you can expect this all to happen in the next couple of months. Hopefully with school starting in the fall, I can manage to put this all together.

One other hold up is the fact that my laptop that I ordered from Dell won’t arrive until after I have already left for Washington. Considering I need it for consulting in NY, etc. I think this could be a big hold up. Hopefully we can resolve that situation with some quick shipping, etc.

Ben

For those of you that are interested, we are moving to the next phase of bengfort.com web development- getting off the shared server we are hosted on now, that is pretty limited, and is really only just a file server- and moving to our own (hopefully dedicated) virtual server. This means a lot of things, and I am excited about all of them!

1. With PHP and MySQL, we can employ a database driven dynamic website, as well as my own custom blog application to release us finally from Blogger, and me having to store so many HTML pages on the site. I tried to use a page count tool for the site, and it stopped after 500 pages- way to many in my opinion! With PHP, the site dynamically loads the information you want from a database, so I don’t have a page for every single post!
2. I can apply HTTP authentication for secure areas of the site. This way, we can have a part of the site for Bengforts only, secure other information that we don’t want getting around, as well as placing a front end up for our FTP server, so that we can share files more easily. The secure portion will also mean sign in, which will give us individual user functionality.
3. @bengfort.com email addresses! Don’t worry, we can still tie these into our gmail accounts.
4. Picture Album functionality, for Facebook-like sharing of our photo albums.
5. The recipe site will finally start working!

Pretty much anything we want to do with the site will be possible once I gain more control of the site. If you have any ideas let me know, and I would be happy to see if we can implement them.

I have gotten some questions about my time and involvement with the project, and I just want to reassure you- now that I am doing graduate work in Computer Science, I think it would be embarrassing not to have this site upgraded well! Also, I need to get my own blog started, rather than just this bengfort.com blog!

Well, I just hit a wall in my forward progress that I have been making over the past couple of days! I have just got a brand new computer that is perfect for development work. I have purchased Visual Studio 2005, which is on its way, and I have everything I need to get going on all of these grand ideas I have… or not?

I discovered that Microsoft FrontPage 2003, the HTML editor I was using on my old computer no longer exits on my new computer! I have the same exact Microsoft Office installed- MS Office 2003 Proffessional, and yet, no Front Page 2003! At first I thought that because I have 3 copies of Office (A student copy, a copy from Navy, and a copy from my old computer) that perhaps I just had the wrong copy of office— nope! I did find Front Page XP, but that is really of no use.

So I am HTML editorless, which makes it tough to do web design work! To do everything this weekend, I used notepad, which obviously gave me a lot of bug shooting to do because I type too fast for my own good.

So I said to myself- I just need to buy a new copy of FrontPage (although after more exploration, good riddance- FrontPage does the most annyoing thing by putting a thumbs.dat file in every single folder you are using). But Microsoft has given up on FrontPage and split it into two very different products- SharePoint designer 2007, and something called Microsoft Expression Web, which I guess is Microsoft’s attempt to rival Adobe Dreamweaver.

Well Expression Web is 200+ bucks, more if I pay in pounds. I had already purchased Visual Studio 2005 to do ASP.NET work as well as C#, but before I could go talk to Jaci about the software purchases, I realized- do I really want to buy into Microsoft this completely?

This led to a lot of angst about my path along this learning process. I have swerved into Microsoft-only technologies somehow, and I am wondering if I should try to escape while there is still time (although Visual Studio is an expenseve back down!), or if there is some good way to mix the two. I am torn, because I started learning C# instead of Flash or Java, and I really should switch back. Needless to say, the Adobe Web Design Premium suite (which contains photoshop CS3, which is another product I really want) is going to run me 1500 bucks- so should I switch now?

Well, now I am HTML editor program-less and clueless about what I should do next! See my next post for my learning path, and maybe someone out there can make suggestions.

In response to comments, lets discuss single graphic home pages. I feel that they are the cleanest way to maintain a homepage. Below are some of my reasons for advocating a single image webpage.

1. Acts as a portal to the web- getting onto the internet is easy, and the home page is fresh (all of your home pages should be bengfort.com by the way!!!!).
2. Easy navigation allows you to get away from the home page either via a Google search, or navigation into bengfort.com- you are not overloaded by lots of information.
3. Time saving on page loading.
4. Branding- this is useful for companies, but also for anything that is public- when folks see a clean style webpage, they recognize it more easily.
5. Google indexing- will help develop a site map which makes indexing the site easier for Google and other search engines.
6. Dashboard feel and easy way to place announcements

Homepages with lots of text, images, feeds, scripts and controls tend to not only overwhelm a person when they first log on to the internet, but they also take a long time to load and display, and if you are getting on the internet just for a quick Google search or to look up a small piece of information, or even just to read the blogs- you don’t need a mess of information on the home screen, often times what you are looking for, you would navigate away to anyway.

It is like a screensaver for your internet explorer, if the single graphic home page pops up every time you load IE (it will pop up very quickly)- then you get used to the bengfort.com style, and it looks more personal on your computer.

Easy navigation- the page will have a google search bar and links (via images not words) for easy navigation away from the home page and to what you really want to see- no need to type in addresses or click in favorites!

Dashboard- Google often changes the image of its logo on its page for events or holidays. It is a quick, easy way to make the site feel personal, and also an easy way to give announcements. A banner that says: Happy Birthday Dad! Is much easier noticed on a single image homepage then on a page with lots of information.

Finally, it is clean- and makes the webpage look a little more professional. It also acts as a portal to the webpage, and can contain sitemap code to allow easier Google indexing.

Now- I just need to get on designing it!

Well, it has been a while since I have put posts onto this blog- I’m sorry about that. Things for bengfort.com except standard maintenance and adding photo albumns have sort of fallen by the wayside- mostly because of my new job at the Oxford University Press.

But aside from that, I have been learning new technologies that will help me broaden the website and give greater flexibility while adding web applications to the site. Since I am new to the world of web application development, you must bear with me as I do a lot of reading- a lot of reading- and not much implementation. Plus the current state of the website (see below) has not allowed me the flexibility that I need. Right now I have fallen into the Microsoft trap- I am developing using Windows Server 2000, ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, and Visual Studio 2005. I was going to teach myself other technologies like MySQL, PHP, Apache, and XML, but only XML got picked up. The main reason for this is because of the Microsoft development I do at work- but also because as a would-be professional, I want to get developer certifiactions, and this is one way to learn them.

Needless to say, you won’t see very many changes to the website in the near future- at least not having to do with any of the technologies I mention above. Hopefully you will see continued use with the blog space, and recipe and album pages updates as we put them up. But for now, the basic plan will not change- with just one exception.

I am planning on changing the homepage of bengfort.com into a single page that will serve as a graphic for your homepages- see http://www.google.com, http://www.cengen.com, http://www.wikipedia.org for examples of pages that have a single graphic entry portal. These pages are single graphic with no news text, but possibly announcements and graphics changes. They include links to navigate into the website, as well as a Google searchbar to facilitate searches into the rest of the web. I want every time you load your webpage to have this page be your entry into the internet.

State of the Website

This is the state of the website as it stands on August 14, 2007. Right now the website is basic HTML pages (sometimes with the extension .htm) that are posted to Atlantic ASP’s server via ftp. I believe that the website has 5 GB of space allotted to it, I have no idea how much space is actually being taken up- but my backup of the website is 80.7 MB, so we aren’t using nearly as much space as we have- but 5 GB will run out quick! The problem with this provider is that I don’t have access to the server that bengfort.com resides on. This means that I cannot run scripts on the pages or run applications like Apache or MySQL on the server because I cannot config them- and therefore basic web applications that you take for granted on other sites cannot happen on bengfort.com (things like feedback surveys, and dynamic HTML).

We use third party providers to do most of that active/dynamic work on the website. For instance, we use Google’s blogger to provide our blogging functions. To write blogs, we navigate away from bengfort.com and sign in and use blogger’s applications to write and design the blog. Then when we hit publish post- blogger sends the blog as HTML via FTP to bengfort.com. We use Clocklink to host our clocks on the main page. Metric Conversions hosts the converter pages. Access Counter keeps track of all the site statistics on the main page. iWebAlbum creates the photo slideshows. And finally, Google provides the search boxes.

Unfortunately this provides limited functionality as well as poor performance on the website becasue many different outside sites have to work on the page, which causes higher traffic on your internet connections, and slows FTP work down back and forth.

Update Plans

Therefore, not out of vanity, but rather as a learning experience- the plan for bengfort.com is to switch internet providers (probably to a provider that costs money to maintain) that way I can have access to the server and actually host the applications that are on the website. I don’t plan on setting up my own server to connect to, because we are moving so much, this would be a waste of our broadband, and wouldn’t provide reliable service to the website.

The first step will be the single graphic homepage, I am going to need your ideas for the design of this! Let me know what you think.

Next will be the website migration- which might change the design of the site completely. During this process there will be a temporary loss of service to bengfort.com.

Next, the recipe application will be designed and put up- and the blog probably switched over to wordpress or some other software. Finally, all other applications will be run on the website.

This basic plan probably spans a couple years- so don’t hold your breath for these changes to happen soon! Hopefully we can grow this website together as we do more blogging, etc.