Serafini Studios

Uploaded the new site template. We’re still adding in the final content, but it should be all online in a day or two.

Let us know what you think by adding a comment below. Thanks!

The next step we’re going to take with the new Arts For the Soul website is to begin a search engine optimization and promotion campaign. So, to kick it off, you might want to visit this arts retreat in Steamboat Springs, Colorado if you crave soul-nourishing inspiration.

Quoting from the website,

Are you looking for a place of inspiration? Then be part of a community of 36 enthusiastic people who aspire to write, paint or play chamber music at a spectacular week long retreat in the charming mountain town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado—in the majestic Rockies.

In addition to the SEO work, we’re going to begin a keyword-based advertising campaign for the site using Google and Overture. This has worked very well for Kristin Joy Pratt Serafini, children’s book author and illustrator (incidentally, who is also scheduled to be one of the instructors at the retreat.

Arts for the Soul is now live! Serafini Studios delivers a new website for John Sant’Ambrogio’s latest venture. John is Principle Cellist for the St. Louis Symphony, and is founding an arts retreat to be held in Steamboat Springs, CO. John’s son-in-law designed the site and Serafini Studios built it out.

Are you looking for a place of inspiration? Then be part of a community of 36 enthusiastic people who aspire to write,paint or play chamber music at a spectacular week long retreat in the charming mountain town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado–in the majestic Rockies.

Check it out! 🙂

http://www.artsforthesoul.net/

ArtsForTheSoul.net is under development and should be ready for unveiling on Monday. The site is for an arts retreat in Steamboat Springs. More on this after we launch it.

Serafini Studios is proud to be hosting the website for the QuickSFV project, written by a friend who has built an excellent application that does one thing and does it well – check the validity of downloaded files. Most of all, QuickSFV is quick! We didn’t design the site, but we may be helping the author work on it in the future.

QuickSFV was designed with one goal … to be quick! Existing SFV file verification programs were slow and cumbersome to use. Most users need to verify files and the quicker, the better. QuickSFV integrates into the Windows Explorer shell and makes it very easy to verify files. Just double-click on the .SFV file and QuickSFV does the rest. QuickSFV also understands several other file verification formats including .CRC, .CSV and .CKZ.

Give it a try if you need to verify downloaded files. And if you like it, consider donating, since the author has spent many hours making this an exceedingly useful little application. 🙂

http://www.quicksfv.org

Recently added 2 additional images to Nora Larimer’s site.

http://noralarimer.com/gallery/index-landscapes_01.html

You can purchase original paintings directly from her site as well as giclee reproductions.

Updated Rachel’s site the other night with the latest WordPress beta (1.0.1). The upgrade went fairly well, although it did take a little tricky manipulation of table names in MySQL. Basically the old b2* tables were still there from an earlier install, and at first I wanted to use the new wp_* table names. So I began by doing a fresh install (of course, none of the old posts showed up). So then I eventually figured out that if I renamed the old tables with the wp_* prefixes that I wanted the new tables to have then the upgrade script would migrate the content properly. This worked well.

I am loving how WordPress is developing as a piece of software. It has vitality. It is growing in elegance and simplicity. It is Open Source.

Particularly, I appreciate the mod_rewrite ease-of-use. Basically, you simply decide what format you want your archives to be in (suggested is something like archives/2004/01/01/post-title-name) and the admin area gives you the exact code to paste into your .htaccess file. It is very slick, and then it works like magic. Considering how tricky many people find mod_rewrite, this alone is an awesome part of the system. 🙂

I’ll be upgrading this site’s installation as well soon, I think. I still have some other stuff to deal with first, though.

Another great feature is the inclusion of an “Edit this post” button in the template tags. Makes it super easy to edit any entry right when you see it. I had hacked this into my installation before, but seem to have lost it somewhere along the upgrade line, so it is great to see an official implementation.

Things are continuing to hum along here at Serafini Studios. Kristin is going to be the writing instructor for the Principia Upper School Teton Trip again this year. She is also continuing her other school visits, inspiring thousands of children each year.

On the project front, exciting progress continues with Vibe Phone. We’re working on interface design, graphics, usability and functionality.

Securanix continues to develop in interesting ways. We’re working on the initial plans for a number of security-related products.

Sites we’ve been spending some time with recently:

• Smarty
• NukeCops
• Xaraya
• PHPWiki
• freshmeat.net

Also, been thinking about non-profit foundations and how they might relate to helping empower young people (elementary-age and up) with technology education including HTML and publishing to make a difference in their own lives and open up opportunities…