December 23rd, 2009
Here’s cool craft idea you can make out of some garbage- cardboard milk cartons. Use these images (below) and this article.
Tags: christmas crafts, craft idea, frugal gifts, milk carton, milk cartons, picture gallery
Posted in Life | No Comments »
December 10th, 2009
We used to get this milk delivered to our house in Dodgeville and for a time it was the best local milk source available. We where so excited when our local grocery chain, Piggly Wiggly, started to carry their mild sold in glass bottles. After a while the home delivery service was not offered and my wife and I were sad when after buying their milk for some time it started to taste really bad–we noticed the milk going sour in a matter of days. This week we learned that Blue Marble Dairy of Barneveld, an on the farm milk producer who does not pasteurize or homogenize, had shut down as a business. Too sad.
Here are a few articles related to this news:
ISTHMUS Daily page article
ISTHMUS Daily page forum
Nick Kirch profile
Tags: blue marble milk, corporations, dodgeville wisconsin, local business, wisconsin
Posted in Life | 2 Comments »
November 2nd, 2009
Knockouts, overprinting, trapping and Adobe InDesign.
Recently, a client asked me to redesign a catalog cover using some pretty fancy printing processes. The layout and design was nothing new but I needed to be able to print a photo on the cover which did not knock-out the metallic ink fill behind the greyscale photo. I found this video which does a nice job explaining how to tweak InDesign trapping settings to do this.
Tags: design, InDesign, metallic ink, photo, Printing, using technology, Videos
Posted in Printing | No Comments »
September 3rd, 2009
I first published this article for the Examiner.
The Walker House has gone through many owners since it was first built in 1836 in Mineral Point, WI. In November, 2005, Joseph and Susan Dickinson purchased the Walker House property and re-opened its doors in August, 2008 to the public with the idea of bringing back to its former glory as a Cornish Pub.
Within the past month, the Dickinson have announced that they have been forced to shut the doors on this historic location due to a number of problems.
This small romantic 150 year old pub features a 42 room hotel, facilities to produce great food including a water-cooled walk in cooler and two dining areas, one with a fireplace. Because the Walker House building was built into the side of a bluff, the dining hall also has two eat-in caves. When this location was open earlier this year, they served hand-crafted local beers complimented by an excellent locavore menu. Ironically, because of the Dickinsons’ restoration efforts the Walker House is more up to date than most new buildings.
Joseph & Susan are currently looking for a business partner to help save the Walker House. Are you instested in old buildings, history and have a knack for the beverage and restaurant industry.
For more info: Walker House, 1 Water St, Mineral Point, WI 53565, 608-987-1660, http://www.walkerhousemineralpoint.com/
Tags: beer, caves, history, mineral point, restaurant, walker house, wisconsin
Posted in Life | 2 Comments »
August 10th, 2009
As you can see in my Lifestream, I am addicted to Pandora Radio.
I use Pandora in my home office while preparing and eating dinners. I often find Pandora to be anoying as I get distracted rating music. This free online music service plays music based on your thumbs up/down ratings of artists, songs and albums.
User Notes – Pandora Tips & Tricks
These tips and tricks in the video blog below show how to get more variety or how to fine tune what kind of music plays on your Pandora radio stations.
For more information about Pandora and the Music Genome Project, view my Pandora profile or use the “P” Pandora icon under “Follow Me” in the sidebar below.
Tags: lists, music service, pandora radio, radio stations
Posted in Life | 2 Comments »
July 28th, 2009
This post about the best of the WordPress Plugins for a CMS website was originally published on the Fatty Matty Brewing brewlog on June 19, 2009.
After using WordPress for so long on this Fatty Matty Brewing blog, I decided to use WordPress as a CMS (content management) with a few new clients’ websites including Greenspirit Farm and Free Congregation of Sauk County. Each of these unique clients has different business communication needs from WordPress and with the huge amount of WordPress plugins available, I knew I could pretty much accomplish any requests for website customization.
This list of WordPress plugins gives your website flexability to perform tons of fat website functions.
My Favorite WordPress Plugins
(tested on WordPress 2.7.1)
Plugins Used on the Fatty Matty Brewing Brewlog
- Akismet – A must have spam catcher for ALL WordPress websites!
- BrewPoll – For all you beer bloggers… Adds a BrewPoll icon to each post on your blog.
- WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Have you backed up your WordPress database today? Do this before you upgrade to WordPress 2.8!
WordPress Plugins Used on the Greenspirit Farm website
- All in One SEO Pack – Improve your website’s popularity on Google with super SEO.
- Force User Field Registration – Forces new users to register additional fields. As a WordPress admin, it is nice to know that your website’s members are human.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO!.
- Login Configurator – Sick of looking at the WordPress logo on your website? Get your company logo on the WordPress registration / login page.
- Multi Column Category List – Want to create a WordPress Page with a list of categories? See the Recipes Category list at the bottom of this page. Requires the use of WordPress Page Templates and some custom coding.
- Page Links To – This plugin allows you to point a post or page to any URL you want. Very useful if you want a WordPress Page to link an external URL.
- Simple Login Widget – If you are using WordPress as a CMS, this simple widget will show just the login/logout and register links instead of all the RSS and Meta Feed crap.
- WP Render Blogroll Links – Display your blogroll or WordPress links on a page like this!
- Drop-down menu – Add a cool drop down style page menu to your WordPress theme.
- Event Calendar – After a ton of searching for the perfect Event Calendar plugin – this one is the BEST!
- Inline Posts – Allows you to include dynamic WordPress posts in your static WordPress pages (and in other posts). See an example here.
- Simple:Press Forum – as far as I can tell (and there are not many to choose from) the best WordPress Forum Plugin. See a brand new installation of this WordPress Forum plugin here.
Check out some of our other favorite Free WordPress Plugins.
Tags: cms, cms website, content management, page templates, plugins, widget, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wp
Posted in WordPress Ideas | 3 Comments »
There are a number of themes which I have tested out which would work awesome for a CMS website. I am not saying the themes listed below suck but, they do not allow this website to show the theme switcher in sidebar 1 by default. Because of this, these themes did not work for me on this website, here at Another Design by Matt Sweeny.
There is a neat WordPress plugin called 
Agro-Tourism
