Maui Jeff

Do You Know TED?

Posted on April 28, 2010 by JeffBennett

TED started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Their tagline says it succinctly; Ideas worth spreading. A few years back, TED started posting videos of the great talks presented at their conferences. Not only do they have talks from their own TED conferences but they’ve also included great talks from other conferences as well. Need a little motivation or inspiration? I’ve found that soaking in the ideas in these presentations is not only a great motivator but is a great source of new ideas and insights, regardless of whether or not they have anything to do with your interests or expertise. Do yourself a favor and give up an hour of TV a week and dedicate that time to some great ideas. Cruise over to TED and browse some videos to watch.

Here’s a few of my favorite TED talks from the past couple of years:

Sylvia Earle’s 2009 TEDPrize Wish Presentation

One of the first TED presentations I watched and the one that motivated me to get involved in raising awareness for our oceans.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

Jamie Oliver’s 2010 TEDPrize Wish Presentation

I had never heard of Jamie Oliver until he won the TED prize this year. Great presentation. Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty

A fantastic use of data visualization to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.

Posted in Featured, Headline, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Design, TED Talks | Tagged Ideas, Inspiration, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Design, Motivation, TED, TED Talk | Leave a comment

Use Less Plastic

Posted on April 23, 2010 by JeffBennett

I’ve kind of developed a pet peeve about so-called disposable plastic water bottles. It started when I found out about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and all the plastic we put into the ocean, much of it comprised of plastic water bottles. Someone commented on my SaveTheOcean blog yesterday about a new explanatory video on the subject, so I thought I’d include it here as well.

Still not convinced to switch from “disposable” bottled water to a reusable water bottle? Then check this out too – The Story of Bottled Water.

But wait, there’s more. I have to include my own little video attempt:

Aside from the ecological benefits of switching, there’s the monetary benefit. It’s cheaper for you. It’s easy. It will help save the oceans. It’ll save you money.

Posted in Causes, Featured, Headline, Oceans | Tagged Bottled Water, Oceans, Plastic | Leave a comment

Stop Doing Stuff You Hate

Posted on April 22, 2010 by JeffBennett

I’d never heard of Gary Vaynerchuk until a few months ago when this talk was a featured TED talk. Great message in my opinion. As he says within the first minute or two of the talk, there are way too many people out there doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that! Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what do you want to do every day for the rest of your life? Do that!

Watch the video. Don’t get offended by his swearing. Just ignore it and soak up his energy and passion and take to heart his message. Do some introspection and see what it is you really want to do with your life. Then pursue it.

Posted in Featured, Headline, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Design | Tagged Gary Vaynerchuk, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Design, TED Talk | Leave a comment

2011 Photoshoot Photos

Posted on April 21, 2010 by JeffBennett

In the windsurfing world, spring is when all the big windsurfing board and sail makers descend upon Maui with their team riders and photographers shoot photos and video of all the new gear that will be released later in the year. Hookipa has been a zoo lately with helicopters hovering and team riders throwing down big for the photographers. I stopped by Hookipa yesterday to shoot some of the photoshoot action. Check it out on MauiWindsurfing.net.

Posted in Featured, Headline, Maui Windsurfing | Leave a comment

Setting Up WordPress.com Time-lapse Video

Posted on April 19, 2010 by JeffBennett

As part of my upcoming WordPress for your Business Website Workshop I want to give a quick overview of the process of going from scratch to a basic structure to show people how simple it is and how there’s no coding involved. I thought a fun way to do that would be to set up a new WordPress.com sight and do a video capture of that, then speed it up. The result is this sped up overview of setting up up a WordPress.com website for business covering just the basics of selecting a theme, defining some basic settings and setting up a basic site structure with some pages, topping it off with adding some widgets to the sidebar – all in less then 4 minutes (actually it took about 18 minutes before speeding up the video screen capture).

Obviously I don’t expect anyone to be able the details of this. The detailed steps will be shown and discussed afterward. If you’re wondering, the site I’m setting up is a fictitious business site for my dog, Sookie. She’s going to have some schwag to sell (wag schwag?) like T-shirts and services as well. The capture and editing of this was done with Techsmith’s Camtasia, exported to .mov, then imported to iMovie, sped up, then exported again.

Posted in Featured, Online Video, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Upcoming WordPress for your Business Website Workshop

Posted on April 19, 2010 by JeffBennett

Every business needs a website. But historically, to build a website, you either needed to know how to code a website, or hire someone who did. But with the advent of free, open source internet publishing tools like WordPress, you don’t HAVE to know how to code. Though it started out as a blogging platform, WordPress is now a very capable online publishing tool and content management system that you can use to build your entire site with – not just a blog. So, why is this good news for you? You can create a website and update its content on your own without having to know HTML. You can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple text editor.

As part of a series of workshops sponsored by High Tech Maui for the local Maui business community, I’ll be doing a workshop in May about setting up a website using WordPress. The date is tentatively set for Tuesday, May 25, 8:00 – noon. Seating will be limited to 20. Stay tuned for registration details.

I’ll also be posting much of the content of the workshop, as presentation or video, here on this site after the workshop. Peter Liu will be doing an introduction to blogging for business workshop on April 29 that might be a good prerequisite for mine. Registration is now open for that, but will likely fill up fast.

I’m still working on content and material for the workshop, here’s what I have so far. It will start with a conceptual overview of WordPress, followed by a presentation of screenshots and videos to show the basic process of setting up a web site from scratch in WordPress. After that, we’ll segue into a live demonstration and hands-on, interactive portion so that attendees can jump in and try it out in the workshop.

Subject matter I plan to cover:

Why use WordPress for your business website
What is WordPress
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
Sign-up and activation for WordPress.com
Themes
Publishing Posts
Publishing Pages
Posts vs Pages
Managing media
Managing Comments
Managing Links
Basic settings
Site structure
Widgets
Signing up and installing WordPress.org
Plugins
Static home pages
Backups
Security

That’s a lot to cover in four hours, which is why I want to go through it all in increasing levels of detail, starting out at a high, conceptual level, then diving down a little deeper and showing the process of the items above, then, once through that, demonstrating it live and getting the participants hands dirty doing it themselves.

I’ve put together a quick overview video of the process of going from scratch to a basic structure to show people how simple it is and how there’s doesn’t need to be any coding done to get a basic site structure up and running. Check it out.

Think you might be interested? Stay tuned to this site and my Twitter feed, as well as the High Tech Maui site for more details on dates and registration.

Posted in Digital Splash Media, Featured, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Why Use Video Explanations on Your Website?

Posted on April 18, 2010 by JeffBennett

As part of the recent redesign and restructure of this site, I wanted a video explanation of why people should use video explanations on their websites. After all, if I’m extolling the virtues of it, shouldn’t I use a video explanation myself? So, I came up with this short little teaser.

Posted in Digital Splash Media, Featured, Headline, Online Video, Video Explanations | Leave a comment

WordPress Theme Development

Posted on March 26, 2010 by JeffBennett

Over the course of the last 6 months or so, I’ve implemented website redesigns for two websites for the Maui Economic Development Board, www.medb.org and www.hightechmaui.com. As part of the redesign for each of these two sites, we incorporated WordPress to handle the news sections of these sites.

For various reasons, the remainder of the two sites were custom-built using Coldfusion. But the news sections were implemented with WordPress in order to allow MEDB staff to update the news sections themselves. The WordPress implementation included creating two custom WordPress themes to match the new, branded look for each of the sites. While I wouldn’t recommend custom WordPress theme creation for anyone not familiar with HTML or CSS, if you have an intermediate level understanding of the two, chances are good that you can create your own WordPress theme. That’s a testament to how powerful and flexible WordPress is in my opinion. If you’re interested in learning how to create your own WordPress theme, check out the WordPress Theme Development page.

MEDB WordPress News Section

High Tech Maui WordPress News Section

Posted in Featured, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Video Zen

Posted on November 18, 2009 by JeffBennett

I’ve developed a bit of a fascination with online explanatory and informational videos lately and so decided to create a page on Visual Think Media devoted to that – a page I’m calling Video Zen. It’s a collection of explanatory videos that explain concepts visually.

Posted in Online Video, Video Explanations, Visual Thinking | Leave a comment

WordPress Screencast: NextGen Photo Gallery

Posted on August 1, 2009 by JeffBennett

Just finished recording and editing a screencast to show how to install the NextGen photo gallery on your WordPress web site, create a gallery, upload some images and post a gallery in a blog post or a page.

NextGen Photo Gallery for WordPress from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.