All images © Nick Hardeman

Nick Hardeman is an MFA Design & Technology student at Parsons in New York City.

He has created some surprisingly fantastic bauhaus art from data visualizations of the 1997 music video “Mo Money Mo Problems” from the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death.

From Nick’s blog:

“The algorithm detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame, using the initial frame as their starting point. … The bright colored track suits worn by Puff Daddy and Mase in the dark backgrounds make for good tracking and nice color combinations.”

Check the Flickr set of several of his renders for more colorful abstract enjoyment.

A recent “quick demo” created for a class is also quite attractive and interesting: he maps the newswire of the New York Times over the course of 24 hours by category.

This Flash/Papervision interactive web app shows what news is posted at each time of the day, giving some insight into the minds of the influential NYT web editors, if not the web news audience in general. Fun to play with.

The school can likely take a bit of the credit. Founded in 1896, Parsons was the first college to offer programs in Fashion Design, Interior Design and Advertising and Graphic Design.

This was thanks to Frank Alvah Parsons, a co-founder who became the school’s president. Anticipating a new wave of the Industrial Revolution, Parsons predicted that art and design would soon be inexorably linked to the engines of industry.

A recent Harvard Business blog post, entitled “MFA is the New MBA,” lends credence to this view, and shows it becoming more & more accepted.

Creativitiy -> Innovation -> Success.

[Via Visual Complexity]

Domain mapping is a handy and common way to set up a custom URL for your hosted blog, such as one on TypePad.com, WordPress.com or Blogger.com.

This allows you to use MyExample.com to reference your blog, instead of something like myexample.typepad.com.

But what if you want to change the name you originally set-up to something else? In the case of TypePad (and likely other platforms), this can cause serious issues.

All of your posts and images use the original name, such as in search engine listings, on trackbacks and more. So if you change the name, all of your old links will break. You might loose a bunch of RSS feeds that used the old links. And also, all of the images in your posts will be missing!

I ran into this issue for a client last week. A popular blog, with an average of 1,500 unique visitor per day, and over 2,100 posts, was essentially broken. Not acceptable.

Because of TypePad’s inept support I was forced to find a solution, which can likely be adapted for use on other hosted blogging systems as well. The answer lies in some simple .htaccess code. Read on to find out more.

First, a rant against TypePad. TypePad doesn’t have live support. At all. Six Apart, the parent company, doesn’t even maintain their own support forums. With no other recourse to solve the issue, I opened an online help ticket.

We were told that the issue was a tough one, and would be looked at by technical support. After a week of back and forth, asking if there was any progress, TypePad finally responded that there was nothing at all they could do.

Sorry, they said, but even though you have been customers for over 5 years, tough luck.

I tried asking @sixapart on Twitter for help. No response whatsoever.

Ouch! I called GoDaddy.com, where the domain name is registered, to see if their live support team had any ideas. While they were helpful and friendly as ever, they didn’t see how to fix the problem. But that’s when I myself realized how to do it.

An .htaccess file is a text-only file that web servers read first, before any other pages on a site. Turns out it’s a common way to fix issues that might occur when you switch your domain name!

In TypePad, all blog posts live in a sub-folder of your main domain, like “my_example”. In this case, the original links, now broken, were www.myexample.com/my_example/my-post.html, and the new links, after changing domain mapping, were blog.myexample.com/my_example/my-post.html.

Very similar links, and a simple replacement: just find anything with the /my_example/ in its address and send it to blog. instead of www.

To create an .htaccess file, all you need is a simple text editor. Open the file, type in your code, and save with the extension .htaccess. You might have to give the file a name, like a.htaccess, but just make sure to remove the preceeding “a” before uploading to your webserver. [More on .htaccess files here and here.]

For this specific redirect, the code in the .htaccess file is the following:

Redirect 301 /my_example/ http://blog.myexample.com/my_example/

.

It worked to fix all the old, cached, search-engine-indexed, mentioned-by-others posts’ links. However, images are a separate line of code.

In TypePad, all images you upload to their severs are stored not in your /my_example/ folder, but in a directory called /.a/

Why? Who knows. But all that means is we need another line in the .htacess file:

Redirect 301 /.a/ http://blog.myexample.com/.a/

.

Upload the file to the root level of your site, and done. Phew. SixApart, please take note, and save other customers some anguish.

I do plan on addressing code design here, so this is an appropriate place for the script to live.

Spry is a relatively new and easy-to-use AJAX library. AJAX use is very common on the web today, one of the technologies that powers what is often referred to as “Web 2.0.”

Basically, the technology allows webpages to change and update without requiring the user to “refresh,” “reload,” or navigate to another page.  For example: Gmail, which updates every incoming mail every so often without user interaction. And saves drafts every so often in the same fashion.

Find the download link and nuts and bolts of using the script after the jump.

The script is based on one I found at the Adobe User to User Bridge Scripting Forum for exporting a CSV file. It will generate a very useful photos.xml from Adobe Bridge, which makes it very easy to add titles, keywords, ratings — all kinds of metadata that one might use in a photo gallery.

The script generates the required XML nodes for each image, such as “path,” “width,” and “height,” calculates appropriate thumbnail width & height per your chosen pixel size, and uses keywords as categories, titles as captions, and allows sorting by rating (stars in Bridge).

Note: this particular script doesn’t take into account CDATA that might exist in your metadata, like ampersands in your title. Thus far, I’ve just avoided using those, but one could also have the script write out a CDATA node for that info instead. Also, a commenter on my old post noted that the script will break if you have a folder nested inside your source folder of images.

Download the script and readme here.

To Use:

The script goes in the folder “StartupScripts” in Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/ (Windows).

(Update: On a Mac, the script goes in Mac HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Bridge CS3 Extensions/Bridge Start Meeting/, at least in CS3.)

Launch Bridge and browse to a folder that contains the files you want in your gallery — the “source” folder.

Choose the menu command “Tools > Export XML for Spry Gallery”.

Type a name for your XML file in the Save dialog box, choose a location, and hit “Save”.

In the dialog box that pops up, enter a max length/width for your thumbnails, in pixels. Some common sizes are “75″ , “100″ or “125″.

Hit “OK”. You should see an alert pop up telling you “XML file successfully created!”