So what’s the difference?

Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform that was developed as a way to add animation, video, audio, and other interactive elements to web pages. Viewing Flash content requires the use of a free plug-in. Developers must embed the Flash content into the HTML document, which means that the Flash content is independent of the other content on the page.

JavaScript is a lightweight, and open-source scripting/programming language designed to add interactivity to HTML pages. Unlike Flash, support for JavaScript is built right into all major web browsers without the need for additional plug-ins. JavaScript works by manipulating HTML content, which means that all content on the page is seamlessly integrated.

Why do we use JavaScript?

Firstly, JavaScript has become immensely powerful and easy to use with the development of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc. jQuery, our library of choice, is fast, concise, and versatile. It allows us to rapidly add complex interactivity to webpages without spending a lot of time. jQuery is also an open-source project with many developers working tirelessly to improve it each day.

The Web was meant to be an open system, and to use open-source tools is to follow in that virtue. I that same vein, JavaScript/jQuery is FREE. Flash (as a tool) can be an expensive initial investment and also expensive to maintain as upgrades are released over the years.

Another problem with Flash is that the required plug-ins to support Flash content aren’t available on all platforms, namely iPhone, which means that you could be limiting your content from a huge portion of web users by using Flash. Meanwhile, jQuery works on these devices with no problem. Furthermore, even if JavaScript is disabled in a user’s browser, because JavaScript is unobtrusive in nature (integrated content), those users still have access to all of your site’s content.

Finally, JavaScript is universal. As a web project changes hands from one developer to another, no special applications are required to view or edit JavaScript files. Additionally, JavaScript is a widely known language, therefore, future modifications should be able to be made by nearly any web developer handling the project.

These are just some of the reasons we’ve chosen to use JavaScript. Hopefully next time you’re looking to add some interactive elements into your site, you’ll take a look at using JavaScript & jQuery instead of Flash.

1. Broad Oak Energy, Inc. – founded 2005 – David B. Braddock ‘74, JD Braddock ‘03, Cory Parrott ‘03
2. Public Properties, LLC – founded 2000 – Ben Butler ‘85
3. Joubert Law Firm – founded 2002 – John “Johnny” Joubert ‘93
4. General Informatics, LLC – founded 2001 – Mohit Vij ‘97
5. Ryan Gootee General Contractors, LLC – founded 2004 – Ryan Gootee ‘96
6. Gatorworks Web Design, LLC – founded 2004 – Brian Rodriguez ‘06, Charlie Davis ‘03
7. Construction Management Solutions, LLC – founded 2005 – Kyle G. Flettrich ‘05
8. Doerle Food Services, LLC – founded 1950 – Carolyn Doerle ‘80
9. Petro TV, LLC – founded 2005 – Ethan J. Cheramie ‘95
10. Worley Catastrophe Response – founded 1976 – Michael Worley ‘84

According to LSU Stephenson Entrepreneurship Institute Director of Development Jill Roshto, the LSU 100 celebrates the success of LSU graduates and recognizes the impact of LSU on the local, regional and national economies. LSU 100 is co-hosted by LSU and LSU SEI. The full list of winners is available for viewing at www.lsu100.com/honorees.

Our company met the following requirements for inclusion in the LSU 100:

• Has been in business for five years or more
• Has had verifiable revenues of $100,000 or more for the last calendar year
• A former LSU student owns at least 50 percent of the company or is a CEO, president or managing partner
• Operates in a manner consistent with the mission of LSU and LSU SEI

We are honored to be a part of a list of such distinguished companies. We’d like to thank our friends, family, unbelievable staff, and of course all of our amazing clients!

The conference is billed as the most prominent Republican event prior to the next national convention. Top Republican law makers from around the country are expected to be at the conference in June 2011.

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC)

Scheduled for April 8-11 in New Orleans, the SRLC is the most prominent GOP gathering outside of the national convention. Confirmed speakers include Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Tax Gov. Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and more. The SRLC will be carried on Fox and CNN, and Sean Hannity will broadcast live. More than 3,500 people are expected to participate.

We are pleased to have had such a large impact on the national conference.

SRLC Website Screenshot

With more than 60,000 entries annually, the national ADDY® Awards are the world’s largest and arguably toughest advertising competition. The ADDY® Awards represent the true spirit of creative excellence by recognizing all forms of advertising from media of all types, creative by all sizes and entrants of all levels from around the world. The American Advertising Federation conducts the ADDY® Awards through its 200 member advertising clubs and 15 districts. It is the only creative awards program administered by the advertising industry, for the industry.

This year’s local competition produced 446 entries from Baton Rouge professionals and LSU students. Judging was held January 16, 2010 at Lamar Advertising. Renee Miller, President/Creative Director of The Miller Group in Los Angles, Ca.; Jim Dudley, Broadcast, Copywriter, Creative Director of Dudley Creative in Roanoke, Va.; and Jimmy Ball, Art Director/Designer, Photographer, Interactive of Jimmy Ball Design in Dallas, Texas, served as judges for the competition.

Gatorworks brought home a Silver ADDY award for their client project, Santa’s Online Wishlist. Santa’s Online Wishlist is an interactive website where children can dress a snowman, have fun in Santa’s Toy Factory, view Santa’s Mailroom, and best of all send emails to Santa Claus. The website took approximately 6 months to hand-draw, custom illustrate, and then custom animate using Adobe Flash software. David Link, Creative Director and lead designer/developer on the project, said, “It’s really nice to be recognized for our hard work, especially in a community as talented as AAF.”

At the red carpet ceremony, 41 gold ADDY®s, 50 silver ADDY®s, three Special Judge’s Awards, a Mosaic Award, Best of Show and Best of Category awards were presented. Advertising students were also recognized with 17 gold ADDY®s, 19 silver ADDY®s, a Best of Show and Special Judges’ Awards. ADDY® 2010* also recognized professional excellence on the business side of the advertising industry with its Pinnacle Awards.

Mallery Mele leads the king cake cooking class

After the shop tour it was time to make our homemade king cakes. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Mele Printing bakes thousands of cookies each month for their clients. Many of their clients plan to receive their printing order on a Monday or a Wednesday so they’ll be sure to also receive a nice batch of fresh cookies. Anyway, each of us was given a log of dough with cinnamon rolled in the middle. We worked our dough in the form of a circle and threw it in the oven.

Once we took the cakes out of the oven, we dug out a few holes with our fingers on the bottom of the cakes to create a canal to insert fillings. I put strawberry and cream cheese in mine. Then, we flipped the cakes over and drenched them in hot icing and topped them with sugar. It was a masterpiece!

The event was an innovative way for Mele’s clients to learn more about their company all the while celebrating the rich history and culture of Southern Louisiana. We’re proud that Mele Printing is one of our vendors, and we look forward to fostering a long-term relationship with them!

Brian Rodriguez bakes his first Mardi Gras King Cake

Check out a small sampling of some of the websites we’ve designed, developed, and maintained throughout the last year.

Giraphic Apparel: http://www.giraphicapparel.com

Giraphic Prints: http://giraphicprints.com/

Giraphic Blog: http://thinkgiraphic.com/

Hoist & Crane Service Group: http://www.hoistcrane.com/

LA Office of Juvenile Justice:  http://www.ojj.la.gov

LA Dept. of Veterans Affairs: http://www.vetaffairs.la.gov/

Louisiana Finance Assoc: http://www.louisianafinanceassociation.com/

Metropolitan Gastroenterology Assoc: http://www.metrogi.com/

Republican Party of LA: www.lagop.com

Rotolo’s Restaurant: http://www.rotolos.com/

Santa’s Online Wishlist: http://www.santasonlinewishlist.net

Southern Republican Leadership Conference: http://www.srlc2010.com

Stein Engineers: http://www.steinengineers.com

Surgir Real Estate Development: http://www.surgirllc.com/

The Tradewind Report: http://www.tradewindreporting.com

Tiger Bookmarket: http://www.tigerbookmarket.com/

VasoCare Healthcare: http://www.calmrestlesslegs.net/

VoxBox: http://www.yourvoxbox.com

Zymeaux Mobile Marketing: http://www.zymeaux.com

Tickets: 225.216.0660, theparktheatre.com
$10 – AAF-BR and SME-GBR members
$25 – General Public

The social media revolution has changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. Learn social media techniques that will improve your sales from a master marketer.

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. In so doing, he learned that the Internet offers up potential via these free tools for businesses and individuals alike to develop their own brand. Gary will touch on his core themes for best utilizing these tools, including why listening is more important than speaking, the importance of authenticity in business, and what it means to “scale your caring.” Learn more about Gary at garyvaynerchuk.com, or catch him on Twitter where he has over 840,000 followers!

Join Gary at a Wine and Cheese Reception before the event from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost to attend the reception is $250.
Information courtesy of AAFBR.

At the end of my talk, the students played a multimedia presentation that they had put together as a going away gift for Ms. Trammie. The presentation was put together very very well, and I think I was in the presence of some future business owners in the room.

Congratulations, students, on all your hard work. I wish you all the best!

11:30AM
The techies are in the LaunchPad conference room planning out the technical aspect of the project. Matt Tritico is jumping from the concept meetings to the technical meetings to try to keep an open dialogue between both groups. Our goal is to have a system by 4PM today. We’re thinking WordPress might be the technology to use.

11:40AM
Tritico just ordered pizza- will be here in an hour! Gatorworks will host the system.

11:55AM
Chris Schultz is heading up the concept meeting, and we’re going through our site architecture. Chris’ wife just walked in to join us! Here’s the temporary link for testing our system: http://www.gatortesting.net/schooldistrict/

12:10PM
The proposed domain name is nolaschoolvolunteers.org

12:25PM
The email address info@nolaschoolvolunteers.org has been set up. Our concept meeting will be meeting with the technical guys after lunch. Lunch should be here within the next 15-20 minutes I think. We’re going to purchase a WordPress theme to use.

12:40PM
We’re breaking for lunch right now. We’ll be back online in a bit!

1:00PM
We’re back at it- both the concept group and technical group is now coming together to discuss our ideas. We have 3 hours to code the system!

1:20PM
Chris Schultz just finished briefing the room on what our concept meeting discussed. Now Stanford Rosenthal is briefing the room on what the techies discussed in their meeting. I think the site architecture is pretty much finalized. We’re discussing specific WordPress plugins to use, etc.

Our goal is to thank the past and current volunteers of the NOLA public schools, report the latest happenings of volunteer projects in the schools, and help mobilize new volunteers for the NOLA public school system.

1:30PM
We’re getting ready to break out into teams again. We’re going to have different teams assigned to developing the various WP plugins we’ll need to achieve our goals. We’ll have copy writers working on gathering content. The energy is great in the room…people are stepping up and taking ownership of various pieces of the project.

2:10PM
The theme has been selected, and we’re getting ready to install on the server now. Thanks to Marc Juneau and Chris Schultz with the help on selecting the theme. We have several dev groups working on the WP plugins, and Andrew Larimer is going to work on modifying the design.

2:20PM
The theme is now installed and activated at http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org. We’re working on customizing the site according to the site map and architecture we’ve put together.

2:55PM
Things are coming together. We’re going to re-group in about 5 minutes to see what needs to happen during our final hour of development. I’m working on a press release that will communicate what we’ve done for our local community and help encourage technology professionals to join us for our next BarCamp. We are talking about planning a BarCamp in Baton Rouge in the Spring of 2010!

3:40PM
I just finished draft 1 of the press release, and I’m feeling pretty good about what was accomplished today. We have about 20 minutes or so left, and I think we’ll be in pretty good shape. Tung Ly has been documenting everything we’re doing so Troy Peloquin of the Recovery School District will be able to take this system moving forward and be able to update the content on a regular basis.

4:15PM
We have some guys working overtime over here at BarCampNOLA. However, the project is just about finished, and we just need to populate with content now. Check out http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org.

4:30PM
Ok, I’m going to go ahead and call it a day. We did it… we developed a website in ONE day in support of the New Orleans public school system. BarCampNOLA would not have been possible without our sponsors: Voodoo Ventures, LaunchPad, Humid Beings, Gatorworks, and Newstwit.com.

Today was truly inspiring.