Charles Buchwald and Friends is proud to be donating free hosting to Salt Spring Community Education. They have a great, active, friendly slate of classes of all kinds, including Photo Editing for Photographers. They are another one of our community’s wonderful non-profit, charitable societies. If you are on Salt Spring Island, check out their ever changing list of courses, lecture series and other learning opportunities.
We’ve added a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to this site.
We’ll add questions and answers we get regularly… or feel free to ask about anything related to web design and development, online marketing, or software development and we’ll do our best to answer.
Working with Saltspring Community Education, Charles is offering two courses for the late Spring session:
- Photo Editing for Photographers
- Websites for Community Groups
Register for a course with a friend, and one of you gets 10% off!
Our latest, greatest project went live recently! ChildHonouring.org is up and ready for you. Please visit and check out all the wonderful information on Raffi’s transformative philosophy, including free book downloads, free songs, and lots more. CB&F has been thrilled to be a part of this effort, even so far as to donate 10 percent of our fees back to the Centre in the form of pro bono work. So, please spread the word about this site and these fascinating, world-changing ideas!
Charles Buchwald is offering a course through Salt Spring Community Education for the Fall 2009 schedule. The class, called Photoshop for Photographers, is focused on basic and intermediate photo editing using Adobe’s Photoshop software.
Here’s the course description from Community Ed:
Learn how to edit photos with Adobe Photoshop. Improve composition, contrast and colour; fix defects such as redeye or incorrect exposure. Learn about key concepts and techniques including color space, resolution, file types, and image noise. The class will edit a variety of sample photos to create beautiful, powerful images. The lab will have PCs available. Contact the instructor if you wish to bring your own laptop. Prerequisite: intermediate computer experience; ability to open, save and organize files
8 Wednesdays
Oct 7, 14, 21, 28, Nov 4, 18, 25, Dec.2
7-8:30pm
GISS Room S111
The class filled quickly, but if you are interested please stay in touch, as it may be offered again in the Spring 2010 schedule.
If you are have registered for the course, please check this new section of this site for class information, examples, tips and resources… or leave a comment below… and we’ll see you soon!
Former Salt Spring resident Aaron Hanford is offering Joomla! CMS courses in Vancouver. Aaron has lots and lots of experience with the software, and has great people skills, so I’m sure his classes will be informative and fun. Check out the class site for more.
Registering .ca domains can often be confusing. Here’s a quick, “how to” guide.
Registering a .com, .org, .net or many other top level domains is quite straitforward: you sign up with a registrar, pay them around $9 to $20 depending on their services and the domain, and you are set.
But with Canadian .ca domain names, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) adds some extra steps. It goes like this:
- After you register with your domain name registrar and purchase your .ca domain you receive an email from CIRA.
- The email contains a link, a username and a password.
- You must follow the link, user the username and password, and confirm your legal status in Canada, your address, and other information. They’ll ask you if you want to establish an account or membership with them, although it’s not necessary to complete the domain name process.
So, it’s not a scam, it’s not particularly complicated… and it is essential to confirm on time with CIRA, if you want to get up and running with your .ca domain name.
CIRA has more info for new registrants.
Tips? Questions? Comments? Please leave me a message in the comments for this article.
P.S. For registering .ca domain names, and .com, .org., .net, and others, I’ve used v2reg.com for several years, and I appreciate their simple, inexpensive service. There are many others, including Godaddy and Network Solutions for example, that work well, but because they complicate their offerings with lots of addons and up sells, my experience has been that they are more trouble than they are worth.
Charles Buchwald & Friends is proud to announce our latest web site development effort. The WOLF Kids school, here on Salt Spring Island, has recently debuted a site that is both a information portal for their program, and a communication tool for the participants in the group.
WOLF Kids web site
The WOLF Kids program is a very exciting “nature immersion” program on the leading edge of educational curricula. Here’s an excerpt from the program description:
Wolf Kids offers a nature immersion and home school program where students interact with their natural environment through adventure, challenges, and a lot of fun. A core principal of the program focuses on experience in nature, as it has always been fundamental to the education of young developing human beings. For instance, climbing trees and running, tracking animals, building shelter and watercraft, making fire, discovering edible and medicinal plants, students acquire a keen knowledge of the taxonomy of flora and fauna, as well as traditional outdoor skills. These activities lead to an ecological integrity, which answers the call for affirmation and maximization of the potential of our children. Their classroom is the forest, ocean, fields, streams, and mountains. Their teachers are the otters, birds, shifting winds, and the people who make up our tribe. This full immersion program, utilizes both scientific and indigenous studies. Through hands-on outdoor experiences, students develop an ingrained knowledge and awareness of the natural world, and their place in it. They become eager and quick learners, the stewards and unshakeable voices of our environment, in whatever they choose to do for the future.
Please check out the site and leave a comment to let us know what you think!
Charles Buchwald & Friends staff will be attending a new workshop on Salt Spring Island this weekend. Here are the details:
The Work That Reconnects: Discovering Our Ecological Self
Sunday, July 19th
“our pain is a measure of our love for our world”
The Work that Reconnects helps us to connect with our deepest emotions about Earth in a respectful and supportive environment. By recognizing and experiencing the profound feelings we have about what is happening on our planet, we develop insight into our radical interdependence. From this understanding comes hope and empowerment!
Take it from me: writing manuals, guides and instructions is an art.
I’ve written, illustrated and/or designed a number of manuals, including the successful Park Tool School manual, a guide to the Automated Flight Following system for the BC Ministry of Forests, and many others. I’ve taught, as a university teachers’s assistant, in community education, and in secondary school. I’ve co-invented first-of-its-kind educational software and worked on several educational technology initiatives. And I’ve taught canoeing and rock climbing and worked as a ski instructor.
So here are some tips for writing useful instructional or support materials…
- Introduce and sum up your materials with what entrepreneurs call an “elevator pitch”. In sixty seconds or less make a pointed summary of your main point or points in a logical, memorable, concise way. If you can’t say it in a few paragraphs or a short time, then how is your audience going to remember it?
- For consumers, aim for an 8th grade reading level. This is the average in North America. This means it has to be “short, sweet and simple”. Paragraphs should be around 3 or 4 sentences. Sentences should be around 8 or 10 words at most. And words should be short, too—no fancy, multi-syllabic stuff.
- Repeat the important points three times. Your audience won’t absorb it without saying it several times. Repetition drives the point home and increases retention and three times is optimum. (See what I did there?)
- Use illustrations instead of photos. Clear, black and white line drawings reproduce more clearly than photos. They also eliminate distracting details, thereby increasing comprehension and retention. Photos may seem less expensive or easier, but drawings convey the important information more clearly, concisely and memorably.
- Typography and layout are important. It’s not so much a matter of making it look good, as it is optimizing reader understanding and memory retention. Help your learners by using a qualified and experienced graphic designer, or at least a professional template.
- Create a “teacher edition” while you are making the student or consumer version. Any good layout will have some white space—use this with another digital layer of information to add notes for an instructor or tech support person. This can be printed at the same time, with a separate plate, or as a digital print.
- Use a single folded sheet or a spiral binding so your work can lie flat in use. This is especially important for user manuals, where your reader may be performing a task while reading your materials.
A few simple points like these can make the difference between instructions or a manual that will help and support your user versus one that will frustrate and discourage. Often these materials are your users first contact with your support system. Leave them with a positive feeling about how you take their enthusiasm for your product or service seriously and with care, and the effort will be well repaid.