Take THIS Old High School Guidance Counselor!

Got this email recently:

Hi Mr. Anderson, i am a local photojournalist looking to take pictures of a Cartoonist doing his job for an educational career guide called Career Cruising. if possible, i’d welcome the opportunity to take photos of you at work for this great educational tool. please contact me at your convenience.

Neat, huh?

The photographer came over this afternoon and took a slew of pics of me inking, coloring, pretending to talk on the phone, and thinking of ideas. (Lemme tell you, that last one’s a stunner!)

She asked a lot of questions, and the experience, albeit a little embarrassing, was interesting. The photographer was very complimentary about my work, and really sweet around the kids.

I was told a few times, very earnestly, that I have the coolest job in the world. And I gotta say, it’d be difficult to disagree.

Anyway, at the end I took a pic of her taking a pic of me just for fun.

Img 2920

We traded looks at each other’s digital pics and said good day.

Word is my pics will be up on their site within a few months. I’ll letcha know…

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Andertoons 2.0 – URLs

One of the best ideas my web team came up with is something called mod_rewrite:

This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching.

Basically, it takes complicated URLs like http://blog.andertoons.com/search.php?kwords=sales&browseall=false&resultsfrom=1&cat=Sales (showing sales-themed cartoons) to something much simpler like http://blog.andertoons.com/cartoons/sales/.

Now instead of having to solely use the site itself for navigation, you can search and browse via your browser’s address bar.

Looking for the business cartoons page? Add /cartoons/business/ after http://blog.andertoons.com.

Wanna search for cartoons about meetings? Just add /search/meetings/ at the end.

Need cartoon #4002? Add /cartoon/4002/.

No more looooooong URLs. No more remembering to add .php at the end. No more confusion.

And the best part? All the old URLs people bookmarked or have linked to still work, and are automatically redirected to the current address.

Simple, easy, intuitive URLs. Nice!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,