Posted on November 23rd, 2009, by Aaron Howland
You’ve finally done it. You’ve made a film — most likely a short — and you’ve been accepted to your first film festival. So, what should you expect? Well, first thing’s first. I don’t want to burst your bubble (after all, getting screened at a film festival is a big deal — it really is) but it’s important not to have any illusions about what this means for you as a filmmaker.
Getting into a festival is like any other career achievement. It’s something to enjoy; it’s something to put on your resume; it’s an opportunity to gain some exposure and make some connections. It’s very rarely, however, a giant breakthrough that results in funding for a major production. After all, there are hundreds of film festivals in the United States alone, with thousands of filmmakers screening their work every year, yet when you see commercials for upcoming Hollywood releases, almost none of them were directed by filmmakers who just got discovered at a festival.
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Posted on October 7th, 2009, by Aaron Howland
Still somewhat new to CSS? Below are three suggestions to help improve your coding:
1) External, Not Internal
There are three ways to apply CSS styles to your web site:
- Use Internal CSS
- Use Inline CSS
- Use an External Style Sheet
Internal (or “embedded”) CSS is a set of CSS properties specified within the head tags of your page. For instance, if you want the background of your page to be black, you could do this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Web Site</title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: #000;
}
</style>
</head>
Inline CSS is similar, except that the properties are applied directly to specific elements within the page. For instance, if you want one paragraph to have a 20px margin above it, you could do this:
<p style="margin-top: 20px">This is my sample paragraph.</p>
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Posted on August 13th, 2009, by Albert M. Chan
One of the big complaints I hear from ethnic actors is the problem of typecasting. A Latina actress friend of mine once told me about the problems she was having with a director. “He didn’t have to explicitly say it, but I knew that he wanted me to be that sassy, finger-snapping Latina with attitude,” she complained. “And I didn’t want to do it.”
As an actor of East Asian heritage, I have been well aware that East Asian men have historically been typecast as martial artists and gangsters, and are typically not romantically involved with anyone. East Asian women, on the other hand, are usually typecast as prostitutes or as the “hot” girlfriend of a Caucasian character. In the past few years though, roles for East Asian actors have become more varied to include professional characters such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists, but there is still a ways to go for the roles to truly reflect the full range of the East Asian experience.
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Posted on June 7th, 2009, by Aaron Howland
Most experienced WordPress users could spend hours discussing their favorite—and least favorite—WordPress plugins. If you’re still fairly new to WordPress, though, you might be wondering which plugins you really need.
Below is a breakdown of four WordPress plugins that all new users should consider installing. There are a lot more great plugins than the ones listed below, but the following list represents the core group of plugins I find essential to maintaining the optimal health and functionality of a WordPress blog.
BackUpWordPress
With traditional, static web sites, it’s easy to keep backups of all your files right on your own computer. With interactive, database-driven sites, however, the content is always changing, so you consistently need to create new backup files. For instance, if you have a WordPress blog, all of the site’s posts, pages, comments, and registered users are stored in a database on your hosting provider’s server. Because of this, it’s important to make regular backups of everything stored in the site’s database. That way, if anything goes wrong—if someone hacks into your site or your hosting provider accidentally wipes out all your files—you’ll be able to restore your web site with relative ease.
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Posted on May 17th, 2009, by Aaron Howland
If you have a WordPress blog on your own web site (not through WordPress.com) you should configure both a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap in order to provide indexing information to search robots.
If you don’t know anything about configuring robots.txt files, I encourage you to learn more about them by visiting http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html. If you don’t know anything about configuring XML sitemaps, I encourage you to learn more about them by visiting http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php.
Below is an outline of special considerations that WordPress users need to be aware of when setting up these files for their blogs.
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