NY International Auto Show

I made it a point to go to the NY International Auto Show this year because it's been a while since the last time. So despite the rain, my longer-than-expected doctor's visit and train delays, I made it there at 1pm. It was crowded, but not as packed as past events (probably due to weather & the holiday weekend). The cars that were fenced off were easy to shoot. Thefully exposed ones were a little harder to get pictures of, but all I had to do was wait a few minutes until they cleared up.

The theme this year seemed to be hybrid and electric cars, but I went to get a closer look at all of the muscle car remakes... Shelby GT 500, Camaro SS, Challenger, etc. Most interesting of all was the Camaro exhibit because of the life-size Bumblebee replica from Transformers.

Click here for photos and details about each of the cars I looked at.

These photos have also been uploaded to RCT Performance.

Related: NY Auto Show, Jacob Javits Center, Transformers Movie

Wheels and Tires

RCT Performance just got a couple of new machines to add to their wide variety of services. To promote it on the website, a detailed slideshow was added to the homepage in place of the large photo. A smaller version of the slideshow was duplicated for the Wheels and Tires detail page, where it was wrapped with a detailed description of the machines.

Click Here for Wheels and Tires

Résumé 2009

I finally updated my résumé with a bunch of new items. Over the past 2 years, I added a lot of new technologies, but many of them were not software titles. Instead, it seems like everything went towards web-based services like search engines and Online communities. One of the major goals was to get "SEO" in there. It seems like everything these days is about search engine optimization. I've been to many seminars, read books and applied a lot of that knowledge to all of my sites. I also cleaned up some of the older items like the 3-D animation packages.

Click here for my updated résumé

Exhibition List

Part of the redesign that was done last July involved removing the high-maintenance Exhibitions section. Instead, the news box on the homepage was used to promote upcoming events. There was still a need to archive past events though. So a listing page was just added to the About section. The new page lists all of Kim Eng Yeo's exhibitions back to the beginning. It's a dynamic page driven by an MS Access database for easy storage and entry of each exhibition.

Miniature Opera House

The Miniature Opera House is up again on Frommers.com as Australia traditionally purchased another beginning of the year sponsorship. It's a great boost for traffic because the site gets higher volume during January and February. Also, Australia has always been one of the more successful contests.

Click here for details

Pistilli Grand Manor

Strata-Art Updates

12 recent paintings by Richard Fox have been uploaded to the various galleries of Strata-Art. The homepage and main gallery pages were also updated accordingly. Previously, the main gallery page, like the homepage of last year was made up of a grid of small images that formed a larger one. This was simplified to just one large image with a smaller total file size. Just converting it to one large image already increased the load time because downloading one large file is quicker than downloading many small files that are the same total size as the large file.

Click here for Strata Art

Share This

You may have noticed the new icon under every post labeled "ShareThis." It's something we're looking into implementing on Frommers.com that will allow users to share pages via every major social media site on the Internet with a couple of clicks. I decided to try it out on this blog first since it's a much smaller site. They had a script just for Blogger that was pretty neat. Just by placing it on the page, every post has it's own unique action. The ShareThis code is based on JavaScript's location.href property. So implementing this on a full website will be pretty simple because the code won't change from page to page. On Frommers.com, it'll just be tedious because it has to be added to many pages manually as well as to some backend generating tools.

Into the Seasons

Opening Night Reception

Nightshift 2008

Photos from Hot Import Nights: Nightshift 2008 are up on RCT Performance now. The format is different than previous galleries. This time, it's a medium resolution Picasa slideshow. Having the photos on Picasa has many advantages:

• Reduced development time
• Automatically generated Flash slideshow
• Hi-res downloads
• Hosted content management system
• Plugs into Picasa community

Click here for Nightshift 2008