web site

It has been a very interesting week on the web. For those of you who aren't aware, my brothers and I started up a little blog about the Pittsburgh Penguins called I Bleed Black 'n Gold. We started it up at the beginning of this NHL season with the primary goals of staying up to date on team news and stories as well as a means to practice building a site and user community.

The network of Penguins and Pittsburgh sports bloggers is interesting as there are quite a few folks, all willing and most helpful of new blogs. Not that we've been around all that long, but we are now able to provide support and guidance to some of the newer guys as was given to us. Anyhow, we knew it would be important to uniquely position ourselves in this already saturated market. With so many blogs covering scores, stats and generic team news and doing a superb job at it, we looked to the media and entertainment sector. So far this has been a successful choice as we often receive requests to edit, share and create Pens related media for users and other bloggers alike. When we do cover scores or game highlights, posts are typically in the tone of entertainment and uncovering unique points.

In our goal to build interesting and interactive media assets, we've recently been toying around with sound clips. Putting Pens related sound bytes to background beats and seeing what we can come up with. As we cut, spliced and edited clips, it became apparent that a soundboard would be fun to try and create. Building the buttons and images in Flash and making it all function was a piece of cake once adjustments of all the clips were complete. So far we've done soundboards for Evgeni Malkin and Maxime Talbot with more on the way.

Apparently, people are enjoying the soundboards quite a bit. We have seen them pop up in a couple places around the web and just had to mention these two instances.

First, as avid listeners of Pittsburgh's Kiss FM Morning Freak Show radio program, we were blown away when we heard that Mikey and Big Bob decided to utilize the Evgeni Malkin soundboard on air. The resulting gag phone call turned out pretty epic and we were super proud that they actually used our board. Give the show a listen:

A few days after we posted the Malkin board, we finished up and set live the Max Talbot version. Max's was a bit more extensive with almost double the clips. As buzz built and people started checking out the Max board, we were shocked. It turns out that Greg Wyshynski editor of the Puck Daddy blog on Yahoo! Sports decided to drop a link to the Talbot board is his post: Puck Headlines: Preds rookie beefcake; Anaheim lucky or good?

Puck Daddy is one of the most entertaining and widely visited blogs by hockey fans, not to mention it is part of the Yahoo! network. Greg and his team of contributors, Ross McKeon, Sean Leahy, Matt Romig, Dmitry Chesnokov, The Two-Line Pass and Margee keep hockey fans entertained yet extremely informed as they are consistently one of the first to publish breaking news. Long story short, Puck Daddy is highly renown in the hockey world.

We were amazed when we started seeing traffic to I Bleed Black 'n Gold spike like crazy. Not that we check it all that often, but the influx of visitors from the PD link ate up all the bandwidth we had for a couple of hours. It was an honor to be mentioned by Greg Wyshynski himself and we are super glad that people are enjoying both of the soundboards and the IBBnG blog in general. Plenty more to come.

While springtime for many brings about the urge to open up the windows and clean out all the dust that settled from a long winter. To me it was the signal of a time to update Brenton Bairhalter dot com, aka this site. I hope you are enjoying my variation of the "clean" up! It's obviously an ongoing work in progress, but this I can live with.

Thanks to my brother, Brice for creating Twitta-Bear. See him up there? Most people have the renowned Twitter "t" or some variation of the bird, but it's time to move on up the food chain. Thanks Brice! (p.s. here's TB in all his glory / original size: http://tr.im/iWp7)

Stay tuned, I'm finally up to par (or at least bogey-range) with Flash and Action Script 3 and already have some neat things planned. Things that could use some much appreciated, well accepted feedback. Please get in touch if you have any ideas or would like to exchange links, etc. Cheers mates.

My rise to internet fame continues to grow at the staggering pace of a salt-covered snail. I never thought snapping some photos with my trusty LG VX-9400 would help on my journey to online dominance, but think again.

The following email was delivered to my inbox a few days ago...

How easy it is to apply a quick gradient map layer overlay. This one took me about 3.8 seconds. I would probably utilize this technique on a more appropriate photo choice in the future. I believe the optimal use for this method is for drab or overcast outdoor images, but tweaking just a little can add just the right amount of warmth to any darker image.

View the results here

Digital Bootcamp is a technical training center here in Chicago. They specialize in providing top quality, hands on courses in everything from basic html to complete site design.

I finally got started uploading some of the sketching I've been doing lately. The navigation link now has a little content with more to come soon. You can check out the start on the Sketches page.

A little bg. So we went down to the CAR (Chicago Artist Resources) expo a couple of months ago. Among the various free items given out at the tables was a small sketch book provided by Blick Art Supply. Since then I've been drawing away with whatever free time I can muster up.

I will keep the drawings coming whenever I possibly can. Some of these are ideas for Threadless tees that I'm thinking about polishing up, others are just how I'm feeling at that particular time.