Photos: withreservation

Sorry Pedro, We're voting for Vince

For as long as we've known Vince he's been a source of fashion inspiration. Vince lights up a room wherever he goes. His charm and humility is sprinkled with grace and a true love of people. He's from the old school when it comes to looking your best wherever you are, if you see him on a plane, he'll be decked out to the nines.

We got word this week via kibbe (who claims she likes music better than we do, which obviously is impossible, but that's another subject for another time) that Esquire magazine is holding a contest for the "Best Dressed Real Man 2008", and wouldn't you know it, Vince is a contestant.

Esquire's wording of the contest is great, best dressed real man, and as you will see when you visit there are a ton of entrants. None of those other doods matter though, as far as we're concerned its all about Prince Vince.

And whether he wins or not, he'll always be our nomination for best dressed real man. So head on over to Esquire with about 50,000 of your closest friends and Vote for Vince Anderson!

Related

• Vince Anderson on Aenonfire
• Esquire Best Dressed Man 2008

Transforming Culture

Artistic Call To Arms

We were tipped off to an event this week by reader Billy Hollis, about an exciting symposium that is taking place in Austin, TX focusing on art and artists and how it relates and integrates with church and community. This was a very encouraging bit of news to find out about.

One of the greatest concerns that I have had for quite a while now has been the over commercialization of the arts, and in particular when it comes to Christian art, whether it's visual or aural. Being an artist myself, I've never lacked having opinions, that being said, I am glad that there are people who enjoy mainstream music and art, for the most part I'm not into it because it doesn't move me.

It reminds me of the talk Sam Phillips gives Johnny Cash in "Walk The Line" when Johnny is singing a mainstream gospel song to him in his audition. Phillips isn't buying it and doesn't believe that Cash believes what he's singing- not that Cash doesn't believe in God, but does he truly feel what he's singing, is he making it his own?

Without opening a can of worms here [which I probably am anyway] I think for something to be felt, for something to be lasting, it has to be created transparently, and presented in the same manner. For me, raw and ugly is far better than neat and tidy. As artists we need to take more chances, make failure an option, lose the safe zones and formulaic pre-packaged, plastic deliverables.

It may be shocking to some, but there are plenty of non Christian artists, musicians, poets, [insert next thing here] that deliver better material than someone who performs a song and slaps Jesus's name on it. Are you selling Jesus or do you actually feel Jesus? More often than not, I see the former. I can clearly spot this by the times that I hear someone who really feels it.

I think these are important things to consider when we take a close look at the artwork that we are creating, and to what degree our viewers and/or listeners are being impacted by our work. If we feel it, they should too. They may not like it, it may not be their taste, but they should be able to see or hear our passion.

So, If any of you are in the Austin area, or can make it to the event, do what you can to get there it sounds like it will be a good one. And if you do make it, let us know your thoughts and reactions

Feedburner and Aenonfire

New Feed Links

We have started to run our feeds through Feedburner to enable better tracking and statistics. If you have subscribed to our RSS Feeds, please note the feed links have changed. See below for the new locations. The RSS Page has also been updated with the changes.

• 01 Main Feed article + feature content
• 02 Articles Feed the articles content
• 03 Features Feed the features content
• 04 Blog Feed the blog content

Related

• Feedburner

Aenonfire showcased on Nice Stylesheet

CSS

Looking at our site stats yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see some visits coming from nice stylesheets. It so happens that we are being showcased alongside some other fantastic sites with great designs.

We'd like to extend our thanks to Deron Sizemore and Nice Stylesheet!

Head on over and pay him a visit and drop us a vote if ya dig how we do.

Related

• Nice Stylesheet
• Nice Stylesheet > Minimalistic [Some fantastic designs]
• Nice Stylesheet > Clean & Clear

Aenonfire icon for your iPhone

The Mission

Eagerly last Friday after work I went down to the soho Apple store and picked up a spankin' new 16gb iPhone. I had been trying to hold out until the 3g was available, but that didn't seem to be happening anytime soon, (although who knows with Apple just check any kind of rumor site) so once they updated the memory to 16gb I figured I'd take the plunge.

Which reminds me a funny side note I have to mention- I called Verizon to make sure that I wasn't going to get nailed with some mysterious fee or charge by switching to AT&T (even though my contract has been up for a good 5 months now). So I called and got a phone rep, I asked him about my account and he said everything was fine, but asked why I was switching carriers. I told him "I just got an iPhone and want to get it activated". His response was so hilarious I just have to use the special blockquote style for this one:

I couldn't keep from laughing when he said that. But wait there's more. After hanging up with him, I went to start registering the phone and came to a screen where I was to put my account information from Verizon and one field asked for my password. I wasn't sure if I needed that or, for that matter what password it would be. So, I fired up the Treo and called Verizon again. Me:"Hi, I am switching carriers and want to find out if there is a special password that I'm supposed to use, a registration process is asking me for one". The Verizon lady said "No, you don't need one, and can I ask why you are leaving"? Me:"I got an iPhone". Enter special blockquote:

Dang! A little jadedness from the Verizon camp about iPhones eh?

Clippin'

Last nite I decided that I needed to make an webclip icon for Aenonfire. It's not rocket science, just create the image you want to use, size it accordingly- on this there is much discussion on what size yields the best results, the short answer is not to follow apple's recommendations and to use something larger. I set the Aenonfire size to 129x129 px. Save your image as a .png file, name it "apple-touch-icon.png" and upload it to your sites public directory. Then when you visit your site just add a bookmark in safari and choose "Add to Home Screen". Safari will recognize your file just as it would a favicon.

That's all she wrote.

Related

• Apple Sample [note dimensions]
• Apple iPhone Dev Center
• Playground Blues [Size Info]

Revolution NYC

Shared Obsessiveness

"I know I probably sound a little obsessive right now, but we have waited so long for this day."

That, Jay my friend, I can empathize with, having said pretty much the same thing. We share in the excitement of the Revolution NYC crew in the redesign and launch of their spankin' new site.

Hats off to designer Chris Ammons. We're also really feelin' the staff photos by Casey Curry, and Rose Callahan. Big up to Marc Brown for steppin' up to the plate on the flash. Here's to a blessed and prosperous 08'.

Step on over and give em' a visit.

Related

• Revolution NYC
• Chris Ammons
• Casey Curry
• Rose Callahan

Where To Start

Yeah, where to start? That's a good question. Today as I'm writing this blog entry my mind is just swimming with thoughts. I'm thinking back to the year 2004 when the Lord gave me the direction to start this whole venture. Maybe I should tell you all a bit about that.

The first event so to speak happened when I was at church at the altar after service. Honestly, I can't tell you what the reason for the altar call was, but I can tell you that at that point of my life (2004) I was pretty much at my lowest. My freelance business was really hit and miss and each gig that I got just covered the bills that piled up when there wasn't a gig the month before. There were many services that I ended up walking to in the dead of New York January winter because I didn't have the train fare.

I remember one particular walk back home after a tuesday nite service in January. We had a blizzard and the streets were so quiet because of the pile-up of snow. Well, I was walking home and had the weight of the world on my shoulders and I just started to break down and cry, and by cry I mean snot down the nose type of crying. I yelled out to God "When am I going to get out of this!" It was just one of those time periods.

Back At The Altar

So back to the altar. I remember standing there with my eyes closed and something happened. This thought came into my mind about my freelance business. It came out of nowhere. Now, just a little background about my freelance biz. I had been working freelance since 1998 first doing photography and album design work and then later web design. I loved it, and I cherished it. Even though sometimes rent wasn't getting paid I held onto it with every fiber of my being.

The next thing that happened was something that I don't say lightly. I felt the Lord speak with me, it was in my heart and He said "what makes you think that if you give me your business that I won't give it back to you?" At that point I just about fell down on the floor from the mere fact that He had communicated with me, but I didn't do that. I was given courage by that and said to the Lord "Ok, you can have it, I give it to you, whatever you want to do with it".

Fast Forward

It was about three months after that event that the big one took place. Again, I was at the altar after service and again, I can't remember the particular reason for the altar call. But I do remember what happened explicitly. A complete and total surge of information was inputed into me, it came so fast that I couldn't keep up with it. It started: "Aenonfire, online magazine..." followed by many things that as I mentioned I couldn't keep up with. I've never experienced anything like that before. What was just absolutely crazy about it was "Aenonfire".

I came up with that name quite a time before all of this happened and honestly I had no idea what I was going to do with it, it just seemed cool. lol. But here it was in full force with direction behind it. Hindsight now shows me that even though I'm working full time presently, the first event where I layed my freelance business out before God was the foundation for the magazine. It's as if I finally got to the point where I let God in and allowed Him to take it over completely. This was one of the hardest steps I'd ever had to take because I had a very twisted perception of who God was.

Prior to all of this I had the idea that God was someone who wanted to spoil everyones fun and if He did tell anyone to do something, well it most certainly wasn't going to be fun. I had this concept that the talents, the creative things that I enjoyed in my life were somehow separate from Him and if I was to fully give all of that to Him, He was definitely going to take it away and make me be a missionary or evangelist. It was so ingrained in my mind that once someone becomes a Christian that they were then to completely leave everything in their past- good or bad.

What I didn't realize was that God is an investor. He makes wise investments, not only that but He helps out so that they become fruitful. As creatives, God has given us these abilities so that they will grow and prosper. Furthermore, He gave us these things that we absolutely live for. Artists live for art, Musicians live for music, Writers live to write and on down the line. That passion that we have for creating came from Him and He wants us to go for it, but most importantly He wants us to do it along side Him, it all has to start and end with Him.

Shouts

I want to thank those who have played a pivotal part in this magazine whether its encouragement, inspiration or lending expertise. Most of all I thank the Lord for this gig, it blows me away just thinking about it, if I had to pick one myself I couldn't have come up with one this good. So as my friend Marlon says "Let's do the thing!"

Austin Baby, Austin...Honestly!

Pardon my Austin Powers pun there...

This is just a quick announcement that I'll be at the South by Southwest conference this year in Austin, TX. I will be attending the Interactive event which runs from March 7 - 11. I'm lookin' forward to some drop dead awesome Tex Mex food, oh yeah the conference too, but the black beans and guacamole, at least at this point, are running an extremely close second place to the conference.

If any of you are planning on attending, drop me a note and let me know. It would be great to meet up and see some new faces.

Back in tha' day

Aenonfire magazine has undergone a good amount of structural changes since its conception. Having used Wordpress for years and prior to the building of the magazine, I thought that would be the first logical path to take given my experience with it. At the time however, I did take a look at a good number of content management systems out there.

Moveable Type was the first cms that I used before Wordpress, and while it did have some nice features, my days with the cms were largely involved with keeping track of hundreds of templates and rebuilding every single time I made a change. Even though MT has since taken care of the rebuild issue(and is now free to boot), I wasn't very interested in embracing it again.

This is the one! Doh! I guess not...

I did a lot of investigation into different cms platforms from php to perl to ruby on rails. Just when I thought that I might have found something that would work better, it would inevitably not have something that I needed, or on the flip side, have way more than was needed, which seems to be the plague of many systems. Then I came across a book (Weblog Solutions) co-authored by a friend of mine: Chris J Davis, who oddly enough co-authored the Wordpress chapter and has since moved on to Habari. That book has a chapter about Expression Engine, written by the talented Simon Collison.

Keeping coffee stains off of the book

I had read about Expression Engine before from some of the other great designers like Mark Boulton and Andy Clarke but prior to this I hadn't taken it for a spin, in part because I was looking for open source solutions. Well, Simon does an excellent job in his EE chapter and I ended up reading the whole thing and taking copious notes while in a starbucks/barnes & nobel and couldn't wait to get back home to try it out.

Proceed to check-out

While extremely excited to embrace Expression Engine from what I had just learned about it, I wasn't exactly excited about rebuilding the entire magazine all over again. Thankfully, once I get amped about something I tend to take the bull by the horns (for better or worse) and dig in. There were alot of eureka moments while reading Simons chapter and a wealth of inspiration and possibilities that opened up to me because of how powerful Expression Engine is, armed with that I took out the debit card and purchased a commercial license and never looked back.

The Benefits

In short, I am elated to report it only took me 1 month to build the mag back up from scratch using Expression Engine. Expression Engine does so many things that require plugins with Wordpress. But one of the greatest strengths that EE has in my opinion is that it lets you accomplish what you set out to do and does not make a profuse amount of decisions about how you will display your content. EE gives you the info and you decide what you want to do with it. It works with you like a mac. Which I can see why we as designers eat it up, its flexible enough for us and extensible for programmers.