Photographed this past fall, NYU Dental School’s new Oral and Urgent Care suite struck me in how much it reminded me of the house in North by Northwest.

Vandamm House, North by Northwest

The house in the movie, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, never existed in real life. The exteriors were painted mattes composited with live action foreground images.

NYU Dental School’s new suites:

Larger versions of the last two images are on my web site in the Architecture>Commercial gallery, here and here.

For the past few weeks I had a ShareThis button on the blog. First on posts viewed singly and then on all posts displayed on the home page. ShareThis allows readers to forward content to other services (email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) I went with ShareThis because visually it was the least noxious of similar services.

How’d it work it? Neither here nor there. It saw a bit of use by readers but not enough to justify keeping it on the site. Overall, having looked at number of these services, I think they all suffer from overkill. Most don’t let you edit the number of links provided. So, it’s common for them to present 30-50 links, the majority of them being too obscure to warrant inclusion. I also think that many in the heavy social media user crowd will already have plug-ins for their web browsers negating the need for sharing buttons.

In other blog news, I’ve made some updates this morning:

• The sidebar links and information now appear on every page.
• The sidebar now scrolls with the page (this allows it to be visible via scrolling if the browser window is shorter than the sidebar column and it means the sidebar will not overlap the blog footer.)
• Posts viewed singly now have navigation at the bottom allowing for easy movement to the next or to the previous post.
• I got rid of that pesky, tiny, smiley face which was showing up in the footer. Turns out it appears when you use the WordPress.com Stats widget. The smiley face is seen by everyone except the admin (IOW, for the admin to see it the admin must view the blog when logged out.) There’s an easy way to get rid of it – the WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover widget.

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12/5/09 – Already going back on my word.  Trying a Share/Save button (different service from ShareThis.)

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12/6/09 – The flirtation continues… I tried the AddToAny Share/Save button. It’s nice and configurable, it can be anything from text or just an icon to a large horizontal button. I was impressed that it learns which services a person uses and puts those front and center. I also had some questions and its author sent me two emails this weekend. Impressive but the button wouldn’t play nice with my WordPress theme when viewed in Safari. This is a fault of Safari’s not the AddToAny code.

So, in one of those weekend sidetrack projects I’m known for – I made my own links that get added automatically on Learning to See’s home page and when individual posts are viewed. The code was cobbled together from suggestions on two sites (Anidandesign.com and MichaelMerrell.com) along with some reverse engineering of sites I’ve seen online. It’s very simple as you can see below, just text based links, but the advantage of doing it this way is that it can fit within the style of your WordPress theme. It won’t call undue attention to itself (a problem with the rows of colored icons many folks use.)

I’m not big on social media myself beyond having a blog but I can see the usefulness in helping those that are and in giving this a longer test run.  Since, ’tis the season, here’s Jon’s make-your-own text based social media bar:

ShareLink: <br> <a href=”mailto:?subject=<?php the_title(); ?>&body=Check out this post:%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Email a link to: <?php the_title(); ?>”>Email</a> • <a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”Tweet This” target=”_blank”>Twitter</a> • <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>” title=”Share on Facebook” target=”_blank”>Facebook</a> • <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?> &title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Bookmark on Delicious” target=”_blank”>del.icio.us</a> • <a href=”http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Stumble This” target=”_blank”>StumbleUpon</a> • <a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Digg This” target=”_blank”>Digg</a> • <a href=”http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url= <?php echo get_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>” title=”Share on Linkedin” target=”_blank”>Linkedin</a>

I’ve dubbed it ShareLink but you should feel free to call it anything you want. A title may not be needed at all. If you want it in your single posts then add it to the single.php file, if you want it on your index page then add it to your index.php file.

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1/26/10 – It’s been just over seven weeks since adding the ShareLink links mentioned above. In that time my site and blog had over 10,000 pageviews. With all those views ShareLink was used only ten times (1/10 of 1 Percent of pageviews.) Five times for Facebook, four times for email, and one time for Twitter. Given that, I’ve deleted the links for Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Linkedin.

I see an iPhone enabled site looking at me.

One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.

JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:

Learning to See on the iPhone:

For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.

For the blog, being on a Wordpress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This Wordpress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.

The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.

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Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.

Butler College, Princeton University, God courtesy of Michelangelo

The clouds above were present when the image was shot so it’s hard not to make the leap above. This is a new project added with the new web site, Butler College at Princeton University, designed by Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

Shot in August, Butler College incorporates many sustainability features including green roofs on more than half of the buildings. These will serve as a living experiment for professors and students as they assess its impact when compared with traditional roofing materials.

Here are more images from the project. Larger versions can be found at the new web site in the Butler College Gallery (minus Michelangelo’s input.)

The under the hood switchover was late last week but we can call this launch day for the new web site and the new blog.

The web site is at my domain, jonroemer.com, and on this blog there are direct links via the Portfolio button to the left and on the About page.

What’s new at jonroemer.com? New galleries, new images, and a whole new engine underneath. The site is Flash based but still allows for direct linking to every page. There are many other great features as well:

• Images and layout are dynamic. They will resize automatically to fit your browser window.
• The site can be run fullscreen via the full button at the bottom of each gallery.
• Images can be advanced by clicking to the right or left of the page, by clicking the arrows beneath each gallery, or by using the forward or back arrow keys on your keyboard.
• Images can be emailed.
• Curious for a bit more information on an image? Click the info button beneath the image.
• Thumbnails are now available for every gallery.
• The home page will feature slideshows instead of a static image.
• Contact information is on every page along with a more detailed Contact page.
• For the first time in over ten years of jonroemer.com websites I’ve added an About page and a Client List page.

The blog has been renamed, Learning to See, and is now hosted within my domain. All of the posts from the old TypePad blog have been imported here. Nothing was lost in the changeover.

Both Learning to See and jonroemer.com now have Smart Phone and App Phone versions to make viewing on those platforms quick and easy.

I’ll have more to say on the change over and what I’ve learned in the process in the coming weeks. For now, I’d like thank Rob Haggart of aphotoeditor.com and aphotofolio.com for his help in switching platforms and in consulting on my gallery edits and image selection; friends for giving everything the once and twice-over; and my very patient family as Dad became obsessed with yet another work related project.

This afternoon I changed the way the blog’s permalinks work.  Shifting them from WordPress’s default format (“?”+ post number) to an easier to read, more logical address (year/month/post-title).

End Result:  This will be much better in the long run but there is a change to the blog’s RSS feed address.

The new RSS Feed: feed://www.jonroemer.com/blog/feed/atom/ .

If you subscribed to the blog prior to this afternoon (11/07/09, 2:45pm), please use this new link.  Thanks!

Word came earlier this week that CIT Group, a 101 year-old bank to small and medium-sized businesses, was filing for bankruptcy.

I photographed their building in 2006 for the building’s developer.  Hopefully, the creditors won’t drain all the color out of the lobby.

505 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY, October, 2006.

Too see these images larger visit the new commercial architecture gallery at jonroemer.com.

This is the view from New York University’s newest dorm, Founders Hall. The only catch? You have to enroll and then get very lucky in the housing lottery.

A few images already appeared in the Live View blog post. Here are another few and the rest can be viewed in the Recent Work Gallery on my web site.