Sean Blanda

Every college has their famous alumni.  For Temple, an incomplete rundown would include Bill Cosby, Bob Saget, Jill Scott, and Hall and Oates.

Well, after months of pestering by fellow editor Christopher Wink, The Temple News scored an exclusive interview with both John Oates and Daryl Hall.  Their publicist informed us that it was the only the third time both were quoted in a story in the past 10 years, with the other two publications being Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune.  We decided that this would be a good chance to flex our new found online muscle and do the first “complete” multimedia package.  That is, a slideshow, video, and audio.

While it could be argued that soundslides, Flash, and more original video should be included, I think we covered our bases well.

So with the help of Hot Recorder and Skype we recorded Wink’s conversation with Oates, and using Flickr and YouTube we added some video and a slideshow.  Wink also wrote two articles as well.  The result is the first in our series of alumni profiles.

The hardest part of this was getting it all up under deadline.  After I was provided with the YouTube link, photos, audio, and text, we sketched out a design, and it was coded and up in a little under three hours (not counting me driving home for a bit).  While nothing revolutionary was done, it was a good test of him and I as we had to convert his Skype conversation into mp3’s, create a banner image, create a slideshow, and make a custom Wordpress template page.

Check it out!

Many thanks to Mindy McAdams for her awesome 1 Pixel out tutorial, and to IRIS design for the snazzy button.