House Ways and Means Tuesday, April 19th. And we are taking up three different issues this morning. The first one is going to be an update on revenue for both fiscal 2020 and 2021 that Graham and Mark will walk us through. And this is a consensus forecast, I believe. The last one we had was not consensus, it was just Tom Kovett. And Tom Kovett is available by phone if we need him. Then we're going to look at a bill S283, which is the Hartford TIF they have asked for an extension. I'll let them explain why they need it. Has passed the Senate. It's been in our committee since before we left the building March 13th. So it was this date that I timed things before the 13th and after the 13th. We've had that spilt for a while. And then we're going to look at H716, which is a bill that would give hunting and fishing licenses to Native Americans. It's a bill for free. And it's a bill that came to our committee on March 12th. So when I was first asked about it, I didn't realize we even had it in the committee because once it arrived there under rule 35A and I just wasn't aware that it had had gone in there. So we'll hear about that bill. And that will be our morning. So with that, Graham, I think are you the one who's going to start us off? I believe so. I mean, I should first ask if the committee has anyone on the committee has an announcement or something they want to put on the table before we get rolling. Okay. Go ahead, Graham. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Graham Campbell from the Joint Fiscal Office. Sorcia, would you mind putting up the document that I sent you this morning? Also a public shout out to Sorcia for the many changes to this document that occurred between last night and this morning that she had to post multiple times. So thank you for that. So I'm here to talk about the updated revenue forecast that, like Madam Chair said, was consensus between Kankovet and Jeff Carr, the administration. This is an update for all three funds and it's fiscal 2021 and we got our first glimpse at fiscal year 22 as well. So I'll be walking through that. The main sort of headline summary here is that the numbers by certain standards, but in terms of the size of the revenue downgrades we've seen are not actually, it's a relatively small update, but in sort of regular world terms we're talking, you know, five to $15 million. So large depending upon how you think about it, but in terms of the dollars we've been seeing not super significant. So I'll begin with fiscal 2020 here. The total revenue downgrades across all three funds total about $143 million. That number last forecast on April 28th was $146 million. So a very modest improvement for fiscal 2020. The general funds expected to be $46 million to the red. And that does not include the direct app that we receive on the property transfer tax. And so that is an additional roughly $2.8 billion. So the true number to $8 million up or down additional down. So the real number here should be about $49 million. The transportation fund down about $42 million. Oh, sorry, I should say that the general fund number back on April 28th was negative $48 million. So it's roughly the same. The transportation fund is now estimated to be negatively impacted by COVID-19 to the tune of $42 million. That number was $44 million back on April 28th. So it's a little bit better. And the education fund is basically the same as it was on April 28th down $55 million. That number was $54 million on April 28th. So it's a million dollars worse than it was on April 28th. May I ask a question? Why are we waiting on the property transfer tax because it's a direct app and it doesn't go into the office? Well, maybe I didn't explain this very well. So the property transfer tax is one of the wackiest taxes that we have where it starts with the general property transfer tax and then statutorily the first $2.5 million comes off for debt service for the housing bond that was passed a couple of years ago. And then there are statutory percentages in terms of diversion and revenue, but we not withstand that every year. And so the department taxes gets a small chunk in statutes about 2%, which would work out to about $850,000, but we have only appropriated about $500,000 to them. VHCB gets, I think it's, let me see here, about 50% of the remaining revenue, but that's not what stood. And then the municipal planning board gets 17% according to statute, but that's not what stood. So essentially what happens is we say VHCB municipal planning board and department taxes will get a set amount that we specify in the budget and the rest of it just flows to the general fund. What Tom does here is he produces a downgrade for the property transfer tax as a whole. And then he uses the statutory percentages, but the actual loss to the general fund is really what is left over after the, we account for those, what's actually put into the budget. So in the budget last year, we put in a certain amount for those other areas. And so essentially any loss that happens in the property transfer tax will be borne by the general fund, both through its statutory percentage, plus any of the remaining, what we call the direct app that's left over after the other three parties get their portion. So that total loss Tom is projecting at about $4.3 million. And that is basically all borne by the general fund. But what he shows in his tables is only the 33% of that, which is the general fund share, but in reality it's greater than that. So kind of a long-winded explanation to say that the property transfer tax loss is mostly, is all borne by the general fund. And so the 46 number that you see here is actually more negative. It's about 49 once we account for that direct app part. Okay. I was just curious why we, why we waited on it. But I think, I think I understand because it's a direct app. It's, it's what gets left on the bottom line at the end. Yes, exactly. Thanks. Other questions on fiscal 20 from anybody? I don't think so. So let's go on to 21, unless you have one other notes that you wanted to go over. No, I just have the notes there at the deferrals going on still. I know that small update that I've heard from Tom on the meals and rooms and sales news tax is that the interest and penalties on those were waived for the March and April payments. So we should be getting those, those deferred payments on May 25th. And it's my understanding that after speaking with the department of taxes, the two economists have sort of counted most of those deferrals as showing up in fiscal 20. So there's not much deferral revenue loss accounted for. And you see that sort of at the bottom line of the table here, fiscal 21, the actual deferral here is only 6 million. Whereas that number used to be as high as 40 million in previous forecasts, because there was the assumption that the administration might extend this or people might not pay. And it seems as though they've, they've changed their thinking on that, that that money will, most of it will show up before the end of fiscal year 20 close out. Do we know that the deferral won't be extended or is that just built into what the economists have agreed on? I don't know for sure that answer. I think it's just, when I spoke to Tom, that was the assumption that they're making is that that money will be mostly paid before the end of closeouts or the end of the fiscal year. Okay. Anyone, any other questions anyone has? So moving on to fiscal 21. So the current, the newest forecast has total revenue downgrades across all three funds of just about $378 million. That is better than it was on April 28. That number was $430 million. So we are just under $60 million better in fiscal year 21. Going across all three funds, the revenue loss of fiscal 21 relative to the January forecast for fiscal 21 is down $230 million, roughly. That number was $266 million in April, late April. So about $36 million better than it was. The transportation fund is down about $47 million in this current iteration. That number was $52 million in April 28. So small amount better there. And the education fund is down about $100 million in fiscal 21. And that's just the non-property tax revenues. And that number was $113 million in April. So we're about $13 million better than we thought in the education fund. So, and then the additional note there is that any revenues that actually defer revenues that are received after July 30th will sort of increase the revenue loss in 2020 will increase the available revenues in fiscal 21. So the extent the monies aren't actually paid before the closeout, they'll actually increase revenues in fiscal 21. So less of a deal though now because they're starting to assume that most of those deferred revenues will actually be counted in fiscal 20. So just flagging that for the committee. So the question I've got, I'm looking particularly at the sales tax, but I guess that applies to Rooms and Meals as well, is the slightly improved, well actually it's improved by close to 13%. That's not so slight, at least on the fund side. Is that improved picture because of a change in economic activity or is it a change in the information that was available and not reflective of underlying economic activity? Or do you know? I don't have a great answer for that. I know that the numbers are up because the Meals and the sales tax numbers are better than they were in April, but I don't know whether Tom and Jeff have received better economic information from the people from the contract with Moody's or whether they've received better information. But I imagine some of that is probably due to more information they have from the April payments. So they've looked probably more at the larger payers. This is typically the process they do. They look at the larger payers and see how much they paid and get a sense of how much they are struggling in this environment and then they revise the forecast. So I imagine it might be both, but I can't say for sure. I saw information somewhere, I think you when I exchanged a note about it, about the online sales, which had been, I think I'm going to get the figures wrong, but 13% of the total in March and April. This is national figures in March and April were 30%, they've gone from 13% to 30%. Did I get the figures right? Yeah, that's what I remember too. Yeah, some very large online sales activity going on. In Vermont, it's about 11% of pre-COVID sales work. 11% of pre-COVID sales were online. So I imagine that percentage has gone up, but we don't know what the specific figure is. But if it's comparable, if it went from 11% to 25% or something like that, I mean those increases are huge and that's all money we collect. Yeah, it's blessing that this committee and this legislature passed the marketplace facilitator bill when it did. And then also that the Wayfair decision came down about two years ago. Or else this would have been much more difficult of the situation for the state. Committee members, questions for Graham? Or questions for Tom Covet that you want to loop him in? Scott, are you jumping in? I'm trying. You go ahead then. I'm looking for blue hands and I didn't see one, but I see that you turned on your mic. Graham, I know you probably don't know this number right now, but I'm curious about that movement of $13 million in consumption taxes. How that breaks down as far as sales tax and rooms and meals tax? Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head. I can follow up with you after this and let you know. That'd be great. Thank you. Yeah. Sosha sent me a note that Tom Covet is on the call. I may ask him the same question. We can ask him the question Scott just asked about the breakdown between rooms and meals and sales. Tom, if you're there, I'm also, I don't see that you're here. There he is. Okay. I'm on. There you are. The question about how much of the improved estimate is information about underlying economic activity or just better data? Okay, so when you say improved, you're talking about relative to the last round because some things are worse and some things are better. Specifically at sales tax because I'm sort of focused on the education fund at the moment. So the both sales tax and meals and rooms, we have scant information because of the deferral issue that is not giving us complete information and then the information we have is likely to be from firms that are better off. But we just learned prior to doing this that there will not be deferrals this month and next month. That was the original assumption was I was going to continue and presumably all of it would be due in July and then that could be counted and recaptured in the current fiscal year. Now the assumption is the money that's been deferred for March and April will not be captured in FY20. That's going to go to 21. But we will get May and June revenues with full detail. So in terms of analysis, we'll have a better picture on that. But what we've been doing is going through all of the April data trying to find, so we have all payers and then we're looking at those that filed but didn't pay and those that didn't file and didn't pay and those that paid right through. And so that's where we've made some adjustments based on that. I think that's probably nudging the numbers up a little bit. They might still go up as we get more information. Because of the deferral situation, it left us without a lot of basic data that we would otherwise be using to inform this. And the question Scott asked about how much of the change in the education fund is bills and rooms and how much is sales tax. Did I get that right, Scott? Yes, you got it right. Yep. Yeah, I have to go back and look at the prior sheet that you're comparing it to. We do sort of a rolling update and then periodically when we're asked, we kick out the sheet. So every two or three days, we'll have different numbers, but we don't always print them out and release them. So maybe Graham, you could just look and see relative to the last time this was presented, which numbers are higher or lower. You know, with meals and rooms and sales and use. I suspect most of it would have been sales and use, but I'm not sure the reference point. Yeah, so I've pulled it up while we've been talking. So sales tax is about $9 million better than it was on the April 29th forecast. And meals and rooms is about $3 million better. Or sorry, yeah, about $3 million better. So it's mostly sales and a little bit of meals. On the other hand, proportionately, that's a much better increase in rooms and meals. Yeah, I'm pretty much the only thing going on in rooms and meals now, of course, is the meals part is very little way of rooms. And the opening up to that, you know, that that improves some of the June numbers, but really the restrictions around tourism visitation that, you know, two week quarantine effectively makes that impossible. So you might as well say you're closed. However, in conversations with Commissioner Pitchick on Friday, he said that he felt testing was getting to the point where people might be able to come in, have a test done or have a test done right before they leave whatever state they're coming from. And if they quarantine between the time the test was done, and the test results came out, which now can be 48 hours, maybe 72, depending on the test and all, but then they could immediately be able to register to stay in Vermont. So anyway, that's still problematic. But some of the other reopening was a little bit earlier than we had assumed before. So some of the gas tax stuff and things like that. June is a little bit better. Committee. I have one other question. I think it goes to the deferrals, sort of the way those are playing out. And I have to admit I get confused about the month that the tax was owed and the month that it's paid, I mean, where the economic activity is and when the return comes in. But the question is really looking at the education fund and trying to understand exactly how much of a problem we have to solve in fiscal 21. How is it really going to be? So the question really is when are we going to have figures that we can be reasonably confident about? And is that the August forecast? Or are we because of the way the deferrals are going to work? Or is that earlier, is that before July 1? Yeah, good question because we don't know really the scope of, you know, the deferrals in terms of the actual money. All we have are accounts.  But that's really fraught until we get it. I'm hopeful that the tax commissioner would say, you know, this is due, I mean, they said they need to send a letter with 30 days advance notice. So if that were done soon, that could even be FY20 money. That would be the best. I mean, it's money that's already collected from the consumers who pay it and just held. So yeah, it's for activity in February and March. And only half of March was heavily affected. But otherwise, I don't know when they're going to send the letter. And then when the payments are made, maybe two that the longer that you wait, some of those companies may not have the capacity to pay if they've used that money for something else down the road. So it's hard to say. The reason we were saying do a September update is because at the end of July, we'll have the personal income tax stuff, which is the enormous revenue swing. And that would take some time in August for the tax department to process. And then if we did a September update, that would be a relevant point of time where we'd know a lot more. Hopefully we know a lot more about sales and use of meals and rooms by then too. But it's up to the commissioners when he wants that money to be due. Thank you. Questions? Okay. Tom, thank you. And where was it so far each time I've gotten an update? It's slightly better. So that's good. And continue to try to get a good read on what's going on, particularly before we take action. I think, Graham, did you have anything else you wanted to add? Yes, fiscal year 22. Okay. Another year. Gosh, okay. Yeah, so I think that the primary purpose of looking at fiscal 22 is getting a sense of, you know, once we sort of pit rock bottom, what's it look like on the other side, potentially, just to give us an idea of how we might handle fiscal 21. And I think the overall story here is that there is a modest bounce back in revenues, although I'll show you some charts later to show that, you know, it's kind of good news, bad news, depending upon how you want to spin it. But overall, relative to what we had in fiscal 22 and the January forecast, revenues are down 220 million. And that's obviously spread across the three funds, 141 in the general fund, 21 and a half in the Transcation Fund, and they're 57.4 in the Education Fund. And so that as you can see in the year over year percentage change line there at the bottom, that's across all three funds, but 9.2 percentage growth from fiscal 21. So a bounce back, but fiscal year 21 is kind of sort of the low point here. So you're bouncing back from a low base. And so that's sort of the main story there. So if you scroll down to some of the charts here, I'll show you how that sort of looks like, how these sort of look like graphically. So the general fund here, the blue line shows you essentially what available general fund revenues were from fiscal 17 through forecast of fiscal 22. And the blue line is what we had in the January forecast. The red dotted line is what we now think we will have for available general fund revenue. And so you can see fiscal 21 is a precipitous drop in revenue.  And so it's just somewhat, I guess, positive improvement there. But another story you might say is if you look at the endpoint of fiscal 22, it is lower than the total general available general fund revenue we had in fiscal 17. So we have a bounce back, but our revenues basically are what they were five years ago in the general fund available. Robin's got a question. Did you want to jump in, Robin? I'll wait till we get to the Ed fund. Okay. Transportation funds kind of the same story. The chart there, we see sort of a small bounce back, but fiscal 20 and fiscal 21 are roughly the same amount of revenue in that fund. And then we get the bounce back. But again, even once we get that bounce back in fiscal 22, we're talking about fiscal year 17 levels of revenue in the transportation fund. So I guess you could say that the epidemic is set back of revenues in these two funds almost five years. And then the education fund, things are actually a little bit better. So to make this a little bit more comparable, I added 100% of the sales tax and 25% of the meals and rooms tax for fiscal year 17-18. Even though that percentage split didn't occur in those fiscal years, we had a general fund transfer, but just for a little bit of comparability. So this may not be exact amounts for non-property tax education fund remedies, but it's relatively close. But you can see we see the big drop in fiscal 21 with the rebound. So the education fund at least will sort of rebound to its fiscal 19 levels of revenue by fiscal 22 for non-property tax revenue sources. So it's a little bit better situation there. So I wonder why it feels like such bad news. That's what I said. It's good news and bad news, depending on how you ask it. Yeah, Robin. Thank you, Graham. You answered part of my question because this is non-property tax education fund revenues, but I'm wondering how you're starting to think about the income sensitivity and property tax credits that are going to affect FY 22 because of the way we account for them. And that's the year that's really going to get hit by that. Is this too early to start asking those questions or are you thinking about that? I think Mark will have good answers for that. Okay. I'm going to use the best person to ask about that. Okay, thanks. Anyone else? Mark, are we shifting to you? Oh, Emily, go ahead. Thanks. Are all of these models built on the assumption that we're not going to have another shutdown? I think I would defer to Tom on that. I don't know what the assumptions are, whether there's a resurgence in the buyers or not. I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, the assumption is there is not a second complete shutdown. So there are tremendous unknowns about this, and it's not like an economic model is going to tell you what this path is. It's an epidemiological model. And the information to date has been so limited with the testing. That's improving all the time. So as more data comes in, more will be known about transmission characteristics and risks a second wave. I think those risks are substantial from everything I know now. But that's why these are important to view as order of magnitude type estimates. And not only is FY20 changed all the time, 21 and 22 potential ranges are huge. This is not like a normal revenue forecast where we have relatively tight bands around the risk elements because this is an epidemiological event primarily with huge economic consequences. It's not an economic collapse based on any economic fundamentals. So that's a risk going forward. Okay. I think we'll go to Mark and you're going to talk about, are you going to present that fund balance sheet now? Is that the idea? Sure. Good morning, everybody. This is pretty straightforward for the education fund, but we can go over the balance sheet. To answer a representative shy's question, we haven't done any, I don't think we've done any analysis on what the property tax adjustment would look like in 22 yet, but you're right. There's a concern there because for FY22, household income would be based on calendar year 20. So that would reflect the significant downgrading people's incomes. Offsetting that to some extent, however, will be, household income is defined very, very broadly. So it'll include unemployment, insurance, compensation, and I think the other monies that are coming out from the federal government. So household income is a really broad definition of income. So it will include more than just people's actual wages and salaries during that period, but we haven't looked ahead. I would expect it to grow. Does that answer your question? Yes. Thank you. Okay. So on the education fund outlook, the revenue upgrade you just, we'll present to you with goes from 20 to 22. We're only looking at FY20 and 21 here. So if you can page down to the bottom, I think this is pretty straightforward and we can just show what's going on here. So all of the changes to the education fund have come on the sales and use, purchasing use, and meals and rooms taxes. So this is just three sources to the education fund that are affected. For FY20, the forecast is a little bit worse so that where we initially had a $3.7 million deficit to carry forward from FY20 into FY21, we're now showing a $4.6 million deficit that needs to get carried forward. You can see that on line 26. So a little worse there and that carries right through these three examples that we've been looking at. And then in FY21, the forecast improves. So where we had been looking at line 31, a current year unallocated, not reserved, basically a deficit of $166.7 million. We're now looking at $155 million. So not usually different, but it's an improvement. And I don't know if we'll be going out to FY22 at some point. I haven't thought about it, but it's possible that we could try to carry out the fund another year and just see what's going on there. But it gets really speculative because of the spending and all that. And the issue Robin raised about income sensitivity. Yeah, I think the big one would be really how to just decide what schools and voters are going to decide they can spend in FY22. It will depend on how this pandemic rolls out over the next six months or so. All right. Questions for Mark? So when we've been talking about $167 million problem to solve, we're now talking about $155 million problem to solve. Not that that's simple and easy, but as we learn more, I'm glad to see that the number is not growing. It's shrinking. It's not shrinking a lot, but it's shrinking. So that's good news among the bad. Let me see if people have questions. I think so. Anybody want to jump in? Great. So we're going to look at Ed Finance again tomorrow. And so I'm not going to spend more time on it this morning other than to say thank you to Tom and Graham and Mark. And then so we're going to shift gears.


The Pittsburgh Steelers are the most slept on team heading into the season. They got better from last year that defense is loaded. And Mike Tomlin has never had a season with a losing record. Let's take a look at the schedule week one on the road in Cincinnati. This is an L they win the next three though taking care of the past the Browns in Cleveland. No to Sean Watson they take care of the jets then hit a four game slide lose in Buffalo lose at home to Tampa they lose in Miami that'll be a close game. I'm giving the edge to the Dolphins at home. I'm also taking Philly at home. That's a tough place to play. Hit the bye week three and five then win six straight. They take care of the Saints the Bangles the Colts who haven't beat them since 2008. They take care of Atlanta beat the Ravens at home also Carolina on the road. Then I think they lose to the Raiders on Christmas Eve losing Baltimore and finish off the season sweeping the Browns. I have the Steelers going 10 and seven. Let me know your predictions and take up those terrible towels.


One easy definition of big data is anything that doesn't fit on your laptop. In historical terms, big data was something on the order of petabytes, which is, that was the impetus for creating these distributed systems. So Yahoo would have petabytes of web search data that they had to analyze. You know, same thing with Google, same thing with Microsoft. And so you've seen a lot of work on these distributed data systems at those three companies. Google has the patent on MapReduce, which they've been very cool about not enforcing very strictly. Yahoo contributed a lot of the code base to Hadoop. Microsoft has its own version of Hadoop that's written in C-Sharp instead of Java. But in all three cases, the motivation was how do we deal with these petabytes of data? And so that's where the definition of big data started.  Maybe that's a way to look at it. So anything in the terabyte range, I think, is probably going to be big data for most companies.


Okay, quick summary, this talk is about other cool stuff we've built for NN7. We want to be like the hub for alternative paths in India. I'm not going to do any club for NN7, just get started. This is one of the talks which is actually a bit backward from the rest of the talks I've seen all day. The rest of the talks all day seem to talk about here's a new thing which in technology and let's see how we can deploy it and use it. This talk was a bit backwards because we started with NN7.n and we had a bunch of problems to fix and we went from how do you fix this problem with the best technology we can find. So it's a bit backward. So I'll start with what were our key features which we were trying to get right and then we'll get into the code and the kind of features we went about creating. So NN7.n in a nutshell has two key important features, there's content and there's music. Each piece has a set of important things you wanted to build around it. Content for instance we wanted an experience where you could browse content within the site really easily and quickly and we wanted music to be continuously playing on the site. So if you've seen Hype Machine, if you've seen Pandora, if you've seen any big music streaming site one of the things they do really well is when you're navigating through the site the music continues to play.  So this was a really important feature for us and that is what has led to most of the stuff which we're going to show you on how we've got around building it. So key deliverables which we were trying to create, seamless navigation when you're playing music and you click on a link, music doesn't stop. We built the first version where people could pop out of the player and listen to music while they could browse the site, people just absolutely hated it. No one wanted to pop out their browsers. The JavaScript involved in keeping track of your popped out browser. So I built this JavaScript where the browser was at the bottom, like how you see at Nemo and when you click pop out it pops out and then you need to map that this browser is active at all times. So if you close this window it had to appear back in the bottom bar. Like how Facebook chat does it, absolute nightmare to get right across browsers. It worked beautifully on Chrome and Firefox. I just wouldn't work on it. What works sometimes, Opera wouldn't work at all for no good reason because you would create a parent and a child within the new frame and new window and your own window and you would track it. So that didn't work at all for us. Lots of people, it wouldn't work. There was lots of bugs. There was no way to fix it. It was a bug which we didn't know how to fix. So we said check this, we're going to go back to a complete asynchronous JavaScript based approach where every link on the site which is internal is going to be loaded in a JavaScript loop and the music is going to be in the main loop which is always, always on. So whatever you do on the site the music doesn't stop. That is seamless navigation is basically more across various lanes the music doesn't stop. Universal playback always started, I think this, we know the player sometime about a year and a half, two years ago with HTML5 audio was just about there. One of the biggest challenges with HTML5 audio was not getting HTML5 audio right. That is the simplest, easiest thing to do because it's audio, SRC audio and it's the simplest thing to do. The problem is what happens if there is no audio support. And if you have a flash player how do you integrate these two controls? Because I didn't want to show any flash on screen, hell no. I mean like absolutely that would not be any site I ever built. So you have to have like an invisible flash one pixel container and everything else built in JavaScript and then you would write like a JavaScript bridge from flash and expose the same controls in flash as we do for our native audio tag. So this dot play and this dot pause and this dot rewind and this dot forward works irrespective of whether it's a flash container or an audio file. And that is those are the two key things which we created for NH7 and which we will go around explaining how we built it. So couple of, how many of you use Gizmodo? Yeah, so Gizmodo was like about the same time as we launched it. So Gizmodo did this whole attack script thing and he explained how they use a hash bank format. Most of a JAX node works in a hash bank format, but this is a URL and if you need to add a new URL to that to load, you add a hash and a bind and then you add the rest of the path to the URL. This was basically invented by Google because they wanted to index a JAX URL. So just summing up everything. Okay. Hi, I'm Lee and I'll be explaining what we did for the seamless browsing experience on NH7. Okay. So he started something about hash bank URL. I'm pretty sure you guys have seen it. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, I'm talking about we have seen these URL formats. So this was a world of format which was used a while ago to load a JAX content. So the thing is there are several challenges when it comes to loading a JAX content. One thing is the browser location. The URL and the location bar doesn't change. There's a challenge. How do you change the URL over there? The other problem is if there's no JavaScript in the browser, what do you fall back to? What happens then? And the third challenge is how does your search engine index content which is loaded by JavaScript? Because we are essentially a music magazine. It's not a problem for, let's say, Twitter or something or Facebook. We need not index content like it's not content maybe or something. But we had to index content. All our content needed to be indexable by Google and search engines. So that was also another challenge. So I'll explain how we got through all the challenges. The hash bank was the initial system which was started by Google. This was started because basically any hash value appended at the end of the browser can be read using JavaScript. So you can write JavaScript code over this value and load content based on that value. So you can load content and on the page move when you click on a URL with a hash in it. You can write JavaScript to inspect the hash value and fetch the relevant content. So a very popular sign which has this is obviously Twitter. It uses the hash value. So there are several problems in this. One is the URLs are hardly straightforward. They're not like proper URLs. They don't look clean as such. The Google has a specification for indexing this content but we haven't done it yet. So the Google has a specification. I cannot show it to you right now. It has a specification for indexing content in hash bank URLs. But the problem is this is only Google. Other search engines won't be able to index this content. And does it matter? Yeah, does it matter? See the thing is it's not about getting your content across to Google every time. The thing is when your content is fetched, if suppose that there's no JavaScript, or suppose that the JavaScript breaks, the content should still be visible. That's the thing. So there's a bunch of issues with most sites. You would try this any link you get in Twitter. Click on it. It would go to twitter.com. Then twitter.com would redirect you with a hash bank to the URL. Even if you add a relatively straightforward URL. Even if you have twitter.com. And you click on that URL in your browser. It would take you to twitter.com. Then there would be obviously some htx's rule there. You should take that URL out, put a hash bank in, and then redirect you back to the actual URL. Which is how the resource allocation happens. That is really, really broken. Because A, it takes you three, it tries the amount of time it takes you to reach that link. Because there is a redirect in the loop. Two, if JavaScript breaks, and it breaks quite a bit. You actually don't get to the link at all. Right? And this happens a lot. The DAIC is more or less with this approach. They're JavaScript that had an issue, and none of the site pages work. Because everything is so heavily dependent on your JavaScript being loaded. A, and being working 100%. Right? So one of our big tasks was A, to make it work without JavaScript as well. Which, at that part of time, no one had a really clean implementation of. To make sure that the browser back button works. Again, Gmail does this really, really well with hash banks. But now they've moved to history API. But to make sure every time you get back the same thing you expect happened. You go back to the last page. And that needs to happen without your music pausing. So every browser control is actually in JavaScript. So like I was saying, it's not just about getting the search engine to index the content. The thing is if JavaScript breaks, at the very least you should be able to see the content of the page. That's also a problem. The other thing which he again mentioned was, when you're fetching the page, your page request completes. Why should your browser make another request just to fetch the content again? It's like multiple requests just to fetch the content. So that's inefficient. And third is obviously breaking the back button. So there was this while ago. You have these just as an anecdote I'll give you. There is this very popular link sharing site called Reddit. So there was this outcry about people posting Twitter links and sharing Twitter links. Because what happens is if anyone clicks on a Twitter link, and then you try to go back to Reddit, it doesn't work. What happens is it completely breaks your history. It goes over there. Then it redirects some other friends somewhere else. And the back button doesn't work. I think they have fixed this now during some other act. But this was a great big problem with them before. So there are other ways. These are not all disadvantages. These are not all like fixed disadvantages of R&D. Like for example, the back button is fixable in R&D nowadays. They have discovered a way to redirect it and get it to work. But like the indexing thing and the HX loads and all these are still problems with the hash bank developers. So HTML5 introduced a new sort of specification which allowed you to modify your history, your windows history. So there was always an object called a window.history object which allows you to just navigate forward and go back in history. But HTML5 added three new functions to it called push state, replace state, and pop-screen question mark function. Sorry, it's an event. So what push state does is it adds a new event. It adds a new item in the history stack and pushes it to that position in the stack. So what it basically does is it just changes the URL. And it introduces a new history state. So and replace state what it does is instead of pushing a new item it just replaces the current item in the stack. So at the all pop state event it's called every time you press the browser it's forward or backward. So using these three functions you are able to completely like customize your JavaScript role experience. And I have some code with me but I have to show it on my app. So I've written a simple demo. Can you guys see that? So this is just a mix. There's a little bit of plash key code here and then it will help me out over here. So basically I'll explain some of the things I've learned. I'll start off from here. So basically firstly the thing is all the clicks need to be handed using JavaScript. So initially they won't work with the normal this thing. So I have a bunch of exceptions over here. Which is like if the click has class no Ajax then you know don't handle it using JavaScript. And what I do over here is if I check if the click the domain of the click has the same domain as the site you're using. If it's an external link you just open it in a new window.  These are all exceptions. You don't need to use JavaScript load in these instances. Otherwise or if the target is blank I can open it in a new window. Otherwise what you have to do is I call the hand click function over here. So I have written a fallback to the normal hash bank URL also over here. In case HTML5 is not supported. HTML5 is not supported. So the way to check if HTML5 is supported is to check if the push state function exists. That is the simplest and easiest way to check it. You create a state object which stores the current you are in. And you push the object into the stack. That's all you do. Otherwise I'll explain this part later. The other plugin we have over here. And there is a load content function. You're pushing the current URL into the stack. Yeah, the current URL. No, actually it's just in your side. No, I'm pushing the URL to be loaded into the stack. So the new state will have the URL of the present of the state. And the load content function basically what it does is it just fetches the content using Ajax. It finds one dip inside your body and it just inserts the content inside that dip. So there are one or two problems with this. First of all, the URLs are always the same. I mean, it's like if your page has a header or a folder or something, you cannot fetch the entire page and use it inside the page again. So what I do is I just pass a special argument for a JS load to it. And in these pages, I check. In the header itself, I check if the argument is set. If it's set, then I just exclude the header. I don't include the header again. So it's like a simple hack to prevent the content from loading again. And down here, I just have the main container dip which is there to display the content. So I have a simple demo here. So I'm just loading the index page URL and I can show you the network tab in the Chrome Inspector. So now I'm loading out of the page. It's like it's not fetching a new page again. It's just fetching the content for page one using Ajax. And you can see from the response tab that it has only got the internal content, not the entire HTML page. So it just fetches that content and puts it inside this demo. Which is the dip to display the content. It's the same thing with other pages. And if you go back, I didn't explain the on-pop state problems. So on-pop state event is called. Every time you press your browser's forward or back button. So what it does is, it has an argument, the event handler. That will contain the state which you pushed to your push state function. So that will, I have stored the location over there. So I just use that location to load the content again. Based on your forward or back button.  The new state gets popped out. So you just examine the URL of the new state over there. And you just load that out. And this is another thing I've done. Each page. The app is browser not supported with the history API. Then you would fall back on hash times. I'll explain how it does that after I complete this. So another thing which I've implemented is. It can't handle. The thing is, I have a different htaccess file. This is the demo I've shown you. So I probably have another htaccess file which will specify the cache address. Based on whatever that I have finished. So I'm not talking about the htq address. This is not about the htq address. I'm talking about the html data. Like your tool bar or your sidebar or something like that. That need not be fetched again. And it's paid to the game controller. Still a proper htq data. Yeah. I'm not talking, sorry about that. So another thing all these pages have is. They have their own bootstrap function. To invoke like to execute some JavaScript code. Each time each page is loaded. So what I do is every time I load some content. I just execute. I just check if there is a bootstrap function. I just check if there's a bootstrap function and I execute it. Oh yeah. So the bootstrap one, if I know the content you pull or? In the content I pull. Depending on what each page has. So each page has its own JavaScript. So when you pull a new page you have to execute all the JavaScript of that page. Right. But then the page doesn't have its own JS files as such. No. I mean all the common JS files are abstracted out from the common JS which is included in you. This is per page. Whenever you do a special page and it has specific JS of its own. You basically call the bootstrap function whenever it's loaded in JavaScript. So basically JavaScript pulls the content, puts it in the DOM, calls the bootstrap of their own page so it set up the way it works. So that's why I have a bootstrap function for each page. Otherwise also the URLs remain the same if I just load one of these URLs in a new tab using a normal request. It just works because in this page also I just include the header and it just goes about executing it. Because over here I have just given another check once the page loads if the bootstrap function exists which is executed. And since it's not loaded by Ajax, I just include the header right away. So that works over there. I guess that's about it. You can see. Just one quick question. I am not asking how are you checking if the bootstrap function exists now. Because if you load more pages the previous bootstrap function would have already been there. But it gets overwritten. Oh another thing I do is I nullified the bootstrap before loading content. I mentioned earlier bootstrap equal to zero. I clear out the bootstrap. Otherwise what will happen is if a new page is loaded which doesn't have bootstrap defined and you try to invoke it and it just another previous type of bootstrap. So I clear out the bootstrap over here and I load the content. So other tools are crashing. As you can see this is page one. This is page two. You can see it's out of nowhere. This has been executed by the bootstrap function. So once you navigate it forward and backward it just executes the bootstrap again and again. And would the process be easier? Has it been done? Has it been done? Has it been done? Has it been done? Has it been done? And this is one link which I've given with class no Ajax. In case in your application there are some links which you don't want to be loaded by Ajax for certain reasons. And just an external link which just opens up a new page automatically. And I'll explain about, quickly I'll explain about the fallback to hashback you are using here. There is a plugin called jquery.history.js. What it does is, you just pass a function to it as an argument which gets executed every time the hash value changes. So you just check if the content has been loaded the first time. Otherwise you just load the content. And over here, for the handle click state, you just use doto.history.go. It handles it very well. It just adds an hash before it. You have to specify the exclamation mark yourself in the link. Which I just added manually in the code. And if I have to, I just add manually in the code and I just fetch it. It just handles it very simply. You just have to use doto.history.go of the URL. And over here you just have to initialize it using doto.history.ion id. That's all at this instance. It should be something. I guess yeah, that's about it. Does anyone have any questions? How does it know when the hash point changes? Is there an event or like they keep polling for it? They will keep polling for it every once in a while. I don't think they use it using events. And this whole thing supported on mobile? Like if I support the Safari app, I don't know. Yeah. In the US, they just create the APIs on mobile. And on the Android? Android, it's all supported. But on the phone we actually just have a completely different mobile. Right. But otherwise it's supported. So this works in Chrome. It works in Firefox version 4 onwards. At IE9, it doesn't work. The HTML5 history API. So it falls back to HatchMang URLs. So I'll show you that also. The vision is not big enough. But I think they're valid in IE9. They're valid in the latest version of Oprah too as it turns out. Keep on getting these Oprah updates. I've never seen her do it. So I can't demonstrate the HatchMang because I don't have an older browser only right now. But yeah, so this should work across all modern browsers right now. Anyone has any questions regarding the specific JavaScript role part? I'm curious about why does Twitter still not use something like this? Why does it still have like an explanation of HatchMang? I don't know myself actually. I really don't know why they don't know. Like a lot of things at Twitter, you don't know what they really think. Even Facebook, in fact, until very recently they were using HatchMang URLs. They rectified it very recently. See, one of the good things we realized with this system is when you hit direct links, there's absolutely nothing coming in between the user and his perception that you're on some system where it's an attack. Direct links just work the way you expect a web page to work. It's only when the user interacts with the site, it clicks more links as JavaScript can get in. So there's nothing in HD access which comes in the way of URLs being used. Everything's done on client-side JavaScript. But where does Google come in the future in terms of indexing? Because as far as Google is concerned, it just goes to the page directly and gets the content right? Correct. So, I forgot to mention that part here. In any of the links, we don't have any HatchMang published because that's just the fourth part. So all the links don't have HatchMang. So the links are easily plaudible by Google. Once they reach the page, the content is always there. So that's also easily plaudible by Google. And you always have the seamless page experience so the music always continues to play. Yeah. So I do a quick run through. I have five minutes to go through this.  But I'll tell you what the basic problem is. Any of you are trying to use ht-1.5 video or audio, you have to figure out what each browser supports. On audio, Firefox 3.6 plus supports all in Google. You might see there is not one single codec which is supported across the board. So you can't use one single native codec and say, I'm just going to use this file format and all the audio, your simple audio controls with your source mp3 world across the board. An option to that is you can specify multiple source files. But that means re-encoding every file you have in multiple formats. And the amount of files we have that's not practical at all. And the control which you specify in your audio tag basically comes with four controls which can be accessed through JavaScript. So basically you want an audio tag but you don't want the default control because you want to theme it your way. So they give you in JavaScript access to four functions. The main boss can play type and buffer. So our biggest challenge was how do you take these four functions and integrate it in a seamless way in which even if there's no ht-1.5 audio control available, it will still work with our flash drive. So we have audio ht-1.5 as the default with a fallback to flash. The simple design that we were trying to get across. You can find a classical playlist which basically gives four or five objects to anyone controlling it in the planted. It allows you to play a file. It basically feeds a file. It allows you to pause, forward, rewind and seek. Seek is if you want to skip for beautiful clients. And it figures out whether it's an html5 control or a flash control in its background. So this is your simple audio id file which says the buffer is let the browser like manage its own buffer. But the problem is when there is no support. First we check if audiophile.length if we have some amount of the file cache. And you check the file contents and figure out if this file can be played by the audio tag itself. Which can be played natively. And then once you figure out whether you can play natively or not. You can see that if you can play natively then you bind audio to the audio file which is the id of your audio control. Otherwise you use the flash player control to load it. But the fun part is how do you make the flash player control work exactly like the audio control? Because you don't want multiple... You don't want to say this is not played on flash player. This is not played on boss flash player and so on. So we came up with something, a playlist. Which is probably the nicest EP lights of Koda ever in it. Basically what it allows you is it allows you to bind any existing dim on the browser. To an SWF file. So you'll see this is the SWF object file. Which basically plays the MPP file of audio controls not available. The JavaScript bridge back from flash into this object. So whenever for instance play happens you get this dot boss. Because it's this dot object dot boss which is the SWF object which is created here. So you go around here. There is a playlist of id or dip which we create. Which has the content of the flash file. And then there is a bridge setup where any player or boss comes to playlister. And it figures out whether you need to push this to audio. I mean whether this needs to be transported to flash in the same way as an audio tag. So you can see that these are the controls. So we do when it's ended you get a flash control back saying that this file is ended. And then you trigger and end it on to the main JavaScript file which will then handle it. That's exactly how the audio tag also works. So this one you can see that this approach of the bunch of interesting problems. One we figured out that if you put a flash file inside a dip you couldn't theme it. Because if you theme it any CSS property on to the dip which we had an embedded flash file. So I think there was we had a comment here somewhere saying that don't do that. So we had to like embed the flash of the callback exactly on the body itself. Because the flash file had if you add any CSS properties on it it just wouldn't work. Okay so since we're trying to start with like yeah let's just take questions. The styling thing you know I didn't get it right. So if there's any CSS styling on it they want to say it's the flip file embedded in that. Then they give me no callback from the SRF file back to JavaScript. No the callback from the flash file to the JavaScript which is not working. So the flash file has a bunch of external problems when a file ends or it begins to play. It's then called the dorsal bridge. And the dorsal bridge which was broken in that dip on which you embedded the flash file had some styling. So we had to embed it on the body tag itself because that's the only way to upload it.


Hey guys, so I am back from my vacation in Las Vegas, and I am here to work on the last page for that trip in my year of my life journal. I always save the last page until I get home because there's just too much other stuff to do with you know packing all your stuff up and getting to the airport and you know our flight was early in the morning so on Saturday So I saw a Friday's page to do before I do the page. I'm gonna use my LG pocket Photo printer, which I got on Amazon. It's by LG. It looks like this. It's in a case right now Hang on my phone's going to sleep it's hooked up to my telephone via Bluetooth and You use an app that you download for it on your phone or your iPad to Print whatever pictures are in your camera roll on here So and I haven't printed Friday's pictures yet. So I thought I would get on and I would Print them for you. So here's one that I want to print of my husband when we were having our last lunch out and I'm going to let me zoom in a little bit so you guys can see Okay So I've got him here and it's going to print sideways, but I'm I'm and I'm okay with that So we were I'm gonna hit okay, and it's gonna Paired device not found really So you got to make sure the Bluetooth is turned on Let's see So evidently I turned it off by mistake. So now it's connected I'm going to go to LG pocket photo printer app and This is called an LG pocket photo printer and you can get them on Amazon and you can get a package deal What comes with the printer and a case and the charging cables and everything? So here's this picture. So I'm gonna just hit the little print icon and then click okay, and Then it is gonna print. There we go. Is that successfully? It prints little small pictures. They're perfect for working in your journal and Let's see and I and it's not real big so I can bring it with me on my trip and I don't have to worry about Printing pictures while I'm away or printing a bunch of pictures and then trying to get them into my journal when I get back I Got it for my Christmas and my birthday. I don't remember last year. I think and on our last day in Las Vegas we had lunch At this really great restaurant called the Earl of Sandwich, which is hilarious. The name just cracks me up But they had really great sandwiches. I really liked it They were inside plan at Hollywood and then we also had dinner, which are the pictures. I'm printing at Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich's restaurant burger and beer and it is Overlooking the part of the Grand Canal in the Venetian And I got to tell you if you guys have a chance to eat there To do it because the view is just amazing So I am going to finish printing all my pictures. I've got a print pick I've got to pick the ones I want to print but these are all views. Can you see these? These are views from our table at the restaurant That's one. I'm probably gonna print That's from when I got home All right, so I'm gonna finish printing my photos and Then I'll be right back and I'll show you what kind of little bits of ephemera that I brought home to use on the page and that I normally collect a lot on my trip That and most of the time the little bits of collect are free. I'll Talk you through what I do, you know how I ask for things and all of that stuff because I do ask All right, I will be right back Okay, as it's printing the last couple pictures for this page I did earlier in the week We'll zoom out again Where we went to see the Frank Sinatra tribute show I started to run out of Paper for the little printer, so I started to be pretty Careful about what I printed which I'm not normally to be perfectly honest So there were a couple of pictures. I wanted to print when I got home and stuff in here This is one of them This was the curtain before the show even started and I love not only the colors And I don't think you can see it on camera as much as in real life. It's like hot pink and purple with a blue It I just thought it was inspiring. I would make a great Journal page background at some point. So I print I took a picture of it before the show started This was my grilled salmon dinner at Buddy V's Oops, it looks like I have to print one more photo. So let's do that And it can just be printing it doesn't want to print it Got a low battery All right, well, we'll just let it charge and then I'll print it later And that goes in there All right, so we're gonna skip ahead here so when I'm traveling I collect things from everywhere and Take pictures when I can using my cell phone. These are the three I printed for this spread. This is my husband We're sitting back relaxing waiting for our dinner And this is the view as I said from our table And this is a picture of some of the architecture designs. I thought we're really pretty and inspiring So when you use those on my page, I always ask for when we go out and especially when we're traveling For a bit when we walk into the restaurant or we're leaving do you have a business card for the restaurant? They always have them rarely are you going to run into one that says no and then you can use the card on Your journal page, you know it makes a great little keepsake to put on your page to remember where it was the eight and Usually they have the phone number and the address or the phone number in this case in the website And this case this card is double-sided and has this picture of the cow on the other side So I actually have two of those cards Here's another one because I wasn't sure if I wanted to put them on the page, you know something like that If I'm at a restaurant eating and they bring me My meal on the plate with an interesting piece of deli paper underneath the food You don't really want to use that deli paper in your journal because it's got food and grease and all kinds of Not fun things for your journal on it, but I always ask the waiter Do you have a piece of that deli paper that I could have? And I just they usually give you a funny look to be honest, and I just say you know I'm a mixed media artist I really love a little piece for my journal and they almost always say yes. This is a little piece I actually got when we went to Buddy V's and you can see it here in the background. I tore the piece in half and you can see it here We got an appetizer with this underneath it, so I like that When I'm on the airplane, you know, you always get pretzels or peanuts or whatever I usually save the bag I Did in the beginning of the trip? Here's my peanut bag, and I used it to put pictures in They make good little holders For photos or pamphlets or brochures. You also can just cut the part of bag apart and use it as collage material in your page. I Always ask if they have a copy of the menu. I can have these are from the Earl of Sandwich And I also when we were at the Earl of Sandwich our sandwiches came wrapped up with these labels on them. So before we got too far into our lunch and Because they didn't have any food things touching them. I asked my husband. Can I have a label of her sandwich? He like my husband knows me by now, but he looked at me like really, but he gave it to me anyway these are the Claim tickets from our luggage from the flight home So they make good collage fodder, you know, we're walking around the casino and You know, there's always people trying to hand you stuff, you know, this was you know Little booth they had win instant millions and you know, you're like really like you're really gonna win instant millions But they had these funny, you know two million dollar bills They were handing out and I don't know if I'm gonna use it my page But I did think it was funny enough to bring home and show you guys When we were at burger and beer and I asked if they had a copy of the menu I could have they gave me the ones that they give out when you go there to sit down So I have the drink menu and the food menu and I probably won't use them in this journal But boy they make good collage Material good pages for a junk journal. They're nice thick cardstock. So I love that I Brought home lots of bags and this isn't even all of them But a lot of them had great artwork on it would make good junk journal covers.  So I brought the bags home. We have Whole Foods here It probably has watermelons on their bags too, but you know, I'd have to go spend more money We went to Carlos big shop a few times Unfortunately, I was at the gym this morning. I brought home The bags I have this one bag from breakfast that we got there And I have a couple of big bakery boxes because I did bring treats home for the family My daughter and her boyfriend and so I brought the bakery boxes home last year when we went to Las Vegas I turned I had a box like this and I turned it into a junk journal. So I will probably do that again with these Oops. All right, and most of these, you know, didn't cost me anything. They were, you know from things that we were going to do anyway or Places we just were you have to eat while you're on vacation and most of the time you don't cook you go out So if that's going to happen Then why not ask for little bits and pieces that you can use in your journal and that's what I always do I Always come out with a handful of business cards Even if we end up not eating at those restaurants like we didn't go to this one, which maybe next time we will this is a great little Betty page inspired dress shop that I really like I didn't buy anything there this time But I did get the business card the neon museum. That was all that place is a lot of fun This is one of the other restaurants we didn't get to go to but the card is really cool We went to more than a couple of parks and one of them had a pay Do it yourself pay instead of somebody at the ticket booth You had to pay the entry fee yourself and they had these little envelopes You dropped it in a box after you put the money in and all that and I thought the envelopes were cute And I probably it's probably some sort of federal offense to steal the envelope, but I took one. I'm sorry I Always take the little pads of paper from the hotel or resort that we're at and the pens because The paper is really great for your junk journals or just to make notes on in the kitchen And the pens usually are only don't last very long. They're inexpensive But you know again, they're just a good kitchen pen to make some notes with or something like that We had these that were sticking out of some food that we got. I think these are From burger and beer These are really great picks and they were fairly clean when we pulled them out. So I brought them home and there's always a big pile of Maps and magazines and I don't bring all of them home But I pick the ones that have interesting images in it that I think I might want to cut apart when I get home for Collage or maybe words and phrases this one. I just love this image on the front This is hello, beauty. I love that so There's another card. So I know I'm gonna want to use that in something at some point And a lot of these throw away little magazines I even get them here at home And this is where I get a lot of the words and phrases and the occasional image that you can use in collage Those girls would be cute on ATC cards, right? We have a Hawaii themed ATC Swap coming up in Crazy Island family. I could see some of these girls in the swimsuits and some of those Cards that would be cute. See I didn't even know that when I brought it home But I always pick up things like this Bring them home and then and then disassemble disassemble them basically. So when you're out and you're traveling You can find stuff to use in your journal without spending a lot of money. I did get some Tissue when I was out This I found at the local Target in Las Vegas They may have it at my local Target, but I hadn't seen it there, but I did see it in Las Vegas It's American greetings tissue and I love The neon dots. How do you just not love the neon dots? So I had to have it. It was only like $1.69 or something. I don't remember. It wasn't very expensive So, okay. Now, let's put our page together And I'm not gonna fast forward. I'm gonna just do it and you guys are gonna see my process Let's see. I want to start with I Think with lunch the day before we left Let's see. I Don't think I want to put a flip out But I think I want to cut this top off. I just try to follow my instincts. Now, let's get some gel medium out. I Usually use heavy gel or extra heavy gel. I Do bring collage podge or Mod Podge on vacation, but most of the time I'm sticking Business cards and other things that are made out of card stock in here and the collage podge just doesn't stick them very well I do have some Photo paper for my printer that is sticky back and some that is not. I love the sticky back So when I can and I remember to I try to pack the sticky back because it works really well And I'm just going by my instincts and I am Just going with what feels right and that's Really what I do with this journal my credit card. Let's see My squeegee here we go I'm still coughing and wheezing from the trip because Las Vegas is not good for my asthma And then I got home and it's kind of icky here too. So Asthma is kind of acting up now. I don't throw these extra bits away right away I usually just set them to the side until I'm sure that I don't want to use them I'm going to put these on here. I think like that And that kind of balances out the page having all of this heavy stuff over here and then Having more down here and then travel your eye travels kind of around the page I always leave for my trip with pages pre decorated and painted So I'm not working with a blank page And I don't usually bring lots of paint with me on my trip I bring a little bit but not too much and if I do bring paint it's usually watercolor And it's not usually something that I use in this journal It's usually for my watercolor little watercolor journal. I like that So I'm going to put these on here. These are the luggage claim tickets Well, this is the kind of thing that's just good to just save these stickers You might as well use them. I think I want it down here. Okay, and then we have our photos Now this one is has a white back because this is a sticky back paper. These blue ones are not sticky I Love the sticky back. I said that already didn't I? I'm running a little low on paper so I have to save up a few pennies so I can get some more paper Husband and then I just said these aren't sticky. So for these we have to use a The gel medium and a lot of times I print too many pictures, and then I have I don't have any place to put them So then I end up putting a pocket on the page and just putting pictures in the pocket You could use tape runner or something else to put these in if you're worried about getting glue on the photo you can Make sure that Whatever you stick them down with that you wipe it off with glue. I Got some glue on that one. I'm but it's fine. I'm not too worried Put the picture in push it down Make sure this is clean Swipe it one way To push it into the glue the medium then wipe it off and pull it the other way and Then there you go nice and stuck down really well All right We are going to let that dry and then I will be back to do some journaling on the page and show you how I finish it off and I will share my other pages with you. I'll be right back Okay, I always finish it off with a stabilo pencil and some journaling So let's do that and I I usually try to highlight like the parts of the page that I think are the most important to me With the stabilo pencil which is usually the photographs not always but usually and it's not completely dry But I think it's dry enough. I always have a water brush in my kit And I usually have my watercolors in it in with me, too So if I forget the water brush, then it's there's one in the Watercolor kit. I want to go around this too Not because I think the cow is important, but I think in my balance of page We spent this trip pretty much eating our way through Las Vegas, so now I got to go to the gym But it was fun. It's what vacations are for right to eat too much and gain some weight All right, that's good. Let's give it another quick drive now when you're using When I'm on vacation, obviously, I don't have a heat tool with me So I never use that but if you're doing something like this with pictures printed on the LG photo printer Be careful about getting them too hot because it does affect the paper and the picture Um, so don't do that I guess how I know that Do some doodling on the page and then I'm gonna do some journaling and this is what I always do And I usually just have a black and white pen with me. I usually don't have anything more than that I just do some quick doodling nothing, you know complicated Just easy Don't overthink it.  I don't know why that's good. It just gives it some interest. I think Okay so now we're gonna just do some journaling about What we did on these last two days and you know, basically how much fun I had on the trip and This journal always ends up with pages that are glued together Because I'm just not careful. This is how my pages start out though before I leave on the trip I make sure I have enough of these done plus a few extras more than I think I might need So that I already have some backgrounds are ready to go To work on All right, so let's do some journaling See and again nothing complicated. Just you know, you can go into lots of detail or not Just journal about you know your trip and how you felt about the different places that are documented on this page Why do pens always run out of ink right when you're in the middle of something? What is with that? And I write every which way I constantly turn the journal as I'm writing in it and I It makes the page more interesting if the journal is not what you expect Sometimes if I'm writing a comment about something in particular I'll draw an arrow to that thing on that page that documents that so I can remember Screaming kids, which is what I just wrote. What was talking about? Oh, yeah, the flight home Lots of screaming kids. So there you go. I would probably leave it at that. That is good I would probably just do this down here because it seems like it needs something but I don't want to do any more journaling and Go back and show you This is and then I also date the page. I'll let it dry a little bit more and I do I do date the page Maybe not necessarily the date these things happened, but I do try to include Bits and pieces of things that have the date that things happened on them But I try to complete the page soon after and then date it the day it's completed So the date is always the day I completed the page and did the journaling And this is from the beginning of the year just different pieces of different things Different bits and bobs things people gave me things I picked up Since I've got a wax a couple pages again, and I you know pick up postcards, and then I'll do a flip out You know tickets to things that we did and this is the first day of the Las Vegas trip This is a little envelope that I had with me, and I put my extra photos in there. I Did a lot of smash pennies on this trip They're inexpensive to do and then stick in your journal, but you have to use gel medium or they won't stick more flip outs. I Really like the mob museum. That was a lot of fun We also went to the Clark County Museum. I'd recommend that that if you like history I would recommend that because that was a lot of fun As I said the Frank Sinatra tribute show, which was great This is our trip to Red Rock Canyon And also that day we went to the Neon Museum Valley of Fire State Park Which is gorgeous people. That's just absolutely gorgeous, and this is today's page So that's it. I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do with a small travel journal Now this journal is not going to close at the end of the year I just don't even bother even worrying about trying to keep it flat. That's me if you want to keep it really flat Then you need to put Be careful about how much stuff you collage in here how much stuff you collage in towards the spine Or use a different kind of journal for me. It doesn't matter I have last year's on display and it sits like this and I kind of like that it does that I think that's interesting. So there you have it. I hope it gives you some great ideas You can find now all my copyright notices and disclaimers in the description below along with my contact information now So if you have anything you want to ask me you can email me My P.O. Box is down there.  I can do that for you you have a way to contact me now just look in the description below and Don't forget to please like share and subscribe. Have a great day week or weekend whatever I don't know yet when I'm gonna air this but you know have a great day and Don't forget to do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later


Notice that the canner, my hips.  We don't want to be doing a pumping action with your front end doing that, because why? They break.  Well, I don't want to be riding away of this direction. I don't want to be this way, because he's going to dump weight on the forehand. I want to ride reverse English. So what I do is I think about my hips coming forward and up.