Seems like ditching the record label for the branding and design firm was the right way to go.

Mason and Megan Wendell, the husband-wife team behind Mount Airy-based Canary Promotion + Design, met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“We started our own record label (Solarmanite Records) to release our own music and some other artists, and more and more bands started coming to us for advice on everything from how to publicize a release to how to get a barcode,” says Megan, 35, who handles the marketing side of the firm.

So they started a business doing just that outside of New York City, where she was working for a dotcom and Mason was handling Web work on Wall Street. By early 2002, the duo moved to Philadelphia and found a niche in the region’s arts and culture community.

Now they have a heavy hand in the look and feel of the Philly arts scene and open source content management system Drupal is their tool of choice.

“Between our work in PR and marketing and Web design and development for cultural institutions and artists in the Philadelphia area, I feel that we have had an impact on the community and how several organizations tell their stories,” Megan says. Though they both still consider themselves musicians, their business, branding and two-year-old daughter Lyra has managed to take hold.

In addition to the Web work, the couple lists branding development for groups like Girls Rock Philly and Mauckingbird Theatre Company. The team is currently working with the Temple University Theater Department on their new summer repertory theater.

Mason Wendell loves Drupal

But beyond the marketing, it all comes down to Drupal, and that’s where Megan’s husband Mason, with a specialty in Drupal theming, takes hold. Mason oversees another full-time designer and the team works with freelancers — “we’re on the lookout for some good freelance Web designers and Drupal site builders and themers right now,” Megan says.

In recent months, the team has launched major redesigns for the Rosenbach Museum & Library, the Future of Music Coalition, Ars Nova Workshop, Nichole Canuso Dance Company and Drupal development for The Wilma Theater’s new site. They’ve also launched a new site for R5 Productions and a refresh on the site they created for Johnny Brenda’s.

Below, Mason, who is helping to organize Drupaldelphia in May and is heading out next month to DrupalCon in San Francisco to spread the good word.

But before all of that, below, we corner Mason and get him to show off and share the geeky details of three of those bigger projects.

ROSENBACH MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

Mason's Design nerd notes: "Features a custom Javascript menu, lots of tiny examples of progressive enhancement, including css3 shadows and gradients"

Talk to us about the Rosenbach redesign and specific challenges.

We created a full redesign from the ground up for the Rosenbach Museum and Library site… We wanted the design look to acknowledge the museum’s history and collections while presenting it in a fresh way.

The Rosenbach does a lot of different things with their collections, including exhibitions, various types of tours and special programs and events.  It would be too easy to try to showcase it all at once and confuse visitors. Because of their many different events, we had to make a very complex and busy event schedule understandable on one page, while showing the differences between normal events, their annual signature events, and an active series of themed tours.

We decided to make the home page very simple and highlight one major item at a time but drive visitors to delve further into the site. Once you’re into interior pages of the site, we used Drupal to find connections between what you came to visit and other related content, encouraging people to follow the rabbit down the hole.

We built upon Drupal’s taxonomy system to allow site administrators to easily categorize anything they create on the site and use those categories to automatically draw connections between content across the site.

This allows the site to flesh out pages with related content from other sections of the site, which helps visitors find more on the site that interests them. This in turn increases the time visitors spend on the site and increases their level of engagement with the Rosenbach.

The result is a site with content that is much more up to date, because museum staff can now easily update it with the latest news and events, and greatly increased SEO, with traffic up more than 480 percent on average, to-date.

NICHOLE CANUSO DANCE COMPANY

Mason's design nerd notes: "The swirls and assymetrical crop on the home page image are done automatically within Drupal. NCDC just needs to upload a standard jpg. No photoshop required."

You must have had different needs and objectives for the Canuso Dance Company.

… We created a website for Nichole’s company with subtle design elements that give a nod to her unique whimsical and dark artistic style, while keeping the images of her dance pieces and the latest news front and center.

Nichole came to us with a site that was hard for her to update and that didn’t fully represent her aesthetic. This project needed to come together with a fairly small budget while still having a good amount of customization.

NCDC has an active performance schedule and typically produces one new original work per year. We’re using a very large feature image on the home page to help showcase what’s next, or the most important thing coming up in the future.

This is handled nearly entirely automatically through a system that will  feature the next upcoming event or production, while also letting the site administrators override that feature when they want to.  We try whenever possible to create simple workflows that only require site owners to create content once and let Drupal do the hard work.

THE WILMA THEATER

Mason's design nerd notes: "We needed to integrate with their existing ticketing service provider, so we had to restyle their entire checkout process in an effort to maintain a seemless experience when purchasing tickets."

Maybe the highest profile of your new sites is for Avenue of the Arts mainstay Wilma Theater. Tell us about the new redesign.

We’ve been working with The Wilma Theater as a PR client for five seasons, so we were excited to develop a new site for them, in collaboration with the theater’s graphic designer.

Canary handled the functionality of the site and created the content management system, which allows staff to make updates quickly and easily – from adding new production videos, to promoting special events, to posting the latest play reviews.

The major attention-grabber is the custom animated image feature on the home page. We used a lot of custom Drupal functionality and javascript to build this section, which allows each slot in that rotator to feature an image, text, or a video. This all comes together to create a highly flexible and useful tool for the Wilma to promote the next show or season, or anything at all.

In the few months that this site has been live it’s already been used in a number of creative configurations, including one where multiple striped images were tiled together to create a continuous banner.

There is also a lot of Drupal customization on the backend to help tie together the volume and breadth of their content. That required a good amount of Administrative UI customization so their staff could easily use the site with very little training. We take a lot of pride in making complex operations simple for both site users and administrators.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

Afshin Kaighobady outside his new Mount Airy electric-assist bicycle shop on Oct. 8, 2009. Photo: Pam Rogow for Technically Philly

It was a yellow bicycle. That much Afshin Kaighobady remembers clearly.

On cool mornings in 1969, the 10-year-old would ride to the bakery near his home in Tehran to buy his mother fresh bread. Riding on the flat roads of Iran’s sprawling capital city at the foot of the Tochal mountains, Kaighobady can still remember his pride for riding his bike with just one hand, the other clutching a warm piece of naan fresh out of the bakery’s diesel-powered flames.

“The steam would pour off it, and so one bite and then another and soon I’d half finish the bread that was nearly as tall as I was, all the while steering this long, yellow treasure,” he says.

It is there, in Tehran in 1969, that Kaighobady first fell in love with bicycles. It is here, in the far hillier expanses of Mt. Airy in 2009, that Kaighobady, now 50, is hoping to create love for that transport’s next generation.

This Thursday, from 2 to 7 p.m., he’s hosting an opening reception for Philly Electric Wheels, his shop in this northwest Philadelphia neighborhood that he boasts is the first store in Pennsylvania, perhaps even the tri-state area, to exclusively sell and service electric-assist bicycles.

And he’s trying to convince the region that these bikes could be a large part of a greener, more comfortable, more practical way to commute.

THE BICYCLES

Philly Electric Wheels or, yes, PHEW, if pressed, came to mind after Kaighobady watched his wife Meenal Raval use an electric bike to commute to work and found a buzz around her method of transport. Since opening his store Oct. 1, he’s spending his days offering free test rides — also available at this Thursday’s reception — to show people just how practical his bikes are.

“They have everything that is good about regular bicycles,” he says. “But with the option to have someone gently push you in the back when you’re going up a hill or speeding in bad weather.”

He currently stocks 16 models from four bicycle lines — Currie Technologies, EcoBike, eZee, Ultra Motor — all of which cost roughly a penny a mile to operate, range up to 40 miles per charge, can cruise as fast as 20 miles per hour and require no license.

Typical electric-assist bicycle rechargeable battery

The cheapest model he currently stocks is $500 — the starting cost of a new traditional bicycle at many bike shops — and the most expensive is $2,700. A removable battery powers the bikes and are plugged into the wall, to be charged as easily as a cell phone battery, though it’ll take five to six hours for most bikes.

All bicycles come with warranties, many including a one-year maintenance guarantee from Kaighobady himself.

And Kaighobady, with an engineering degree from the University of Bridgeport and a background in tinkering, is probably someone from whom you want a warranty.

HIS BACKGROUND

After leaving Iran in 1979 — unrelated to that country’s Islamist Revolution, he says, though that year “something big happened there” — Kaighobady followed family to Oklahoma City. He built a computer consultancy firm on the East Coast, and then moved to Mount Airy in 2000 with wife Meenal, a native of India.

“This neighborhood has been very good to us,” he says.

He’s been involved in a half-dozen eco-ventures, though PHEW is his first swing at retail. Since 2006, the couple has tried to create a low-carbon household, which fits well into living down the block from his store. Also, the store is located in Green on Greene, a mixed-use building with a mission of sustainability. An environmentally friendly household-products manufacturer is also based there.

Kaighobady has used his mechanical mind for greener transport before.

In July 2007, he finished making a homemade electric-powered Volkswagen Vanagon, and says two men who claimed to be Chevron employees in March 2006 paid $3,900 for a 1979 Jetta he rigged to run on a biodiesel from used fryer oil.

“But these bikes,” Kaighobady says, in his stark corner storefront, a half dozen store models carefully arrayed on the hardwood floor, “are really going to be part of the future.”

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

Updated: 8/31/09 6:17 p.m., source title

Sarah Lockard should take more walks.

Earlier this summer, the Wayne native was on a long stroll when she decided she should contact Internet craft supply marketplace Etsy about working with AroundMainLine.com, the online magazine startup she launched last fall to cover the famed, ritzy swath of Philadelphia suburbs.

It was on another walk — one amid the crowds of last September spring’s blue-blooded Devon Horse Show — that the former B2B magazine sales executive decided the Main Line needed community coverage online.

Sarah Lockard

Both “epiphanies,” as Lockard called them, seem to have worked out just fine. AroundMainLine.com has partnered with Etsy to profile artisan goods from regional crafts-makers and, while she declined to disclose monthly revenue or funding, her online magazine features weekly content, has a Web designer on staff, photographers on call and a sidebar etched with advertising.

Lockard, 34, boasts that hers was the first for-profit online magazine in the Philadelphia region. But she won’t be the last.

The hyperlocal Web outfit — tied by geography, focused on a niche community and online-only — is meant to be a great wave of the future, seen by MSNBC’s recent purchase of crime and news aggregator EveryBlock, partnerships with online news startups and product launches like Outside.In and Patch.com.

Philadelphia has its first wave of adopters, but their sustainability is far less certain.

Lockard couldn’t name a single site in the Delaware Valley that joined her in independently adding original reporting to a localized coverage area. Though they exist, others, too, knew little of anyone else doing what they did. Most were islands; many part-time bloggers and aggregators and no others with any signs of revenue coming in.

They range from sites focusing on neighborhoods or towns of little more than a few thousand people and motivated by a sense of public service to academic tools funded by big pockets to sites, like Lockard’s, that aim to cover a community better and prove sustainable with a business plan in tow.

Is the future of hyperlocal Philadelphia online news here, or are we still dependent on collapsing community newspapers and a shrinking mainstream media industry, the largest and most influential of whom are fighting to remain solvent?

NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICE

The hyperlocal news movement — often pegged as an outgrowth in 2005 — was going to begin on the most local level: the neighborhoods and towns and regions too small or too underpopulated to be covered profitably by mainstream media, particularly at a time of struggle for legacy print journalism outlets. The hyperlocal trend, the experts said, would be fed largely by citizen journalists, emboldened by plummeting technology costs and the power of social media.

Yet, for a city of neighborhoods, our blocks aren’t heavy with the citizen journalists some might expect. In an age of personal publishing, social media and, now, a flux of unemployed journalists, Technically Philly found just two regularly updated, neighborhood-specific sites.

Jim Smiley is a neighborhood kid. He grew up in Frankford, a historic and beleaguered working class neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia that plunged into urban decay during the last decades of the 20th century. After surprising many by buying a home in the old neighborhood following his graduation from Drexel University and nabbing a Center City Web development gig, Smiley, 31, and his father, now retired but still living in Frankford, founded the Frankford Gazette — or reincarnated the name of an old print community paper and put it to a blog format [Full Disclosure: The author of this article lives in Frankford and has been featured on the Frankford Gazette site.]

Seeing Frankford as destined for a change — big, grand architecture, a 15-minute El ride to Old City, with parks, trees and parking — the Smileys set out to chronicle the good, but balance it with the bad.

The pair runs Google adsense, but with weekly traffic numbered in the hundreds and not much advertising interest in a low-income, inner-city neighborhood, there is little more hope than to recoup some hosting expense. Instead, the blog, updated a few times a week with aggregation, shoe-leather reporting and hounding local legislators, is something of a community service.

It’s a familiar tune for Andrew Schwalm.

Since moving to 51st Street in 2003, Schwalm, 34, has found a deep love for his portion of West Philadelphia. Lured by the interest in writing, exploring and promoting an adjacent park, he began MalcolmXPark.org, which caters to the 52nd Street corridor and other activities in and around the park.

“I have no high-minded journalism intent here… or think I could build a business or make money,” he says. “I love this neighborhood, and so I’m not interested in necessarily reporting in an unbiased way. I’m very much in the mode of a booster.”

But there’s only one problem, a recurrent problem with all citizen journalism projects. He’s leaving.

In the coming weeks, he’s moving with his girlfriend, who took a job at New York University in Manhattan, and he doesn’t know who, if anyone, would take over his role. Whatever readers he found through photos, resident interviews and event listings will likely lose the only source adding value to Malcolm X. Park.

Traffic numbers for Frankford Gazette and MalcolmXPark.org

EXPERIMENTS IN MISSION

There is no doubt that many of the questions that surround the future of hyperlocal news are tied to the historic doubt surrounding much of the news media we have come to know, particularly print standard-bearers like daily newspapers.

So, it may come as no surprise that college schools of communications have seen a gaping hole in local news coverage as an opportunity for training the future of journalism.

In recent years, Temple University has retrofitted its much-trumpeted Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab capstone course, stuffing its Philadelphia Neighborhoods site with student content covering under-served neighborhoods. One of the professors leading MURL doesn’t shy away from calling the course an important part of the next generation of local reporting.

Not to be outdone by its bigger North Philadelphia Big Five rival, LaSalle University is rolling out this semester its own localized news course, run by for-credit student labor. Led by former 18-year Inquirer columnist reporter Huntly Collins, the first class of 14 LaSalle journalism seniors will be working in partnership with G-Town Radio and Germantown Newspapers to add coverage to that aged northwest community, after a month of diversity training.

“You know that saying, ‘all politics is local?’ Well, all reporting is local. If we don’t teach our students to cover local news, they won’t really know how to report on anything, from a different community or someplace like Baghdad,” Collins says. “The future of local news is really the future of news.”

Collins declined an offer to partner her students’ content with Student Union 34, the Comcast-sponsored, Inquirer-backed Web site of college-student journalism classwork, citing an interest in working with more localized content. She says she hopes to make their coverage a dependable addition to the Germantown media, including their Web sites.

Others are looking at that portion of the city and its ability to sustain local, online reporting experimentation.

The Web and civic engagement arm of WHYY, headed by former Inquirer editorial page editor Chris Satullo, is waiting on a large grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to roll out its own hyperlocal news network focusing on Germantown and the rest of northwest Philadelphia [Full Disclosure: The author has expressed interest in a position with this proposed initiative / Brian James Kirk and Sean Blanda were involved in the design of SU34].

Sources also told Technically Philly of other foundations and well-funded individuals who are snooping around the idea of Philadelphia’s local news future. While big money can usher in legitimacy, none of these have any business model, but Lockard and AroundMainLine aren’t alone.

A BUSINESS OF MAKING NEWS

In April, John Myers launched West Philly News, taking on the cumbersome task of covering perhaps the most economically, racially and socially diverse region of the city, mostly through aggregation of print publications like the UC Review and the Daily Pennsylvanian. That work is abutted with occasional citizen journalism, like photos he takes and those submitted by readers.

The South Jersey-native is the founder of NorthernLiberties.org and its active community bulletin, but after leaving that neighborhood to buy a home in Spruce Hill to fit his wife and new kid, he launched the new venture, allowing the older, more established NoLibs site to continue on its own. Myers is focused now on growing coverage and interest, but while the WHYY radio producer — he is unaffiliated and said he was unaware of the nonprofit’s Web interest in the northwest — has a steady day job, he isn’t ignoring the potential to make West Philly News stable through profitability.

“If you look at the neighborhood locals, like a UC Review or the North Star, you have a staff of a half-dozen people or so who are supported by advertisers and are also printing a much more expensive project,” he says. “If you had only a fraction of the advertisers in the weekly and help from neighborhood people, you could support a staff of… a couple reporters and a sales rep working at least part-time.”

It’s a model being employed in another portion of the city and elsewhere in the region.

NEast Philly, which covers the more than two dozen neighborhoods and 300,000 people of Northeast Philadelphia through aggregation, unpaid columnists and occasional reader-fueled reporting, is pursuing monetization already, first through advertising [Full Disclosure: The staff of Technically Philly has personal and professional relationships with the founder of NEast Philly, and this author is an occasional contributor to the site].

Founder Shannon McDonald, 22, has teamed up with several other Northeast natives, including the former editor of the now defunct community newspaper the Northeast News Gleaner. They plan on bringing in revenue by the year’s end, McDonald says.

Bryan Shipenberg, a Bala Cynwyd-based graphic designer, launched a less sleek, if more localized, site focused on a business district in suburban Montgomery County’s Lower Merion, called Bala Avenue. For now, it’s little more than aggregation and press release regurgitation, but he’s effectively squatting on the profitable hyperlocal news trend.

“I believe that a year from now when the township lays the Cynwyd Trail and finishes the rehab of the Cynwyd station, people will come. When they open the Manayunk bridge more people will come,” Shipenberg, who also maintains a site for the Friends of the Cynwyd Heritage Trail, wrote Technically Philly in an e-mail. “With a little infusion of money BalaAvenue.com will become a great resource for the region.”

But not quite yet.

THE PRESENT PARSED FROM THE FUTURE

So very nearly all of the region’s hyperlocal products remain the passions of part-timers: largely fueled by aggregation and plans for the future, not quite ready to fill a hole left by a lost print counterpart, but surely adding to the conversation.

Even AroundMainLine faces limitations. Lockard, its founder, can use her sales background to fill her site with advertising, but, with occasional exception, she is the site’s sole content creator. Beyond profitability and depth, Collins, the LaSalle professor, called foul on the possibility for online news makers to fulfill all the needs of localized coverage anytime soon, considering constraints of the digital divide and other concerns.

In Philadelphia, no one is replacing the print weeklies, big dailies and established TV and radio news-gathering entities just yet, it seems, but many betting on the hyperlocal trend are quite a bit more optimistic.

“Big companies are already starting to pull away from print and eyeballs are too,” says Lockard of AroundMainLine. “This is where publishing and communications are headed, so we want to be there first.”

Below, watch new media pundit Jeff Jarvis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington talk hyperlocal news at a conference in Munich, Germany from February.

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

PECO announced yesterday that 50 “smart” switches, which help prevent wide outages and improve service, are being installed on its grid in Delaware, Chester, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties this year, according to a press release.

At $50,000 to $60,000 per device, PECO has invested $4 million into the project. Installation will begin as soon as this month in Media, North Wales and the Roxborough section of northwest Philadelphia.

These new “smart” switches break up a circuit and automatically isolate issues that could cause outages. They’re even wired to communicate problems back to operation headquarters. If a circuit fails, a customer is automatically re-routed to an adjacent circuit and PECO is notified on which circuit the problem has occurred.

“These are one part of a smart system that utilizes these switches to minimize the effects of outages on customers,” spokesman Ben Armstrong tells Technically Philly.

The smart switches are known in the industry as reclosers and sectionalizers, which essentially do the same thing but on different lines of voltage.

Thirteen-hundred distribution circuits in the Greater Philadelphia area have already been augmented with the smart technology and PECO says that the switches have prevented outages for more than a half-million customers.

Armstrong didn’t immediately know how many total distribution circuits are on the system to compare with the number of smart switches.

The switch upgrades are part of a $400 million capital investment program which will upgrade facilities, improve delivery and increase energy efficiency. Sections of Northeast Philadelphia and central Bucks County have already been upgraded with the smart system.

Ari Weinstein, 15, in the computer lab of Germantown Friends School, where he just finished 9th grade. Yukari Kane/The Wall Street Journal

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Ari Weinstein is the youngest Mount Airy-based hacker we’ve featured on Technically Philly in our long and illustrious history.

Weinstein, 15, is apparently “getting job offers from Israel and all over the place,” and will follow in my footsteps and appear on Fox 29 Monday morning (See clip here), after his place in a Wall Street Journal cover story that ran this week, as reported dutifully by our boy Joe DiStefano.

Weinstein is a contributor to iJailBreak.com, a blog devoted to help users install unapproved software onto Apple’ iPhone and iPod touch products.

Dude is keeping it straight tech raw in northwest Philly, even while he’s in summer camp on the Left Coast. Dude’s father Ken is a developing playing a large role in something of a retail resurgence in Mount Airy, DiStefano reports, including his ownership of the Trolley Car Diner.

H/T Joey D

After the jump, more Ben Franklin Technology Partners dispute, a Digital Philadelphia op-ed and six other tech stories you should read, including our best read article of the week.

Ordered by an incredibly complex algorithm rendering importance:

• eSchool News reports on complications to the doom and gloom three-year appraisal of Microsoft’s West Philadelphia School of the Future, near the Zoo.
• Plan Philly reports that another announced delay for SEPTA‘s smart card movement could actually be, uh, smart.
• Philly Tech News gives insight and detail to the conversation about state fundign for early stage funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners, after Joey D took apart BFTP.
• The Official Google Blog announces the launch of a new feature to its image search that scans for creative commons content, something awfully users for Web content creators. Will this hurt big stock photo business and drive down freelance photographers? We aren’t supportive of the Google blog making a totally lame and predictable reference to the 67th ward as the example in their post though. In other Google news, the New York Times BITS blog reports that the Beta tag on Google applications was finally dropped.
• The Philadelphia Daily News features an op-ed from stakeholders in Philadelphia’s digital divide dialogue. The op-ed was cross-posted on Young Philly Politics, which also featured a video from the Digital Philadelphia Initiative Summit, facilitated by the city’s CIO Allan Frank. See that video below.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Shop Talk: School District of Philadelphia launches probe into its computer recycling program

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Officers on South Street, in University City, Center City and Southwest Philadelphia also begin using the new toys this week.

Try not to cringe at how ridiculous the two-wheeled, self-balancing, battery-powered vehicles may seem, because its role in law enforcement has been growing for years and doesn’t appear it will stop. More than 1,000 municipalities are using them for patrolling, according to the company.

Now, after a 10-day trial in April 2008, the Philadelphia Police Department is joining in.

The department announced yesterday that it received a donation of more than $60,000 toward the purchase of ten Segway PTs, according to a press release [PDF]. The funds came from the Philadelphia Police Foundation, a nonprofit that raises funds to purchase technology and other police equipment that are deemed outside the city’s budget. Yes, our police department takes charity.

“Segways are an extension of foot patrol,” Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said in the release. “They are another valuable tool for our officers in helping to make Philly safer, particularly in commercial corridors. Segways are highly visible, cover a lot of ground quickly, and put our officers out there interacting with the community every day.”

Read the company’s pitch to police departments.

What Gob from Arrested Development didn’t tell you is that police rave about Segway patrols, which put cops on the street to interact like they do on walking beats but also give them an edge in a chase and can increase their coverage area, as the Inquirer reported.

Read about their patrol-specific limitations here. The company boasts their green aptitude, too.

“Everyone has a vested interest in making Philadelphia the safest city possible,” Robert Ciaruffoli, current president of the Philadelphia Police Foundation, said in the release. “Our priority is to mobilize the business and professional communities to join with the PPD in bringing this goal to fruition.”

If you want your own Segway adventure, don’t rob a cop, just take a tour on one around the Art Museum.