February 2012
1 post
January 2012
2 posts
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“This, the opportunity to do great things, to make a real difference, is what...”
– Read the whole thing.
August 2011
6 posts
Designers vs Coding →
cameronmoll:
Frank Chimero, a relatively recent convert to HTML/CSS:
Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside.
Asynchronous chat, actionable email, and working...
At August’s Refresh DC, Jason Wishard of EightShapes gave a talk about working remotely. He gave some general tips from his own experience and from his colleagues about setting up your workspace, managing your time, and making sure you can get things done when you’re not working from the office. And he talked a lot about effectively sharing and collaborating on designs when...
1 tag
Yes, your web host matters
Selecting a web hosting provider is usually at the bottom of a long list of priorities for a business launching a website. Especially for smaller, simpler sites, it hardly seems like a thing that should matter. What matters is that the site is there. And hosting is a commodity after all, right?
Not quite. While physical servers have become pretty well commoditized, the service delivered to...
New, Undeletable, Web Cookie →
Clever use of HTTP to track you and your browser.
“People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment...”
– It’s not just restaurants, of course. People running businesses in all kinds of industries try to apply the same control they exert in their own domains to their websites and online strategies. It very rarely works. It’s a different experience altogether. If only they had someone they...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
4 posts
“We are not asking for tax breaks or favorable regulatory rulings, we are asking...”
– Brad Burnham
The PROTECT IP Act Will Slow Start-up Innovation - Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
(via fred-wilson)
3 tags
1 tag
The seven things every business owner MUST do...
Ain’t linkbait grand?
8 outrageous frauds involving the CIA
Why social media should scare you more than Osama Bin Laden
8 ways the 2010 Olympics can help you survive a plane crash
Need more B.S. blog titles? These and more, courtesy of the Linkbait Generator. Reblogged from the ol’ Wellfire blog.
Happy Friday.
May 2011
5 posts
4 tags
3 tags
2 tags
“Plant materials should thrive, be non invasive, and require little maintenance....”
– Frederick Law Olmsted on landscape design, but relevant to design of all kinds, the web included. via 37signals Signals vs. Noise.
1 tag
““It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about...”
– I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You.
April 2011
1 post
“We always adapt the Natural SEO process for optimizing the website and also...”
– Gem.
If you don’t clearly understand what a prospective service provider is selling, chances are neither do they.
March 2011
1 post
Customer Survey Results, or Why You Hire Us
A few weeks ago we sent out our first customer survey, an attempt to glean unvarnished feedback from our customers about what we’re doing well and what we can improve on (or what we suck at, if the case may be). We received less than a dozen responses, which is hardly the response rate we were hoping for, but we’re happy to have a start.
We wanted to get feedback about two basic...
February 2011
2 posts
Client site launch: National Water Resources... →
Two weeks ago we soft-launched the redesigned site for the National Water Resources Association, a non-profit association headquartered in Arlington, VA.
NWRA had approached us because the organizations’s website needed a fresh appearance. Their previous site was several years old, and to boot, they had zero ability to edit their own content. We worked with NWRA as their expected needs...
“If you’re starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your...”
– Issac Hall, Co-founder of Syncplicity
Great advice for any application or project. This is especially true to remember if you are starting your first venture into the web app marketplace: start small and conquer it well!
January 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Project management: Put your ego aside and fix the...
Long alternate title: Constructively Resolving Functional Disputes Involving Multiple Parties. Yeah…
Conflicts and problems are part of life, especially when multiple people with different perspectives, expectations, agendas, and information are involved. These can be conflicts between a designer or a developer and a customer, or involving a client and multiple client partners.
...
“Oh wow. This waiting for this amazing splash page to finish loading is making my...”
– Not a Single Person Visiting your Restaurant’s Website (via neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites)
“Spend the money and only cry once.”
– An REI customer’s advice on buying a high quality wool garment. So true for business products and services, too, though.
December 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Google Maps & Label Readability
Due to only a few visually subtle changes, Google Maps is more readable than Yahoo! Maps or Bing Maps. See how the sausage is made.
41latitude:
Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem Much More “Readable” Than Those of Its Competitors?
For months, I’ve been trying to figure out why Google Maps’s city labels seem so much more readable than the labels on other mapping sites.
To me,...
November 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Stifling the Muse in the name of delivery
Scott Belsky of Behance has a great post over at Good on seeing ideas to completion. Ideas are a dime a dozen - even great ideas - and sometimes that’s the problem.
Idea-to-idea syndrome is the tendency to launch new ideas while still executing other ideas. As soon as an idea becomes an active project, we become burdened by the minutia of execution. Long days and late nights cause us to...
4 tags
PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard with psycopg2
Installing PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard using the Mac installer binary provided on postgresql.org is nice and easy. Download, click, done. Similarly, installing psycopg2, the most popular Python PostgreSQL adapter, is super simple using setuptools (or pip). But out of the box, those two don’t play well together.
You may have installed psycopg2 just fine and then struggled against this...
October 2010
1 post
“As you may or may not know, here in Venezuela we unfortunately have some very...”
– Yikes. Venezuelan web developer Guillermo Esteves explaining why he encourages readers to use his Amazon affiliate link.
July 2010
3 posts
1 tag
“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”
– Via Jason Santa Maria
Designing in pursuit of being original, or even interesting, can be a foolhardy prospect. Design that strives to be original for the sake of it, and typically at the expense of its real purpose of communication, often falls into a mire of stylistic tropes and shallow...
2 tags
Refresh DC: No Boring Content Allowed!
Another Refresh DC meeting this week:
Steph Hay will discuss ways in which web folks can write compelling, credible content that piques interest and encourages action from readers. Refreshees will leave with tips to elevate their content game — whether they’re aiming to more successfully write dynamic resumes and cover letters, describe their work in creative portfolios, or convey value...
June 2010
2 posts
Prefetch Content with HTML5 →
cameronmoll:
This sounds too easy. Add a line like this to your head element:
<link rel="next" href="page2.html">
or
<link rel="prefetch" href="big.jpg">
… and the browser fetches the content in the background as soon as the user’s computer is idle. If it sounds too easy, it’s probably because Firefox is currently the only browser to support this feature. But this has the...
Microsoft: You wouldn't drink 9-year-old milk
So why use a 9-year-old browser?
When Internet Explorer 6 was launched in 2001, it offered cutting–edge security – for the time. Since then, the Internet has evolved and the security features of Internet Explorer 6 have become outdated. Microsoft
It’s not just security. It’s failure to convey the design and interactivity of modern web applications and sites.
May 2010
3 posts
CSS3 gradients on Body (Quick Tip)
When attaching a gradient (-moz-linear-gradient, -webkit-gradient) on the <body> element, the gradient is rendered to the current client viewport by default.
So if you’ve got content longer than the client window (which certainly happens to most websites), the gradient will repeat. Be sure to set the background attachment to fixed in your css:
body { background-attachment:fixed;...
April 2010
1 post
Ubuntu's new Mac-like controls are a small...
Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx (we were hoping for Lusty Lemur, but hey), will be out of beta and ready for prime time soon. A lot of the early chatter was about the interface updates, including logo and color scheme changes, and Ubuntu’s decision to move window controls (e.g. close, minimize) from the top right to the top left.
Basically, they’ve transitioned the controls from...