mindgraffiti

The choices of web technologies to learn next are overwhelming: should I delve deeper into PHP and mySQL, Ruby on Rails, Python, Flex or ActionScript 3? I continue to learn better CSS techniques and understand XHTML, but where to go from here? Baby steps means learning how to program JavaScript. I can already implement JavaScript frameworks and AJAX pieces developed by others. I can read and understand what any chunk of JavaScript/PHP/ActionScript does, but writing it is another matter.

In terms of accessibility, I think microformats are my next new item to understand. A short term project I would love to test is rebuilding one of the state association member lists as hCards. I wonder if hCards will interact with Google’s Maps API? I would love to aggregate the hCards off of each of our state associations and peg them to a Google map of the U.S. and Canada.

We have so much content available at our fingertips. Why not put it to good use? Membership lists, sale dates, state association events and registration numbers all begging to be mashed up. I would love to take the chance and visualize some of the raw data we add to sites every day.

My long-term goal is to have the same skill set as the Flex developers: understand how to manipulate database calls, be capable of writing in a server-side language, know how to hook into any given API and produce a new product, delivered on a near-universal platform.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Hit the image to see the full size. Don’t panic. ALA will be fine.

Popularity: 4% [?]

If I can solve the fish problem, why can’t I seem to find a proper solution to this one?

The Photo Department

The Photo department has reached critical mass. After 10 years and 12 TB (yes, I do mean 12 terabytes) of photos, their Mac G5 finder windows will no longer search for photos with ease. Complaints of “spinny beach balls” and a noticeable lag in productivity this past busy season earned them an iMac loaded with Leopard with the idea of dedicating a single machine only to search. The trouble? The poor iMac can’t search photos as fast as their G5s on a bad day. While I predict a small boost in their productivity because their own machines are freed from search queries, it does not solve the problem. They need a long term solution.

Band aids on broken legs

The best possible solution would be a dedicated server with a custom database and a nice interface to spit out the results. Throw in intranet/internet capability and a shopping cart for good measure. Unfortunately, I suspect the budget is not available to address an enterprise-level problem with an enterprise-level solution.

Size that budget down some and I would suggest a contract to develop a Flickr clone built for commercial use. Keep all the perks of Flickr with a shopping cart added. Once the programmers were finished building it, they could sell it to other companies as a white label product where others could install it on their own local intranet or on their own servers. I understand the typical online business model is to sell the service and not the product but many companies would rather own the product than risk becoming dependent on a company that they perceive “could disappear into the night.”

I am resisting the urge to peg them as thinking in the traditional business model types who were burned when the tech bubble burst because it also makes sense from a convenience standpoint. If we simply bought the services we needed instead of buying the product to do the service, we would end up with Flickr to handle photos, Wufoo to build the Contact Us forms, Paypal’s shopping cart to sell our products and Issu to serve our magazine online. These separate services cobbled together would work great for a small business, just not the medium or large ones.

Cut the budget even more, and I would like to see a Mac Pro with 2 Quad Cores, serious RAM and Adobe Lightroom running. The same solution already in place, where a machine is dedicated to searches only, but bulked up beyond the iMac’s abilities.

The last on the list would be a revised work flow and Adobe Lightroom installed on the iMac. Even then, I doubt Lightroom will function. The minimum system requirements are lies. Adobe recommends running Lighroom with 1 GB of RAM, but the forums and my own testing suggest it takes a minimum of 2 GB for it to function on its most basic level without crashing.

I presented my solutions two weeks ago. During our weekly staff meeting it was announced that the Photo Department will be receiving a new Mac Pro with Lightroom to help ease their growing pains. I was unimpressed, since The Higher Ups only approved the minimal budget.

At 2.8 GHz/8 GB RAM on two sets of quad core processors, it’s the minimum specs I recommended just to run Lightroom. The downside is obvious. I predict they will out grow the memory on that computer quickly. The upside is the Mac Pro is configured to grow with them, so they can expand it in the future.

I learned a new lesson on office politics. If you really want to see them on a screaming machine, claim it as the minimum specs. Then declare that no less than a custom-programmed solution costing three times your minimum solution would truly solve the problem. After that, they won’t flinch at the original specs you set up. Too bad I learned it too late.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Rob Keniger has kindly taken the time to patch the GL2DW extension. You can get it here: http://menumachine.com/download/GL2DW.zip. From his description in the Adobe Forums:

1) the extension is now tolerant of any errors copying components or templates. If these errors occur, you will still see an error message but the conversion process will not abort. The extension will also use the Library folder if it can’t find the Snippets folder.

2) the extension will no longer modify any MenuMachine code. This is important if you are still using MenuMachine to manage your menus in the converted site.

If you found his patch useful, do stop by the Adobe Forums and thank Rob for his thoughtful post.

[Announcement via MindPalette/Nate Baldwin]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Aside from flowers, something Mom might appreciate is a working computer. Play tech support on Mother’s Day this year with a few free tools.

Clean up her computer performance by running basic maintenance. If she’s on a PC, do the usual: malware/spyware scan, antivirus scan, defrag, automatic backups, etc. Schedule these tasks to auto run if they are not already set.

Give the gift of low-spam e-mail. Set up a Gmail account, complete with mail forwarding for her old account, filtered and sorted by a separate label.

Set up a screaming-fast browser so she can surf without encumbrance. Firefox 3 beta 5 has solid performance and is user-friendly for a low learning curve.

Bookmark a few sites you think she’d enjoy. Create a Del.icio.us account or share some new links if she already has del.icio.us. Choose something based on her hobbies. Here are a few general interest sites most people enjoy.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Many online businesses still follow the subscription model. It looks like the theory behind it is passive income. You built your idea once, then farm it out to the users on a yearly or monthly fee. Aside from customer support, on the surface it looks appealing.

Flickr, Wufoo, Mad Mimi and even Paypal uses a variant of the subscription model. Lynda.com and Basecamp both use a subscription model, but in their rare cases it benefits the customer. These services could be sold piecemeal, if the companies wanted to charge that way. A customer could buy a specific set of lessons through Lynda.com for the price of the CD-ROM or DVD. A customer could also buy access to Basecamp by the project. Instead, buying the premium subscription to each gives you unlimited access: the techie version of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The downside to all this service selling is the missing deliverable product. I don’t mean the lessons provided by Lynda.com or the sanity doled out by Basecamp, I mean the ability for companies to buy a wonderful application in white label form. I wish Paypal and Flickr let you buy their code for a one-time, (very steep) fee so it could be used on the company Intranet or installed on the company server. If some of these applications were deployed as the product instead of the service as the product, we could actually obtain some of them.

Many of the traditional business model types were burned when the tech bubble burst and don’t buy into the idea that they need to be dependent on this great service. In the back of their minds, you hear them asking, “What if this company disappears over night? What happens to our mission-critical items we entrusted to their Ruby on Rails encrusted hands?”

If Flickr or Mad Mimi sold their applications as a product, I think it would only increase their sales. Some companies prefer the hands-off, no maintenance method of buying the services. Others want the security of knowing that if Flickr tanks tomorrow, they will still be able to access their photos and sharing their photos will continue without interruption. Many of these services are so strongly branded that I believe customers would seek out the familiar brands and buy the company’s application because it is trusted and has been tempered by experience.

This is all just conjecture, a stray thought after playing with some of the Web. Business is not my expertise, jut a passing interest. But still I wonder…how much are these companies missing out, in terms of opportunity and revenue? Aside from open source are there any other companies creating online white label products?

Popularity: 11% [?]

Eric Lundquist’s 10 New Rules of Techie Etiquette via Geek Like Me

Cool stuff done with CSS- a CSS Homer Head

25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

Web Economy B.S. Generator

An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

One of my bad writing habits

Have a good weekend.

Popularity: 9% [?]

First, a few design rules even us non-designers can remember and apply. Then a crash course in typography, followed by an excellent list of other fonts available to use on the web. Now that you have a handle on the basics, calculate a nice rhythm and typeset your web pages. Don’t forget- you can also slim it down or spice it up.

Popularity: 11% [?]

When I first started working here I was astounded by the range of benefits I received. Angus Productions Inc.’s benefits are getting restructured, bit by bit…not sure what the catalyst was for these changes, but the good news is, most of them are getting improvements. Wages might be mum around here, but everyone knows about the benefits, so I’ll share.

Paid time off in the U.S. is a rare commodity and one of the defining perks that keeps me here. Last year, between vacation time, personal time, holidays and free days (if we meet production goals often enough, we get a day off with pay, at random intervals) I took off 33 days during the year. Pretty nice, IMHO.

2 weeks paid vacation still applies. Once you hit your 5 year anniversary, you receive another paid vacation day (11 days off instead of just 10), and these add another vacation day until you reach 3 weeks of vacation.

2 weeks paid personal time off. This is a switch- we lost 3 days, from 13 days of ‘bonus time’ to 10 days of ‘personal time.’ It works better this way, though, because the bonus time was a use it or lose it- 4 hours of time off every two weeks, like clockwork. If you didn’t use it, you were paid for it. If you used more than 4 hours, you had to take docked pay.

Paid holidays. Now eight, instead of seven. The day after Thanksgiving was an unofficial holiday here for several years. It has finally become an official one.

Pension plan? It looks like it has disappeared. Sad, but not unexpected. While it was not formally announced that the pension plan is officially dead, not a word was spoken about it during our last benefits meeting. As far as I can tell, it is being phased out/replaced by a 401(k) with a 2% contribution from the company. Roth 401(k) is also offered. Despite the pension plan disappearing, at least the 401(k) options have opened up. We are now allowed to self-direct funds (still for a ridiculous fee, so I doubt I will choose that route) or choose a limited, pre-set portfolio. Now at least I can invest in an aggressive portfolio, instead of being stuck in with the rest of the conservative funds.

Health Insurance. Still 100% paid by my employer, no changes to it. I doubt they will ever take this benefit away, since it is usually the key benefit that draws people to work here.

Life Insurance. 100% paid by the employer. A $100,000 policy for your first year, until you have a W-2 statement. After that, you are covered 4 times the amount on your W-2 statement or $100,000, whichever is greater.

Dental & Vision Insurance. Still 100% paid by my employer, with a new feature tacked on: 20% discount on all vision-related services and products, through VSP.

Flex Spending Plan. New features- they switched companies, so now we have access to a Flex spending debit card and online account service. Very handy to have.

Casual Dress Code. [Funny but true: among us peons, the level of formality in which a person is dressed is inversely proportional to the money they make. Therefore: well dressed = low paid. It is not a direct relationship, but an interesting observation nonetheless.]

Weekends are free. In the past two years, I have only had to work one mandatory Saturday, and our manager was working right beside us. The nice part about the work weekends are the automatic overtime pay. Even if you didn’t work 40 hours during Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday are set at (hourly wage * 1.5) for my pay. Also, if I work more than 8 hours in a single day, it’s calculated as overtime too. So 10 hours on Monday means 2 hours are calculated at overtime rates.

Overtime is optional. It is available at all times, since we are still a nascent department. The best part of having an hourly wage is the ability to control one’s paycheck. I could easily have 80 hours a week, considering the projects we have in queue, but I do not feel the need to burn myself out. Sometimes I work it (I wanted the PS3 and new Ratchet & Clank game so bad!) and other times I don’t.

Something I would like to see in the future is a profit sharing plan, where we have the option to buy into the company. Although I am unsure it is feasible, since we are a for-profit owned by a non-profit. As other companies already know, it would be an indirect method to keeping employees motivated towards improving the business.  I don’t claim any familiarity with tax laws, but as long as they are improving everything else, what does it hurt to ask?

Popularity: 12% [?]

Please excuse the poor headline. It’s rough, just like the “designs” found in our e-lists.

When it comes to design, it doesn’t exist in the e-lists. Our customers dictate what they want and ignore any suggestions made on our part. Go ahead- glance through a few. I hated working on e-lists. It was detestable work, being forced to puke all over a page. I am not an artist in any sense of the term, but I have a rudimentary grasp of the basics: color theory, white space, font choices, dominance of elements on the page, etc. It’s easy to identify good design but difficult to create.

Despite explaining that a well executed design equals effective advertising, few of them understand what that means, so white space is eliminated and as many fonts, colors, and pictures as possible are crammed onto a single page. [Random samples of typical e-list ads].

I don’t buy and sell cattle, but I have to subscribe to the e-lists because it is classified under the realm of ‘web stuff’ handled by our department. Yet, even as an uninterested bystander, I can feel the impact of an effective message an an ineffective one. Here are a few stellar e-list designs that stand out:

MJB Ranch

Trans Ova Genetics

Biozyme Inc.

Surely, others feel it too. I know people talk about these ads. So why is it so hard to convince customers that good design sells?

Popularity: 13% [?]