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ArticleCRMWeb Development Quality Assurance by Justin Kerr on February 16, 2009Chris Butler wrote a great post last July about Quality Assurance (QA) in which he outlined the different types of QA Newfangled does and how it's integrated into our web development process.One of those QA types involves checking for site functionality, browser compliance and content integration after the client has finished entering their content but before the site is sent live. I've executed this type of QA on several sites and thought it might be helpful to share my checklist as well as a couple of tools I use when compiling a QA report.Typically, I start by clicking through every page and link on the site, taking notes as I find browser anomalies or bugs. I'll describe the problem in a text document and include a URL for the page. Sometimes I'll include an annotated screenshot of the problem (see below). A great tool for this is Skitch (Mac) and Greenshot (Windows). I also use the Web Developer toolbar add-on for Firefox to test javascript, auto-fill forms, view HTML source code, etc. My QA Checklist is divided into three categories: Critical Functionality, Important Functionality and General Usability. Critical Functionality bugs include things like code errors, non-functioning forms, broken links and cross-browser incompatibility. Important Functionality includes broken page templates, bad page security and blank or missing pages. General Usability issues include poor or missing SEO data, text legibility, inconsistent navigation and so on.Once the QA report is compiled, I create a PDF that one of our developers will review and address each item in the report. Sometimes a second round of QA is done just to make sure we've shaken out as many bugs as possible from the site before it goes live. Read Now About
ArticleProspect Experience DesignCreative Questionnaire: Andy Mangold by Justin Kerr on February 13, 2009Andy is a twenty-year-old designer/craftsman/doer of things from West Chester Pennsylvania currently attending the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is passionate about riding bikes, climbing trees, wood, good music, and all things design. If he was able to make a living building things out of Legos and making rubber band guns, he would. Read Now About
ArticleWhat is SSL? published on February 13, 2009SSL (or secure sockets layer) is a way for a user to verify two things about a server they are trying to contact for requesting a web page. The first is that they are communicating with the exact server they are expecting to be communicating with, and secondly, that no one is listening in on this communication. SSL is essential for logins, transporting delicate information, as well guaranteeing the correct sender and receiver. Read Now About
ArticleThe Intelligent Content Web by Christopher Butler on February 12, 2009You've probably heard the term "semantic web," or "web 3.0" thrown around at some point recently. But it seems like many people mean many different things when they describe something as "web 3.0." In a new whitepaper entitled The Emergence of Intelligent Content, Joe Gollner, of Stilo International, describes the semantic web in this way: "the semantic web amounts to the introduction of a descriptive layer of particularly ornate content the traversal of which facilitates the discovery, interpretation and use of the content resources that people access and use." Read Now About
ArticleFutures as an Education Strategy by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2009I was really interested in an op ed from this Sunday's New York Times, titled Education is all in Your Mind, by Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the author of Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Here's one example of several strategies taken by teachers to improve their students' performance: "Daphna Oyserman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, asked inner-city junior-high children in Detroit what kind of future they would like to have, what difficulties they anticipated along the way, how they might deal with them and which of their friends would be most helpful in coping. After only a few such exercises in life planning, the children improved their performance on standardized academic tests, and the number who were required to repeat a grade dropped by more than half." The article even mentions the KIPP (Knowledge is Power) program, which Bill Gates noted in his recent TED talk. Gates went on to talk about his optimism that any problem (including malaria and education) can be solved. I wondered recently in my blog what conditions would be assumed in order for any problem to be solved, and though I may have come off as pessimistic, I am intrigued and optimistic that considering future problem solving can improve academic performance. My assumption is that the shift to a more problem-solving mode of thinking is made easier by considering one's own future and possible barriers to success, rather than any problems in the abstract and that it naturally follows that a student could more successfully move to a more academic application afterward. Of course, I'm not a psychologist so I may be dumbing this down quite a bit. I wonder if the same approach could be effective in the workplace, too? Read Now About
ArticleThe Quantified Worker by Christopher Butler on February 10, 2009 Pictured to the right is a visualization of my own time data from mid-October until today (I listed the breakdown by category underneath the graph). I chose mid-October because we started using a tweaked version of our system then, so I didn't want to include a mix of data from the new and old system. This data is a bit skewed since I took a couple of weeks off for Christmas, but in general it shows a clear breakdown of my time across 14 different internal categories... Read Now About
ArticleThe Slow Information Movement by Christopher Butler on February 9, 2009 I've noticed in my reading lately a trend toward a returning appreciation for print from those immersed in online technology. As I was thinking about tracing at least one thread of this meme, I was able to construct this progression (which has much more to do with how I've found these ideas online, rather than the order in which they actually came about)... Read Now About
ArticleScreens Within Screens by Christopher Butler on February 9, 2009 In a New York Times Digital Domain column from this week, author Randall Stross writes: "And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research..." The article, Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens, stresses that though online video has become a major player in the world of advertising, it is still subservient to the value of traditional television... Read Now About
ArticleThe Internet’s Librarian is Us by Christopher Butler on February 6, 2009The Paleo-future blog quotes a passage from a 1997 book, Predicting the Future, which was skeptical toward Bill Gates idea that the internet would be conducive to self-publishing, mostly due to a lack of a meta-organizational structure like the Dewey Decimal System: "The lack of an equivalent to the Dewey decimal system on the Internet is a different matter. While it is true that experienced Internet users can eventually find what they're looking for, [Clifford] Stoll and other critics insist that it takes more expertise and time than Internet enthusiasts are willing to admit...." Read Now About
ArticleCan Any Problem Be Solved? by Christopher Butler on February 6, 2009Bill Gates asks this question (specifically toward the problem of Malaria) in his TED conference talk from this week (video after the jump), but I'm interested in the question in general. I like his optimism, and wish I shared it in general. He says that as an optimist, he believes any problem can be solved. But I wonder, given what? Read Now About
