Article Three Necessary Disciplines: Try to Visualize Catastrophe by Christopher Butler on February 25, 2009 What do I mean by this? Well, I think it's often pretty easy to go about life without giving consideration to possible failure, at least not in a realistic way. You've probably heard the phrase "too big to fail" numerous times throughout the past few months of economic crisis. At this point, given the numerous entities to which have been referred as "too big to fail," which have ultimately failed, it would seem that the moniker is a better predictor of failure than a true statement of resiliency... Read Now About
Article Three Necessary Disciplines: Be a Human Synthesizer by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2009 Last Thursday, everyone at Newfangled met for our annual winter retreat. Our program included presentations from Mike, Mark, and me dealing with the direction our engineering department is headed with our CMS, our marketing and new business practices, and how technology is shaping our company. My presentation focused on what I believe are three necessary disciplines to adopt in order to ensure success in our industry... Read Now About
Article The Snarky Side of Technological Progress by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2009 Louis CK on Conan O'Brien: "Now we live in an amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that don't care." Read Now About
Article You Only Know What Google Says You Know by Mark O’Brien on February 22, 2009 Lately, I've been spending a whole lot more time talking about blogging than actually blogging. The good thing about this, is that I've started to notice some trends and central themes that exist in the conversations I've been having, and this is one of the big ones. Read Now About
Article Theory on the Update by Christopher Butler on February 18, 2009 Virginia Heffernan, in her New York Times column Being There, writes: "My friend Lizzie, who is an actual poet, is a terrific, prolific updater. Her updates are often the kind of lyrical blast — T. S. Eliot’s “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” was a recent post — that might get stuck in your head with no place to go. Sure enough, she has a great theory of the update, which she explained to me in a note on Facebook: 'Unlike ALL other walks of life, status updates are the appropriate places for spontaneous bursts of joy and being. You shouldn’t do it at work, you shouldn’t do it in the middle of a conversation, you shouldn’t do it on the street, you shouldn’t turn to a stranger on the bus, you shouldn’t leave it on someone’s cellphone. But on this grand constantly updating Christmas card that we are all free to access or withdraw from at any time, we FINALLY have a polite space for My sponge smells like a hot dog.' Spontaneous bursts of being: perfect. Read Now About
Article Six Word Memoir by Justin Kerr on February 17, 2009 Could you sum up your life in six words? The folks at Scott Hull Associates asked some of their artists to give it a shot in their February newsletter. The original exercise is attributed to Ernest Hemingway who wrote, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."I think mine would be, "was blind, but now I see." What's your six word memoir? Read Now About
Article Should Information be Free? by Christopher Butler on February 17, 2009 I have to admit that I come at this question with a somewhat conflicted point of view. I believe that information is already free; especially those facts which we merely discover rather than invent. They would be, regardless of whether we knew of them or not. But I think that, to the extent we can facilitate it, information should be free, in that no one should be blocked by another from accessing knowledge. I suppose what I mean specifically is that nobody should own the fact that the planets orbit the sun, or something of that nature. Nor should somebody own the fact that an important event happened at some place or time. These facts exist outside the realm of ownership, obviously... Read Now About
Article CRM Web Development Quality Assurance by Justin Kerr on February 16, 2009 Chris 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
Article Internet Memes Look Like Evolution? by Christopher Butler on February 16, 2009 In Slate Magazine, author Chris Wilson writes in Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook: "All in all, Facebook infections look remarkably similar to human ones. And like organisms, the odds do seem stacked against all but the fittest of memes. The 'Notes' application—including the ability to tags friends—has been a feature of Facebook since August 2006, a Facebook spokeswoman told me on Tuesday. (The PR rep also confirmed that Facebook itself had no part in sparking the trend.) The fact that it took two-and-a-half years for a Notes-based meme to hit it big suggests long odds. Still, viral marketers might take note of the patterns that '25 Random Things About Me' obeyed. The best hope for someone looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however, there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't. Just look at the platypus." Perhaps viral marketers already have? I was recently alerted by Facebook that a friend of mine had just joined a group titled something to the effect of "The 25 Random Things About Me meme is really just a marketing ploy to find out more about us." Read Now About
Article What is SSL? published on February 13, 2009 SSL (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
