Right Now(ish)

Andrew There is something in our attic...
(9 days, 8 hours, 10 minutes ago)

Joshua "When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated, as in a ship. When all tend to debauchery, none appears to do so. He who stops draws attention to the excess of others, like a fixed point." - Blaise Pascal.
(20 days, 11 hours, 4 minutes ago)

The infamous tag cloud

Archived Art beta blink Blowing our Horn Cool Stuff Design Did you know... Marketing Music Ruby on Rails secret SEO Tech Trends Uncategorized web apps Whatever

Micro Ad Networks

5.27.09
Jarrett ››

No we aren’t trying to create a new buzzword - we just don’t know what else to call it.

First, I should preface this post by saying I’m a huge consumer - huge. I’m an impulse buyer. If it weren’t for my wife and her steadfast thrifty nature, we’d be broke & living in a house fashioned together from books, iphones, label makers, moleskine sketchbooks, and 1000 different types of sharpies.

With that said, I’ve been plagued as of late by very, very targeted advertising. And it’s winning. The two main culprits are ‘The Deck‘ & ‘Fusion‘. What’s so unique about these two services? Well, they apparently know me . We are old friends or something. I’m assuming, at least, that is why I’ve been reaching for my wallet since I started writing this post.

Their model is relatively simple - find 20 or websites, micro apps, blogs, etc. that a group of people (in my case designers or designer/developers -it’s that detailed) frequent regularly. Big hitters, too - industry sites. Then, pay those sites to host your > 200×200 simple rotating ad - an nobody else’s. Then, find 15 or so services, applications, whatever, that people in your predefined group might use, and more importantly you have paid for and used. Then watch me fight my wallet. The deck even allows you to purchase a ‘roadblock’ per day, ensuring your tiny ad shows up on all of the site in their network all day - for product launches, etc. I’m screwed.

You see, both of the ads from the deck and fusion are so tailored, that not only have they found where I hang out on the internet, they show me ads for stuff I REALLY want to try/buy. It’s already worked. Here are some examples:

Harvest Time Tracking Application
Campaign Monitor
Mail Chimp
Things
Ballpark
and Probably some others

I don’t know how many times, during my early morning blog run, do I see the same little > 200×200 square show up from one of these services. I actually look for them. Because of their “we won’t allow ads for things we haven’t used personally” rule, these ads almost feel like a referral from the ad network, rather than an ad.

The latest example came from Tweetie a couple of weeks ago. Tweetie is a beautiful OS X desktop & iPhone client for Twitter. Feature rich and awesome - I have the free version. You can buy the paid version for $14.99. No worries I thought, I’ll buy it when my trial is done. Except there is no trial - just an ad supported version. Every hour a new ad from Fusion shows up at the top of my feeds. Right now it’s for ‘Ballpark’ an project billing/estimation app that I need to get a trial for. I was now hesitant to pay for ad-free version - because I enjoyed the ads. They introduced me to new applications, and small little workflow enhancers I otherwise would have come across on a blog or article somewhere down the road. But now I get to flex my early adopter muscles.

Tweetie fixed this. You can now buy the ad-free version (giving $14.99 to some really deserving coders) and then switch the ads back on in the preferences panel.

Ads don’t suck when they are small, info driven, and extremely relevant to your audience.

Hook us up:

Tags: Ads, advertising, Micro Network
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Semantic Code

4.16.09
Jarrett ››

We have a great new intern from WSU learning Rails. He comes from a low-level (which is programming terms means ‘more awesome computery stuff’ programming background. I knew Rails (mostly because it’s high level of abstraction) would take a bit of getting used to for him, but fortunately, he’s a very quick learner. I should put a doomsday clock up to track when exactly his skills will overtake mine. I feel it will be a couple of months from now. So I need to polish up.

As it turns out, it wasn’t the code itself that has caused a bit of pause in our determined intern. It’s something that lies beyond the code - in an ethereal world were logic and process are anthropomorphized.

Rails is pretty semantic. A number of different conventions and patterns have all contributed to this lofty idea - namely MVC, Ruby’s desire for readable code (Time.now, Time.3.days.ago, etc.) Programming patterns are one thing - but when your chosen pattern begins to reflect the natural world, things get hairy - and beautiful.

I gave Josh (we have two Josh’s now) the intern a chance to create a site completely from scratch. A little break from the books and podcasts, and running back to office every 15 minutes to ask some noob question (kidding, Josh). Something that would help him, and help us in the process in gettig him ready to work on real projects. A simple site with a basic custom CMS, and a couple of other brain stretching gems thrown in for good measure.

One of the latest meetups between Josh & Semantic code happened on Tuesday. It was brief, but it was a great example of ‘The Rails Way’ of doing things. The fake site I asked for called for a blog - a simple one. Just to see if he could do it. He did. Josh decided to go with my open set of parameters and add some features I hadn’t dictated - Which is an awesome trait in an intern by the way. Josh wanted users to be able to preview their posts before they submit - preview inline on the the page, just as it would look. Great idea that’s been implemented everywhere.

Josh found he could add a few lines to his New action to in a sense create a Preview by recursively calling the method on itself with a switch in his view to show it if it existed - dismissing the shudder inducing logic he had now placed in his View, there was a greater problem in my mind - Redefining ‘New’.

New acted like New is supposed to - it creates a new instance of the Blog (or whatever he called it model), and then passes the form data to the Create action on submit. Now New acted like New or Preview based on a logic switch. Hmmm. It DID work. It achieved what he wanted, and not even in a clumsy “It doesn’t matter because it just works” sort of way. But it wasn’t railsey. Why? Well for those keeping score, he should have given his Blog Controller a Preview action. He had completely missed the chance to recognize not only the programming pattern, but the oft overlooked linguistic pattern found in rails. Code and markup do their best when they truly mean something. We they have a linguistic definition, and act accordingly, code jumps from the screen and into your mouth. Nothing is arbitrary. a=6…. But what IS an A? What can it do? Who does it belong to? Who are it’s parents? Why does it even exist? Now if a is from the class Apple, we have a bit more semantic context. The apple model makes sure it’s Red. And the Apple Controller gives us action to Eat it, Toss it in the Trash, or Plant it in the ground to make a new apple tree. Wait what’s an apple tree? It’s the parent of the apple class. Look it up in a book.

There WAS frustration. On my part. I couldn’t explain what I felt. Because people rarely explain how the feel about code - it’s cold and insulated, and sanitized. Rails breathes. It brings your app to life in a way that someone could write a novel using your code. Turning your code into actual words. Code with a true linguistic context is something that takes awhile to wrap your head around. Code that lives in our mouths as well as on the machine. I think he got it, no thanks to my inept communication/teaching skills.

Semantic code is simple to do on a daily basis - you probably already do it in your markup - CSS classes now define html structure in real words - div.sidebar gives a seemingly boring and faceless DOM element an inherit purpose now. It’s supposed to walk, talk and act like a sidebar now. And we haven’t even implemented it yet. But we can infer all of this through it’s linguistic context.

Semantic code writes itself.

Hook us up:

Tags: Code, Ruby on Rails, Semantic
Posted in Cool Stuff, Did you know..., Tech | 2 Comments »

Why we love Hatch.

4.6.09
Jarrett ››

We love Hatch. We love it because we created it. We love it because it’s exactly what we need and nothing more. We love it because it works how we think, and how we want our Clients to think with us. That’s the beauty of a custom application - the fact that it’s web based which makes it incredibly agile, always available (from anywhere, anytime) fast, easily updated, etc. etc. makes it even better.

We love to create web apps, and our clients love to use them. Why? Because it’s exactly what they need: It’s tailored perfectly to meet their business model, current infrastructure, workflow, etc. The cost to produce a custom CRM, project management tool, inventory manager, has come down greatly over the years - mind you, they’re not cheap. But they are are certainly affordable, and the level of ground up customization is worth it’s weight in gold. Because of the exponential growth of available web technology, the days of expensive, high overhead, boxed business applications are growing shorter.

Hook us up:

Tags: Hatch, web applications
Posted in Tech, Trends | No Comments »

Were we’ve been, and a little on Twitter.

3.11.09
Jarrett ››

People have asked ‘where have you guys been?’. I’m guessing they were referring to the blog. To be honest, we’ve been heads down, hand to the wheel, trying to push through this economy mess. To be even more honest, we were blindsided a bit by it all. Everything was going swimmingly. Then January hit. A January that will go down in infamy in the Blink Historical record. I’m going to refer to it as ‘The Great Nothing’. It was a waiting game. A good one too - biting you’re nails, edge of your seat kind of game. After the Game ended, we lost our good Friend and hell of a designer, Andrew to Legacy Bank’s in-house creative group. It was pretty glum for a couple of weeks. Days of hollering out something funny across the office, only to be met with silence. His empty chair squeaking in the wind, as if it were singing him home. Or needed a bolt tightened. Chairs are like that. Regardless, we’re here, and we are ready to press on, refocus, specialize, and get back into it. March/April have been excellent to us. I hope all is getting better for the rest of you.

In other news, I had a number of conversations spring up lately regarding Twitter. Known to webnerds for a couple of years now, I think it’s finally getting some main stream attention as the next big (little) thing. Every day, a new radio or news show I watch is slowly starting to add the service to the way they communicate with watchers/listeners. So the question I get a lot is ‘Do you know anything about Twitter?’ followed by ‘I don’t get it.’

Twitter at first seems like it’s been done.. I’ve heard plenty of, what does it do that Facebook Status don’t? I think the question should be , what does Facebook do that twitter doesn’t. The answer is A LOT. That’s the point. Twitter is as single a service webapp as there is - and it’s blowing up. It’s now another tool in the great quest to allow clients, customers, potential customers, your grandmother, communicate with you on their terms - how they want it, when they want it. Marketing doesn’t get any more ‘permission’ based than allow people to interact with you on a granular level.

Last night, someone asked me ‘How can you use it to make money?’. The answer is tricky. Using Twitter alone isn’t the answer; Although a very successful move by a Korean Taco Truck in LA is creating a lot of buzz as the first ‘Viral’ restaurant. The demand they create by Tweeting where 1 of their 2 trucks will be showing up that day is astounding - sometimes a line exceeding 600 folks - some of whom were there before the truck was.

I’ve seen a successful Web Application company tweet ‘The Next 50 people to sign up for XX will recieve XX dollars off’, and then 5 minutes later announce it was all over. They created instant demand. For our web service, Hatch, as well as another group in town’s (Paste) applications, Twitter is the perfect place to announce new features we’ve rolled out overnight, server issues, track other folks conversations regarding our product, etc. The key is to meet people where they want to meet you. That could be a number of places. It’s not a quick fix. It takes a plan, a team, and a lot of ground work. Regardless, sign up, and give it a try. You’ll see… Promise.

Hook us up:

Tags: Economy, Twitter
Posted in Did you know... | No Comments »

Warped pages make great bookmarks…

1.20.09
Jarrett ››

I read a lot of books. The for pleasure to for learnin’ ratio is pretty even. But I must confess something. But it’s something someone might try and it will change their life. It’s also something weird.

When books are for pleasure, I’ll use a bookmark - I just need to mark a progressive section in the book. I read more, the bookmark is moved forward. Pretty simple. But what about those books that you use for reference? I’ve got a stack of Ruby On Rails books that travel with me back and forth daily. I’m in them all the time, referencing stuff as I’m working, looking up some random method I’ve long forgotten. It get’s a little frustrating after a while, flipping through pages looking for a page you’ve seen before, and kind of know where it is, but still - you have to hunt.

This was me until one serendipitous moment a few months ago. Let me preface by saying - we now have an office cat. We like her a lot, but are trying to train her to stay off desks. I read on the internet a quick shot from a squirt bottle will …ummmm…. ‘train’ them.

Not on this life changing day, I was ‘training’ the cat - but over shot and hit an open book. I quickly wiped off the page and went back to work. Later, I noticed something - the page had warped - you know what I’m talking about. It was slight but it was enough to, when looking for that page later on, I found it immediately. So… I did it purposefully - on another page I had dog-eared and needed for quick reference. It worked. It still works. From that glorious day on, sections that I need to find in a pinch are slightly ‘misted’. The book takes on a bit of a ‘used’ look, but honestly the payoff is completely worth it. Do with it what you will.

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Tags: book, bookmarks, great, make, mist, pages, spray, wet
Posted in Uncategorized, Whatever | No Comments »

Archived: Week 16

1.16.09
Andrew ››

(01) Element

(02) Gretchen Hupfel

(03) Lago

(04) Juxtavision

(05) Snailbooty

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Tags: Archived, Art, Cool Stuff, Design
Posted in Archived, Art, Cool Stuff, Design | No Comments »

Andrew’s Music Taste In Colors

1.13.09
Andrew ››

The image below is a visual representation (kind of) of my taste in music over the past few months, according to Last.fm and Epson. The graph was generated by Epson based off my top artists over that time span. It’s far from gorgeous, but it’s kind of interesting to see the timeline. The idea is supposed to have a lot to do with color although I don’t see much variance. Apparently I’m strictly a red/purple guy.