Martin Fowler will be speaking in San Francisco

April 22nd, 2010

I have appreciated a lot of what Martin Fowler has to say about development over the years.

He will be in San Francisco on May 11-12 for a couple of free forms.  The 11th is Tuesday in Santa Clara and the 12th in in San Francisco.  Both are free.

Unfortunately the 12th  is a Community builders night [...]

Some cool Schools/Universities design examples

April 21st, 2010

I came across a couple of university web sites and was interested how they were programmed.

The first is Bucknell’s Virtual Tour site: http://community.bucknell.edu/. It is made up of a lot of full screen photos but seems to load extremely fast. Browse around and you can see what I am talking about. Probably AJAX pulling in [...]

Typekit Fonts get attention at DrupalCon

April 20th, 2010

Here’s a font resource that I heard about at DrupalCon:

Typekit – The easiest way to use Real Fonts on your website

Description from their website:

Typekit is the easiest way to use real fonts on the web. It’s a subscription-based service for linking [...]

DrupalCon SF 2010: Modules/Tools of interest

April 19th, 2010

Just wanted to try to keep track of some interesting modules mentioned at DrupalCon:

Organic Groups – create groups that users can join.  groups can have own home page and context

PURL – use for embedding context info into URL.  Use this instead of setting session variables

Context Spaces – more granular variable level overrides than using Context [...]

DrupalCon SF 2010: Drupal Distributions

April 19th, 2010

Jason and I attended a DrupalCon session on a Open Atrium, a drupal distribution for intranets and project management.  It’s basically Drupal-based app that competes with 37Signals’ Basecamp/Campfire/Backpack suite.  It’s an impressive product which made me think to look up some other Drupal distros that could be of interest.  Here’s some of what I’ve found [...]

School of Business launches redesigned resource site

April 2nd, 2010

You can’t see it unless you’re a grad student, but MBA Career Services across the Bay at UC Berkeley completed integration of the Dayspring redesign and launched the new Student Resources website last month.

Congratulations to the information architect, designer and producer for a smooth, on-time and on-budget hand over to the Haas technical integration team.

The Failures of CAPTCHA

April 1st, 2010

CAPTCHA has become ubiquitous on the web recently, including on sites we have built. However, in my recent accessibility research for a recent project I came across this article which urges developers to stop using CAPTCHA since, in the words of the author:

“CAPTCHAs fail to properly recognize users with disabilities as human.”

and…

“External projects… [...]

Salesforce Spring ’10: its more than a cute ladybug

March 18th, 2010

Sophisticated Data Modeling

You can now have multi-level Master-Detail relationships.  Standard objects may have 2 more sub-levels and custom objects may have 3.  One nice feature from this is “multi-level roll-up fields”.  For example, you have an Account with Expense Reports, and each Expense Report has Line Items.  Roll the line items up into the report [...]

Mobile Data Aggregation, South Africa style

March 16th, 2010

The New York Times has an article about Ushahidi, a platform for aggregating data and plotting it on a map.  Ushahidi was created by a Kenyan lawyer after the violence that followed the 2007 Kenya election.

The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on [...]

Recent ultimate guide to Adwords quality score

March 8th, 2010

For those of us who become intimate with Google Adwords over the years, a lot of head scratching has historically been done over the implementation of quality score. Various blogs and articles have exposed particular details and shined a little light on Google’s calculation and usage. The latest SE Roundtable digest pointed me to this [...]