Category Archives: general

gratuitous animation vs. meaningful motion

In 1996, I was working at Macromedia, when Rob Burgess took over as CEO. Shortly after he came on board, an edict came down from the top: “no more gratuitous animation.” I saw people look at each other bewildered, most employees thought that the company was all about gratuitous animation. I agreed with Rob.
Don’t [...]

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pink and princesses

Lisa Bloom is right on target with her recent article How to Talk to Little Girls. Her story of a little girl in a pink ruffled dress being presented to the guests is so reminiscent of my own experience, but the following genuine conversation was not and I wish it had been.
I so wanted to [...]

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multicountry/multilingual seo

Following my recent post, a colleague (@mightyverse) found a great review of how to handle SEO for multiple languages.
SEO for international multilingual projects
View more presentations from Ani Lopez
Ani Lopez provides good reasoning that we should offer distinct pages for translations, since we want to target those pages to a [...]

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on localization and translation

In thinking about presenting a web site in a different languages, there are a few very different concerns:

A localized user interface.
Localized brand
Unique content
User-generated content in different languages
Translated content

In addition, some sites might consider SEO Translation to entice people searching in their native language to find a site even if the site itself isn’t translated (but [...]

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sf rails meetup talks about performance

I attended the SF Ruby on Rails meetup last week with two excellent talks on performance. The first talk, by Brian Doll (@briandoll) of New Relic, provided an overview of how to think about performance. In the second talk, Guillaume Luccisano (@luckwi) of justin.tv shared his experience of optimizing their Rails app.
Performance is a [...]

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truths about starting a company

I love Tara Hunt’s synopsis of being a startup entreprenuer (via Women 2.0)

Her whole presentation really resonates with my experience. Changing the world is tough. That’s what starting a company is all about. I got involved in a startup straight out of college. From the very early days of CoSA (The Company of [...]

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trackerbot iphone experience

TrackerBot is a new iOS application that lets us access PivotalTracker — an issue/feature tracking system from Pivotal Labs. TrackerBot (just $4.95 in the App Store) works on iPad and iPhone, but I’ve just used it on my phone. A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Olympic National Park in Washington State. [...]

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how to get paid

I just watched Mike Monteiro’s recent talk “F*ck you. Pay me.” which has a lot of great advice about how to get make sure you get paid for your work when doing service work for clients. It was targeted at designers, but it rings true for development as well. His talk focused around [...]

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cross-platform mobile frameworks and the future

At last week’s WCA panel, Jeff Haynie, CEO and founder of Appcelerator, suggested that mobile frameworks will continue to gain traction because of the rise in complexity of mobile applications. Mobile applications are becoming context-aware. They know who you are, where you are — the physical sensors are augmented by the potential for this personal [...]

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javascript and ruby classes

I am happy to announce that our next series of classes at Blazing Cloud are starting soon!
We will be offering an evening Javascript for Programmers class from May 25th to June 30th, which is targeted toward web developers who have been coding with another language and would like to learn Javascript. This class is taught [...]

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