Communiqué

#1: Dan's Desk

Yesterday was rookie developer Dan's 90th day of employment at iMarc. This meant no more hazing and a 90-day review. Dan's review went fine. He hasn't truncated any databases or destroyed any servers and seems to know how to program.

At the end of this positive review, Dan returned to his desk. The other less optimistic developers left a touching note and placed everything from his desk and drawers in a cardboard box.

#2: Fan of the Game

Last night Karin went to a Red Sox game and was voted the Fan of the Game. Unfortunately, Andy Garcia, jumped into the seat in front of her to steal the spotlight.

When you're known for working in Photoshop for the majority of your day and often into the night, you get asked a lot of questions. One such question that comes up very frequently is, "How can I make my photos sharper?". Just the other day, my cousin was asking me what he could do in Photoshop in order to make his blurry shots look better. I filled him in on the typical sharpening techniques, but it was only after our discussion that I realized it would probably be in his and everyone's best interest to avoid taking blurry photos in the first place.

However, for even the most avid photographers, this isn't always an easy task. Under certain light and with long shutter speeds, even a neurosurgeon will take a streaky, blurry picture from time to time. Having recently upgraded my camera, I found myself in this very predicament. Most people would go out and buy an expensive tripod to carry everywhere they go. This is a fine solution, but as anyone who has ever wielded a tripod knows, they're extremely annoying and cumbersome, especially for taking spontaneous shots.

Sure, you can pick up a mini-tripod for $30 and take some photos of...well...anything small enough to fit conveniently on a table. Fellow iMarcian Craig Henry uses a monopod (ladies) for shooting weddings. However, even the most affordable monopod will run you about $40 and will only eliminate 2/3 of the overall hassle. Rob's lens spins gyroscopically to stabalize his photos. Incredibly cool if you have solid gold toilets in your palace and can afford such luxuries.

Without further ado, I present to you a solution to this problem that will cost you less than $5, is insanely portable, and extremely clever.

Gorgeous. What you see is a 1/4-20 eye bolt attached to 6 feet of light chain. The eye bolt can be purchased at any home improvement or hardware store for around 50 cents and the chain goes for 45 cents a foot. I've used a spare keyring to link them together. From here, just screw the bolt into the base of your camera and make sure everything is threaded securely with the bolt. Hold your camera and let the chain down to the ground. Once the camera is at the right height for your subject, just step on the end of the chain and pull up gently. This will work as a sort of reverse monopod, allowing you to take much steadier shots. No messing with screws or telescoping legs, and no more streaky, blurry photos! When you're done, the chain coils nicely into your pocket or camera bag. Have a look at a shot taken with a shutter speed of one third of a second.

Although this isn't applicable in all situations, I hope you find it useful enough to keep in your camera bag of tricks.

I just had a pretty funny encounter on the phone with a guy prospecting for business. His company does search engine marketing, and in his first sentence he observed that my company wasn't coming up in the first page of search results in Google. Sacré bleu! How have we flourished for 10 years without this!

OK, all sarcasm aside, here's where I'm at on this.

For starters, let's just get over the hysteria on just how important search engine 'placement' is for a professional services firm in the first place. iMarc is at best medium sized at 17 people among interactive agencies. There's plenty of folks smaller, probably less that are larger. That said, we don't need, nor could we handle, another 100 customers in addition to the 100 or so that we currently serve. We're past the point of taking every project we come across, in part because we don't have to and in part because we want to reserve our capacity for projects we can be very successful with.

From a marketing perspective, our own web site is not so much the point of our spear, it's more like the shaft. That is to say, we don't expect it to be the primary way we make first contact with a prospective client, but once we do make contact with the right prospects, the site acts as the delivery mechanism for the most relevant and up to date content and information we can put together about us, our experience and qualifications, and how to find out more about doing business with us. And like so many other professional services firms, we find that our new customers arrive at our site from a variety of referrals, mostly from our own direct marketing activities, quite a few from referrals from existing clients, some from seeing our work on awards sites, and yes, even a few from more or less 'blind' searches at Google. Would I turn down more qualified, relevant new business prospects from Google? Certainly not. But even without a lot of lead generation generated from the search engines, our site is still the single most critical ingredient in helping prospective customers to judge us capable and professional and qualified. And that's because of the good content that we serve on it, and the strategy that shaped it.

But back to the fun :-). This poor unsuspecting guy that called today fumbled his way through his telemarketing script, expressing his concern that I wasn't on page 1. Leaving aside the fact that he never did say what search term he was searching on, or qualifying my interest in being found by him on that particular search term, as soon as I heard him pause for a breath, I asked him,

"What is it your company does?".

"Page 1 search engine placement on Google and Yahoo" was his reply.

"And what is your company's name?", I asked.

"<foo>", he told me.

"OK, let's see where <foo> shows up in Google's search results when I search for what you do, as you describe it in your own words".

Of course there would be no punchline if he was anywhere in sight of the first three pages, and indeed, he was not. And in this case, I didn't even bother to ask him to take me off his calling list, because I'm pretty sure he's not calling back :-).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Search Engine Marketing, nor would I downplay the importance of SEM (including natural search optimization, which this guy was peddling) for consumer facing web sites, or for companies trying to reach a wide audience. And that includes a few of our customers. We spend a fair amount of time and energy building our sites carefully, with strictly valid code, machine-readable content, and we limit the use of javascript to create links to other content, all in an effort to facilitate indexing by the search engines. We create tools that let clients manage the meta tags and insert keywords into the urls. And we help clients with keyword analysis to understand what phrases potential site visitors are using at the search engines that would be relevant to their web sites.

But I personally believe that the importance of this effort is a distant second to the importance of developing and maintaining useful, relevant content, updating it frequently, and perhaps most importantly, employing a user-centered approach to site strategy and design so that the right audience will find the site useful, informative, and relevant. In the long run this is the best path to ROI for any web site, and any site building effort that doesn't include a commitment to developing and maintaining good content is destined to underachieve.

Recently, Rob wrote a blog about Business benefits of web standards.

I just ran into a real-world scenario where standards compliance actually saved money. Our home needed some work done on the fireplace chimney. I got an estimate that broke down the cost of materials and labor. At the bottom of the estimate was a note about code compliance.

*Note: Quoted price assumes that chimney has been built according to Code with the required airspace around the tile liner, thus allowing for relative ease of removal of the tiles.

If the tiles are improperly "mudded in", resulting in extreme difficulty in removing them, then a supplemental charge will be involved.

Though this example has nothing to do with the Internet, the same concept is applied to any web re-design project. Whether the developer actually makes note of it or not, any decent web developer will look at the current state of the website, figure out if it's built with valid markup, and charge more if the content and markup are improperly "mudded in".

An interesting way to see how other people preceive your web site is to search for your site on del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website that lets people save and categorize – or tag – bookmarks online.

Searching del.icio.us for iMarc, shows me the most popular tags that other people have used to describe our company. These include photoshop, design, webdesign, tutorial, web, howto, inspiration, blog, among others.

del.icio.us also shows me what exactly which pages of our site have been bookmarked. I can see that 63 people have saved our home page. Clicking saved by 63 people shows me the comments and tags that those people have used. Popular tags for our home page include webdesign, inspiration, and blog.

One of the most bookmarked pages on our site is Will's blog about CSS practices. The del.icio.us page for that has some interesting comments. My favorite being, "i love the look and feel of this site."

True, you'll only see positive feedback on del.icio.us bookmarks—after all, who saves sites that they hate. However, if you care about your audience, del.icio.us provides an easy way to see how they perceive you.

1. Patrick: Hey, how do you ungroup objects in Inspiration?
2. Will: Bah, who needs groups? That's like using directories in a file system.

(Side note: We use Inspiration to generate site architecture diagrams. It is designed to be easy enough for children to use, which means we can use it too. It's one of the fastest, easiest ways around to turn an outline and a bunch of notes into a clear, simple diagram to get us all on the same page. And costs about a tenth what Visio does.)

Here at iMarc, we have a Wiki to keep track of our plans, process, and documentation.

The Wiki's home page starts with a quotation. Any employee can change the quote. When a new quote is posted, the old one gets archived.

Here are some of the quotations we've seen over the last year:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

— Donald Knuth, computer science professor

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked…A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

— John Gall, author

I'm a pretty lazy person, and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

— Martin Fowler, author, software architect

In a perfect world, the client would’ve had the business rules worked out prior to starting a project, leaving the designer to wallow in artistic brilliance while a co-ed rolls by on a Segway drinking a soy protein shake, but as you all know, utopia doesn’t exist and it’s almost impossible to drive a Segway with one hand.

— Greg Storey, business owner

I like when good things happen to me, but I wait two weeks to tell anyone because I like to use the word fort-night.

— Demetri Martin, comedian

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de St. Exupery, writer, aviator

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

— Steve Wozniak, woz

Q: What makes you believe Linux will continue to gain momentum?

A: I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.

— Linus Torvalds, software engineer

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.

— Albert Einstein

Even if a man's whole day [is] spent as a servant to an industrial concern, in his spare time he will make something, if only a window box flower garden.

— Eric Gill, typographer, printer, author

Design is what you do when you don't yet know what you are doing. Real design is done during the unstructured, informal, noodling around that occurs before the structured and formal 'design' methods are employed.

— George Stiny, professor

It is crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.

— The 9/11 Commission Report

Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.

— Old fisherman's saying

There is no spec; to me, the spec is the interface screens... [T]here is nothing functional about functional specs. The only functional part is a real running application; so we try to get to real running applications as soon as humanly possible, and then that’s the spec. So, whatever the way the application works right now, is supposed to be the way the application works right now - and if we disagree, we change the real application. We don’t go back and try to find some spec and rewrite some of that.

— David Heinemeier Hansson, programmer

BusinessWeek has published an excellent article on web standards this week. Short, readable and understandable, author Jessie Scanlon has managed to distill the evolution of web coding into meaningful business benefits:

“For companies with a Web presence—needless to say, most companies—CSS means "You can control you branding, your image, and still deliver content to users in the most appropriate style," [web standards advocate Jeffrey] Zeldman says.”

iMarc is absolutely committed to web standards; we produce completely valid XHTML web sites and applications. And that article really explains why this is of benefit: One site, all audiences, future-compatible, at a lower cost.

Of course, it's not a perfect world. We still have to work around browser-specific bugs. But when I look back on the sites I worked on in the late 90's and the hacks I put together to get them to render correctly on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, it's clear how very far we've come.

And from a business viewpoint, one of the greatest benefits is that valuable development hours aren't wasted on making variants for different browsers, but on implementing useful, informative web sites.

Apple is really good at hype (see iPhone). Unfortunately, they tend to contradict themselves and over-simplify complicated issues when it suits their goals. Actually, lots of companies do this, but Apple sticks out to me because of their tongue-in-cheek methods.

You’ve probably heard Apple rag on how insecure Windows is, but then you may have also heard how awesome it is that you can run Windows apps on a Mac.

Guess what? To run Windows apps on a Mac, you have to run Windows in a virtual machine. Here’s a news flash for you: your computer isn't so secure anymore. Watch out for those 114,000 viruses infecting your computer.

All sarcasm aside, you shouldn’t have any problems with your Windows installation on a Mac if you take steps such as keeping Windows up-to-date and running a virus scanner. However, it is much easier to become vulnerable running Windows in a virtual machine. It’s also a good possibility that if you run a Mac, you may not know the steps needed to secure Windows.

When using Windows as your main OS, you probably run it almost every day. This allows Windows to fetch its updates, and for your virus scanner to do its thing. When your run an OS as a virtual machine, you may or may not boot it on a regular basis. I know this happens on one of my computers at home — I run Linux as the main OS, and run Windows via VMWare every few weeks.

Since you may not boot your Windows install on a regular basis, you might not get those updates in time. You might be more vulnerable than if you ran Windows only.

Moral of the story: You need to be even more concerned about Windows security if you run it on top of OSX. Perhaps someday you won’t need to run Windows to use Windows apps, but from what I have heard, darwine still has a way to go.

In case your were wondering, I currently don’t own a Mac (just two linux boxes and a Windows XP laptop). However, I must say that a Mac mini running Leopard and the new iMovie does look very tempting for editing and cataloging my home movies.