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States Table
When I thought I was done, there were 49 rows in the table.
Stupid Utah.
iMarc Grows by Two
Craig Ruksznis and Dan Collins started earlier this week. Both will be part of the PHP development team.
Dan, a native of central Massachusetts joins us fresh out of Westfield State College. Craig joins us from the middle of Maine by way of St. Lawrence University.
So, please join us in welcoming Dan and Craig to iMarc.
Conflict, Perception and Bodegas
The story dealt with two well-established companies, their brand perception, and the internal conflicts facing each company as it's surroundings changed.
Any well-established company has a number of clients who have been with them since the beginning. It's true for iMarc. It's true for Pacific Green Gourmet. And it's true for Papa & Sons.
Pacific Green and Papa & Sons are neighborhood bodegas – small grocery stores – in Brooklyn. They are in different neighborhoods but are only separated by three miles.
Both neighborhoods are going through gentrification. Rents and housing prices are rising. In the neighborhood Pacific Green calls home, housing prices have doubled in the last four years. Many long time residents can't keep up, so they move out.
As each neighborhood becomes more upscale, the bodega owners see less of the old-time, local residents and more of the newer, wealthier residents. In the business world, you might equate this to getting larger clients or bigger deals.
The owners of the two bodegas found themselves in similar situations, but handled their business quite differently.
Pacific Green went all in. They stopped selling 99-cent tuna in favor of $20 imported tuna. They cleared their shelves of Campbell's and Progresso soup in favor of Wolfgang Puck Organic soup. Pacific Green's owner periodically traveled to stores in wealthier neighborhoods to check what was selling. There's not a Milk cooler in Pacific Green anymore—it's labeled, Organic Milk.
Papa & Sons took a different approach—the same approach that kept them in business for the past 15 years. Papa & Sons asked their clients what they wanted. In doing so, they ended up trying to cater to both their long time clientele and their newer wealthier neighbors. So far, selling organic free-range eggs along side Hormel Spam hasn't seemed to work.
Papa & Sons has twice the physical space of Pacific Green, but only does half the business.
One of the new residents in Papa & Sons' neighborhood was quoted as saying, "The fact that they have so many low-end products doesn't appeal to me. They sell Spam. I can't shop in a place that sells Spam."
That quote sums up brand perception. To customers, the company – and therefore the brand – is about feeling comfortable with the products on the shelf. Do people of my status shop here? Are the other customers and clients like me?
"They have so many low-end products..."
That quote also sums up a business' growing pains and the conflict between what got the business going versus where the business could go. Obviously, it was too difficult for Papa & Sons to clear out their low-end products.
How could Papa & Sons stop selling Spam or Ramen noodles or 99-cent tuna? Wouldn't that be a disservice to their long time customers? I wonder if the owner of Pacific Green had similar thoughts as he cleared his shelves of affordable goods, making way for fancy, organic, imported goods.
This conflict is amplified for the well-established business. A business that has been around for a while, like the neighborhood bodegas, correctly feels an obligation to its long-time customers. How can you abandon the customer who's bought your 99-cent tuna for the past 10 years and embrace the new face who's willing to pay $20 for tuna? Papa & Sons couldn't while Pacific Green did exactly that. As stated above, Pacific Green now does twice the business in half the space.
Conflict.
Ambiguity != Versatility
I used to do this all the time:
foreach ($a as $k => $v) {
// stuff happens
}
I don't do that anymore. Although maybe if I had an array full of 'As' with keys related to the letter 'K' and an inexplicable value that had something to do with the letter 'V'...
Meaningful naming conventions are even more important in database schemas.
Let's look at two examples of a MySQL table.
Read MoreLunchroom Banter (Volume XII)
- Patrick: Schilling just had a no-hitter broken up with two outs in the 9th.
- Fred: Damn...that's like writing 500 lines of code and having a parse error on line 499.
Will Bond Promoted to Senior Technical Architect
Whether it's pushing web standards and accessibility, focusing the team's programming practices, or implementing tools to streamline the development process, Will has been instrumental in driving technology at iMarc's. Over the past two years, Will has also played a key role in managing FreeBSD servers and networking.
...and if you need someone to fix your computer or get your email back up, contact Will immediately.
Recognizing his leadership and experience, iMarc is proud to announce Will's promotion to Senior Technical Architect.
Learn more about the incomparable Will Bond.
SEO: Can it be all so simple
Regarding search engine optimization and positioning, Seth Godin writes:
"If you want to be on the front page of matches for 'White Plains Lawyer', then the best choice is to build a series of pages that give people really useful information."
— Seth Godin in Building 43
Can it really be so simple? Yes, of course it can.
When we kick off a web project, one of the first things we try to impress upon the client is the importance of their content.
Write for people: Put yourself in the user’s shoes. They’re staring at your “Hours and Directions” web page. What do they want? What other pages might interest them? Write your content so it’s easy to cross-link and direct the user to other pages of interest.
Write for search engines: Use phrases that you think people will use in search engines. Perhaps you run a museum and think people will search for “history of shipbuilding”. Use that exact phrase where applicable. Instead of some fancy marketing lingo like “learn 18th century boat building traditions in our…”, rephrase that to “learn the history of shipbuilding in our…”. Decide on 4–5 key search phrases and lightly repeat them throughout your content.
Implement with standards, text, and hierarcy: Once you've written smart, informational content, any competent web developer should be able to edit your content for the web and design a standards-based, accessible website with clear hierarchy.
It's not rocket science. Google is clear about what they want.
Do you read your own website? Does it make sense? Is it useful? Did you like it? If you answered "Yes" to all of these, then your website content is probably in good shape. It's that simple.
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CAPTCHA: User-Unfriendly by Design
You may not of heard of CAPTCHA , but you've probably run afoul of one.
CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
Spammers run web-surfing "bots" that spam web forms in hopes that the content will be published back onto the web — in blogs like this one, for example. CAPTCHA is intended to tell apart real humans from spam-bots, a form of Turing Test.
The problem being, many CAPTCHA systems are so challenging that humans can't pass the test.
Read MoreWhat are you going to do?
If you take somebody like Michael Jordan, and if you said to him, "Michael, at a certain point when you are running down the [court] and the ball comes to you, what are you going to do?" he would look at you as if you were crazy.
There are a thousand things he could do: he could move almost anywhere or he could pass or he could shoot or he could dribble. He wouldn't even have a clue because he would have to see what was happening.
– Lee Friedlander, talking about how a photographer never knows what he's going to get when he sets out to shoot.
The basketball player referenced above has a plan and a goal. He's practiced and done a fair amount of scouting and research, yet he doesn't really know what he's going to do until he's in a specific situation.
Like the basketball player, or a good photographer, the agile web developer possesses the skill and confidence to react to external forces. They lack stubbornness and are willing to not only change their course, but change course and immediately see the best route to the end goal – even if that end goal just changed.
Steve Albini, Guitar Amps & Encapsulation
Music and programming seem to go hand in hand.
Steve Albini plays and records music. In addition to playing guitar and singing for the band Shellac, he is also a highly recognized audio engineer.
I'm not sure if Mr. Albini knows anything about computer programming but he certainly understands the concept of encapsulation. Encapsulation, in computer programming, conceals details of how a piece of software works. Sometimes called information hiding, one of the goals of encapsulation is to provide the most restrictive, most protective interface into the software.
The concept of encapsulation is clearly demonstrated in Steve Albini's beautifully simple, homemade guitar amplifier.
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