SiteCrafting, Inc.

There's something extremely satisfying about doing for others.  It's not very hard, doesn't take very long, yet makes a huge difference for those in need.  Saturday, November 15, some co-workers and I headed over to the Emergency Food Network's Distribution Center for their monthly Repack Project.  Giant bins of frozen vegetables are repacked into 1-2 pound bags for distribution to over 70 food banks, hot meal sites, and shelters throughout Pierce County.

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Happy Halloween from SiteCrafting! Today we found a chicken in our office. Feel free to order him around.

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So I came across a great blog post on innovation posted by Peter Dixon - When Super is Just Plain Superfluous and I have to say he just nailed it.

So much has been made of the need for innovation that people have lost track of what the word even means, they just know they need to do it. Which I guess is good if you are in the business of providing solutions that help people "innovate". 

Unfortunately, every day people are "selling" innovations that ultimately serve no purpose or are just enormous time wasters.
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No matter how protected your website may be, sometimes you still need a helping hand when an accident happens. Delete a page while fumbling with FTP? Someone else in your office write over your work on a webpage? Heck, maybe your entire site is down! Google Cache may be able to help.

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In web design we commonly put footers in the bottom of the page which include links, legal information, and usually a copyright date. But why? And is there something else we should include?
Read on and I promise not to use any more bad puns.

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I was honored to be asked to present at Jay Ray's Think Lab earlier this month. The day long event was focused on marketing / technology solutions for regional health care providers and was held at The Inn at Gig Harbor.

The program included practical tips and discussion on a variety of topics, including my presentation, How to Wow! Website Innovation. Other presenters included Andrew Fry and JayRay staff.

My presentation,  of course begged the question...How does one wow with the web?
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Normally government websites tend to be pretty dry and information-oriented, so I was expecting more of the same when I checked the Snoqualmie Pass traffic cameras from the WSDOT this morning. All the standard stuff that I've come to expect from years of checking the site before driving across the pass was there. However, there was one part of the site that gave me a good laugh this morning. Camera 2 was wiped out in an avalanche over the winter, but rather than a simple "Camera Unavailable" message that I've seen in the past, I saw this:

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When meeting with prospective new clients, we tell them that SiteCrafting uses PHP and MySQL as the development platform. Invariably this leads some of them to ask us what PHP and MySQL are and if they are safe and fast. Sometimes, this can lead to interesting conversations, where we explain to them why we think PHP and MySQL are safe and fast.

Occasionally, there's a client who remembers reading an article 4 or 5 years ago about PHP 3 having some security issues. We refer them to current articles on PHP and mention our own experiences, but the latter argument can come across as "Because we say so," which isn't a good way to get the point across.
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Being very fond of the analogy of web design/development-as-architecture, I was overjoyed with this article, by Jeffrey Zeldman, on Alistapart: Understanding web design.

There isn't much more to say; it's the usual web-design-isn't-just-looks,-guys, but very eloquently and effectively worded. The kind of stuff to put on the wall.

Depending on how well of a response I get I might be doing this more. Figured since the holidays are right around the corner and you all have been pretty good lately I could give you a free mini button set. :) Enjoy


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I've been a Facebook user for quite some time - even before they had the facebook.com domain. One thing that I absolutely love about it is the control they give you to limit what other people see about you. I've adopted a very serious set of controlls that limits only people I actually know to see anything about me. However, this is a false sense of security. Everything I post online that anyone besides me can access is inherently public. This is what initially drew myself and countless other people to Facebook.

However, their new advertising platform - Beacon - throws all this out the window. Beacon is a system that allows Facebook to track what you do on other websites. Let me reiterate that: Facebook tracks what you do online. They don't just track what you say you like on your profile, for example what movies you like; with Beacon they can track what movies you're actually renting.

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In a recent The Code Project Insider email newsletter, there was a link to an animated ASCII art for Star Wars IV, A New Hope. This brought back fond memories of a bygone era, where I cruised the ASCII based bulletin boards on my trusty Color Computer, the CoCo, and played ASCII art games, such as Voyage of the Valkyries (a game written by my Keithley Jr HS teacher Mr. Leo Christopherson*) and Star Trek, on my school's TRS-80 Model 4, trash 80. I also had the experience of entering the code for several ASCII art games from a book, where I learned that the GOTO statement is very dangerous, especially if you put in the wrong line number.

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That's what we did a couple Fridays ago here in the office. Brian's wife Julie is an avid Trekker and was excited to plan a Next Generation marathon with us. And we definitely put her complete series DVD collection to good use. From about 5:30pm on we watched episode after favorite episode. After a pile of snacks, some great pizza, sharing Star Trek memories, 7 episodes, it was half past midnight and time to wrap it up.

Thanks to Julie for making the trek (ha!) up and for those killer communicator cookies. We'll definitely have to do it again sometime.

Pics after the break.

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There's always plenty of tech-speak flying around among developers in the office. I certainly try to keep such language at a minimum when working with clients but sometimes it just works its way in there. DNS and other domain-related processes can be pretty confusing, period, let alone to someone anxious for their website to go live. So how to explain DNS propagation?

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If the iPhone is web apps to go, Google and the Open Handset Alliance's new open source mobile phone API, dubbed Android, is The Joy Of Cooking Webapps. Once again Google has seen a good idea (packing a cell phone full of convenient little apps and widgets that sync with websites and external systems) and figured out a way to make it a great one.

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So, I'm pretty much online all the time. I'm constantly looking for innovative applications and web services. I thought, "I'm going to have a look at what the 'big guys' are doing."

We all know Google is creating some pretty great web applications like their maps or spreadsheet apps. Seems decision makers at the big "G" have squarely set their sites on building innovative tools for web users. Surely, I thought, Microsoft has its plan and it's called Windows Live.

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Ahh.. where to begin?  Greetings everyone.  I'm Mandi and I'm wrapping up week 2 at SiteCrafting.  I was informed that it might be interesting to get a new hire's perspective posted on the blog, and now that I'm here, Paul is no longer the new guy so it's all on me.

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Fully one-third of the staff at SiteCrafting participated in our office Halloween contest today. Though we dressed up to win today's prize a few of us even wandered about the streets of Tacoma on our way to and from a party at local design and architectural firm BCRA. A software pirate, blogging ninja, head-crab zombie, and "J" blockhead walking down Pacific Ave. certainly drew a bit of attention.

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The SiteCrafting team spent the first weekend in October enjoying the Hood Canal area as part of this year's company retreat. Being as we suffer from a distinct lack of petty office politics and other Dilbert-esque characteristics,  "company retreat" is not synonymous with "endless torture" for us here.

The getaway was designed to allow the team to take a break from the office routine and gain capacity to review and offer input on company strategy, successes and our roadmap for sustaining growth. As usual, our collective wit, insight and sarcastic humor made these discussions interesting, informative, motivating and memorable.

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Unless there's a Seahawks, Huskies, or Mariners game going on, it's pretty rare that I listen to the radio in my car, let alone anything on the AM band. Saturday was the exception as I was driving toward Seattle right after the Atlas Foundry explosion. I kept flipping between the local AM news stations, hoping to hear of any updates as I was just down the street visiting some friends about 10 minutes before the explosion.  Hearing any updates required sitting through weather and traffic reports, as well as what seemed like an endless parade of commercials.  One of those commercials hit upon one of my pet peeves.

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Who knew a seemingly innocuous internal email would make for some good laughs and groans? I sure didn't when I invited folks from the office to join in a Friday after work pseudo-tradition.

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In the process of trying to figure out what in the world was wrong with my stylesheet, I went to W3 to validate it (and, although it is irrelevant to this post, I found my problem in a typo. Isn't it always a typo?) Since I am lazy about these kinds of things, I did the validation by direct input rather than finding and uploading the actual file, and something entirely odd happened: the URL bar contained something that looked like a solid black mess. After one forced shutdown due to being worried that something had gone wrong, I copied and pasted the content of the bar into a text document and lo and behold! It was the URL (a 34 000 word one, no less, due to the direct-input validation's method of incorporating all the CSS into the URL) and because of its length, it had wrapped over itself.

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My search for the perfect web app testing environment yielded what I though would be a pretty ingenious setup. Stack up a couple Mac Mini's with a KVM and we could cover everything from XP to Vista and IE 6 to 7. The perfect solution, however, ended up being one Mini cheaper.
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If you have php code that would take longer than 5 minutes to run, what would you do?

You could update the configuration file for apache, or whatever web server you're running, to increase the amount of time a script page is allowed to run  and then use php's ini_set("max_execution_time", seconds) to increase the amount of time php will allow a script to run.

Or you could use a session variable to mark the last position of the script and then use meta-refresh to start the script at the last position.

Or you could try an asynchronous call by using php's exec command.
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One day, one of our clients came to us with a very unusual request - they wanted to be able to print something directly from the browser, but without displaying the usual print dialog box. I don't have much time in the webdev business, but I've never heard of this kind of request, and neither had anyone else in the office.
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It's not a huge secret that I'm a rugby fan. There's a mystique about the rugby culture here in America. It's a lesser known sport in the US, and so when one rugby fan bumps into another fan, as they are prone to do, they usually spend a few moments swooning over the fact that someone else likes their sport. Just last night, I was out at JazzBones in my All Blacks jersey, and someone who I'd never met before started talking about rubgy with me. It was fantastic.
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I never had any idea how complicated, confusing, and involved the development of web sites and web-based applications can truly be. When I was younger, every once in a while I would look at a web page and click the "view source" option and think, "Wow, that really doesn't look too difficult to learn."

Little did I know there is so much more behind the code than what is seen in that one snapshot of HTML.

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I'm working from home today mostly because Ma Nature dumped about six inches of snow on my house. In an area where an inch will shut down the city, this is a bit more serious. It really pays, however, to have a flexible employer so I don't have to brave the hills around town. The beauty of the web and digital communication is that it allows for these kinds of opportunities whether the weather, saving some fossil fuels, or even emergencies are concerned.

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The gauntlet has been thrown down. We can't hide now...we must be exceptional.

While it is nice that we were recently recognized for dependabilty, I see it as more of a challenge. A challenge for us to do more, perform better, and have more satisfied customers.
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Last month, I was doing some major work on a house when I ran into a problem I couldn't handle. I needed a plumber, so I did what a lot of people do -- I turned to the nearest telephone directory. At the top of the PLUMBING section, I saw the name AAA++ Plumbing*, and promptly skipped right over it. (More about why I did that later). Read more →

With all the storm-induced power problems in the Puget Sound area a few of us were able to make it into the office today. The area is a patch work of service availability -- I know of houses with power and phone but no internet access, some with no power but the phones work, and yet others with power but no phones. A stroke of service my co-worker Ken displayed today was brilliant in its simplicity but it probably meant the world to one of our clients.

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Welcome, and thanks for coming to the long-anticipated Blah Blah Blog! What you're going to find here is a rare peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of a leading Website and Web Application Development company. Our aim is to make this Blog different than the billions of other Blogs you could be reading. So start by expecting the unexpected.

For starters, we won't be afraid to reveal secrets or point out how we've learned from our mistakes. The main focus will be technology – but we'll also include proprietary Web tips & tricks, relevant business news, stories from the workbench, and more. Use the navigation on the right to get around, and check back regularly. Your category choices will grow as we add posts. And you never know what you'll find from day to day.