http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/ Latest blog entries from staff at SiteCrafting en-us Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:25:59 PDT Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:25:59 PDT SiteCrafting, Inc. CMS http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/google-search-works-visually/ I thought this was a great explanation on how a Google search works. Google did a great job noting that even when you search the web on Google you are not searching though everything on the internet. ... Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:31:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/to-go-1/ Seth Godin's latest blog post We Can Do It reminds me of the attitude around our office. We have a staff committed to "going for it", a group committed to "Yes" and then making certain we deliver. It's funny, it doesn't always end up the way we think, but more often than not we are pleasantly surprised with the effects our efforts have on ourselves, our teammates, and on others.  ... Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:22:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/flashs-stand/ This article about Virgin America abandoning Flash for it's website popped up late last week and it seems fitting since there seems to be a lot of discussion around Flash and mobile operating systems - specifically Apple and the iPhone and iPad. Actually there has always been a lot of discussion around the effectiveness of Flash and people usually fall into two opposing camps - yeah, big surprise I know.  My take is that Flash is a good tool when used in applications that could be made way more difficult to accomplish without it. I believe it is a good standard platform for video and some specialty drawing or gaming applications - but that is about it.  ... Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:33:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/svn-files-revision/ An SVN command that gives a list of modified files between revisions. It is very useful when uploading files to a live server and when running through quality assurance. Another command to keep in your bag of tricks. ... Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:28:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/holiday-volunteering-at-ywca/ On December 22nd, over half the SiteCrafting crew headed down to the Pierce County YWCA to help out in their Christmas gift center. Every December, the YWCA's gym is transformed into a "store" where residents can pick out gifts for their parents/children/siblings. 13 of us volunteered to wrap and label presents during two different shifts. While the first few presents seemed to take an eternity to wrap, we soon got into the swing of things and were cranking them out like nobody's business. Good thing too, as there were lots of presents to go around. Donations come from several sources: individual donations, Girl Scout troops, churches, even Hell's Angels contribute everything from toys and clothes for the kids to housewares and perfume for mom. ... Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:23:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/sitecrafting-honored-as-3rd-fastest/ Last night, myself, Brian, Julie, Mandi, Michael, Nick, and Kirk attended the Business Examiner's Fastest Growing Companies event at the Tacoma Glass Museum. Last year, we were honored to receive the #6 spot out of 10 finalists, but this year we received third place.Finalists were selected from companies headquartered in the South Sound. The winner of the #1 spot this year was Wichert Electric Inc from Chehalis. BCRA also won the Longevity Award for the second year running.Congrats to Wichert Electric, BCRA and all the other finalists.  ... Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:15:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/hiding-maintenance-wall/ A common task in web development is updating a live server. There are many ways to do it, but some of them require downtime. Rather then turn users away, it is best practice to put up a maintenance page. But what if you still need access to the site while you are updating it? .htaccess and Cookies to the rescue! ... Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:02:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/stackoverflow-devday-seattle-conference/ On Wednesday, I had the pleasure to attend and volunteer for the StackOverflow DevDays conference in Seattle. StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site, much like Expert's Exchange except without the nagging to register. It boasts over 1 million page views per day and something like 20 thousand active users.There were many interesting topics covered, from ASP.NET to Qt, and there's a few new ideas that I want to try out now. ... Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:42:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/side-project-demo-night/ Thursday, October 22 from 6-8pm, SiteCrafting will host a Side Project Demo Night in our conference room. ... Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:32:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/subversion-checkouts-live-webapps-be/ The web design and development blog Smashing Magazine published an article today about a problem when using a Subversion checkout to deploy files to a live webserver. In short, anyone could browse to a directory on your website, and see all the source code, including database connection information. (Don't worry, at SiteCrafting we don't do this. We have a much better system.)The Smashing Magazine article includes tips on how to secure common web servers. Here's another way to secure a site using two simple htaccess rules. ... Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:21:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/coast-guard-new-media-mission-1/ The call came in about an hour or so ago from @uscgd13 "Coast Guard is launching on a man overboard off the Ferry Wenatachee on the Bainbridge Island run." The "tweet" was picked up by @King5Seattle which is how I learned about it. During the next 15 minutes, I learned that the Coast Guard had scrambled a helicopter from Port Angeles as well as a boat from Station Seattle to assist in the search. Eventually, the tweet "@All the Coast Guard is standing down from the search" was posted after learning the report came from someone that thought they saw someone in the water.  Better safe than sorry, I guess. ... Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:32:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/secret-to-managing-employee-social/ There's an interesting article in Business Week about how employers are scrambling to develop policies to manage employees, especially those in leadership roles, in the development of their social reputation through social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. We're often asked by clients and partners to advise on the development of their own social media policies, and we find, more often than not, that most first runs at a social media policy are created from very paranoid perspectives. Unfortunately in this realm, micro-managing often back-fires, which is why we encourage development of policies that stay simple and respect common sense. ... Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:15:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/introducing-digital-file-nuke/ Today, Paul and I were kicking around the idea of secure file deletion. Being able to totally delete/destroy a file is pretty essential when you've got personal information such as credit card numbers or social security numbers. However, there aren't a lot of easy programs that will do that for Macs. Paul found a Dashboard widget, and I idly remarked that coding up a custom program wouldn't be too hard. Well, he called me on it. So, about an hour later, I came up with Digital File Nuke, a Mac app to securely delete any file. ... Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:58:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/working-in-pajamas/ Video chats been around awhile now and its something I now take for granted. I'm constantly catching up with friends using my camera on my macbook when meeting up with them isn't easy anymore.Today at the office I was shocked though. Looking over in the office at a team of our rockstar developers I saw them all huddled around a workstation talking with their team leader Kevin. Kevin was running his weekly morning meeting with his team from Scotland! The picture quality and sound had very little lag and it was almost like he was here.Working remotely in an industry like ours is getting more and more common. Our office makes heavy use of instant messaging, VoIP, SiteCrafting internal management system, and email allowing us to constantly be in contact and available whenever and wherever.The amazing thing about these technologies is how easy they are to get going with them. It was painless for our team to talk and within minutes everyone was back to their jobs at hand. Communication is key for a team when individuals are working remotely. I constantly hear people from other companies complain about when a coworker is working from home since it often delays their deliverables, here not so much. ... Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:28:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/making-legalese-easy-to-understand/ As I was checking out the consumerist.com today, I noticed an article about Aviary.com and their Terms of Use. Normally, Terms documents are terrifically difficult to understand. This one, however, includes plain English explanations alongside the legal-jargon. This is a fantastic little step forward to a better web, and one that I would love to see become more popular. ... Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:54:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/kindle-iphone/ I downloaded the new Kindle application for the iPhone last week and I love it. Prior to the download, my arguments against eBooks have often followed the same ones you've already heard -  What about the emotional attachment to paper - the texture the smell of books? Who wants to read a book on a tiny screen? My new question: "Have you ever tried it?" ... Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:01:00 PDT http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/safari-40-beta/ So at the risk of unleashing the wrath of my own team members against me I am going to have to say this...Safari is better than Firefox. So what if there are several different browsers? All you need is this one. This will be true until the ante is upped yet again by Mozilla, Opera, Google or Microsoft. But today, Safari 4 is king. Now I'm not going to go into all the technical reasons, as I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of why one is faster, more compliant, etc. I'll leave that to the comments and the input from our team. I will say, however, that as a user I love it. ... Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:11:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/obamas-new-on-internet/ At 12:00 PM, Eastern Standard Time, most eyes were on the swearing in of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States. But at the same time, a total redesign of the President's official website, whitehouse.gov, was being launched. ... Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:17:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/cycle-washington/ Have a bunch of old computers sitting around at home? As of January 1st this year, there are 200 locations in Washington State that recycles desktop and laptop computers, monitors and TVs for no charge (just remember to destroy anything with memory in it.)The project is called "E-Cycle Washington" and more information and locations can be found here . ... Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:07:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/buckle-up/ Our logo (the gear) lends itself to many-a-unique uses. It's been used to depict Rudolph on last year's Christmas card, a throwing star held by a ninja on some company t-shirts, and even used as a knock-off of the good 'ol Jolly Roger. We're always trying to come up with new ways to use and new things to put it on. ... Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:20:00 PST http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/volunteering-emergency-food-network/ 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. ... Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:41:00 PST