CAUTION: site redesign in progress. Follow along with the progress by reading this post.

The Blog Studio

Packing up to go offline

Instead of writing this, I really should be packing. Tomorrow morning I’ve got a 6 hour drive with the kids and dog up to my favorite place on earth, Killarney Provincial Park. No place sings to me quite like this.

Getting ready to leave work is a harrowing experience. I’ve checked and doubled checked, and everything is covered. I’ve got an extremely capable couple of partners manning the desks back at the ranch. Still, it’s hard to shake that “what did I forget” feeling.

While I’m away, I hope to be taking tons of photos with my new camera. I’ve got what feels like 100 pounds of art supplies packed and ready too. Creatively, this should be a blast.

I’m back September 1, and I’ve got a couple of big announcements to make when I’m back. Enjoy the rest of August everyone!

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How to get me to read your post.

Bloggers: I am your target market. I am the person you want to have reading your content. But guess what? I’m overwhelmed. The web is incredibly noisy and filled with eye candy.



To get me to read your posts, they must follow these rules:



  • Use excellent typography and be easy to read.
  • If you use images, make them large and sprinkle them throughout the text.
  • Use video whenever possible. It’s nearly impossible for me not to click the play button.
  • Make regular use of headings.
  • Use bold and italic to make it easy to pick out key words as I skim. I skim a body of text before I decide to read it. Give me a reason to double back and read your words.
  • Use lists
  • Be as brief as possible.



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Rethinking & Redesigning Almost Cool

Over on my personal blog, I’m posting a series looking into the redesign and re-thinking of that site. It’s an interesting process. To date, I’ve just posted some shots of my notes. For anyone interested in what goes on a redesign though, it will give you some pretty deep insight as the series continues.

Here are a couple of shots:

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If you want to check out the series, here’s part 1 and part 2. I’ll update this post, so feel free to bookmark this!

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Design Dissection: Rethinking and Redesigning Primetime Politics

Early this year, we helped to launch Primetime Politics. Using a couple of honest-to-god-human political experts, Primetime looked at the best political content on the web each day, and categorized, re-factored, and compared the stories, giving the reader an unbiased, well rounded view of the world. The site was a hit from the get go, quickly growing to 1000s of page views a day.

The original design was clean, crisp and elegant.

A few months ago though, our clients and I started to talk about redesigning the site. Based on what we knew before we launched the site, we thought clean, crisp and elegant was the ideal look and feel for Primetime Politics. In many senses, it was too. But somewhere along the way, the business plan changed from trying to be a general purpose political news site to a site that focusses more on the experts behind the scenes. Jordan and Assaf, the site owners, are way too smart, way to well spoken, and way too good looking to hiding behind the keyboard!

In addition to featuring the site owners more prominently, Jordan and Assaf wanted to inject a bit more humour, and a lot more partisanship into the content. The elegant design of the site didn’t support either the jokiness or the partisanship. We also wanted to appeal to a younger audience. There are about a billion stuffy right-wing sites out there, but very few conservative sites talk to young voters. We saw this as a serious opportunity. Plus we wanted to roll out a new tagline: Young, Right & Right

So, with the goal of making the site more approachable to a younger audience, more suitable to sarcasm and humour, and more of a showcase for Jordan and Assaf, I pulled out my big box of crayons and got to work.

Because I’m as familiar as I am with the site and the concept, I jumped straight into wireframes.

The layout of the old site was already pretty solid. The biggest change was dropping the featured debate box that had previously occupied the top of the page, and the addition of the larger blog graphics on the left sidebar. Overall, we reduced the number of items on the page dramatically.

Looking back at the original site, there were two things that lent it it’s sober feel: the typography and the colour palette. While I kept the overall blues from the original design, I turned up the saturation and added the contrasting orange to make both colours really pop.

I used the wonderful Archer font for the header and tagline. This font has just the right amount of whimsey.

Keeping with the whimsey factor, I set the tagline outside the box. Everything else on the site sits nicely on a grid line, so this “outside the box” thinking really draws the eye.

The body font is set in Arial, with section headers set in Georgia. I really like this combo for it’s clean lines and readability. Again, note how the colours keep things lively.

That’s it for my first design dissection post. I hope to do many more in the coming weeks as we get ready for our own new site unveiling!

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Hey, we’re 3 and a half

I just realized The Blog Studio is 3 and a half. We’re officially in the cute stage; we’re out of our terrible twos, and love to hug. Just thought you should know.

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Work section updated and a few notes on the impending redesign.

I just added a bunch of updates to the work section. Like the coming redesign of theblogstudio.com, this update was long overdue. It’s really interesting to me to hear which bits of work people prefer. I’m never sure what to include in the portfolio. Some of the designs I’m less crazy about are other people’s favorites. We’ll be launching some quite a few bits of major work over the next couple of weeks, so look for the work section to get another update soon.

It’s because of all that work that this site hasn’t been updated yet. The redesign itself is close to complete. It takes a biiiig step away from the current look and feel, and introduces our new branding. While we deeply love The Blog Studio name, it doesn’t fully convey the scope of the work we do. The purpose of this rebranding and site redesign is to address just that point.

Here’s a sneak peek:

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The “where have you been?” post, version22

The thing about blogging, is the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to get started again.

I’m mid-way through a long overdue redesign of this site, and way overdue on a number of important announcement. I’ve got so much important stuff to share, that I don’t have the time to sit down and write a proper post.

The good news is that my time is short because I’ve been actually taking weekends and evenings off to spend with my family. Holidays are the best. We’re all taking time off this summer, meaning there’s lots to do when we are in the office.

Bottom line is that we’re busy working with some really amazing people. I’m taking my time with redesigning this site and having some fun. I hope the end result will be worth the wait!

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theblogstudio.com is back on a new server (aka thank god for backups)

Being that this is a family friendly website, I don’t have the words to publicly describe the past 24 hours. To say it’s been a bit stressful would be an understatement.

In short, a couple of days ago, our server, hosted at serverbeach.com started to act flaky. Over three or four days, site performance slowed to a crawl, then finally gave up the ghost yesterday. We made a couple of requests to repair or replace the failing hard drive. These were never directly answered, instead we were told that the server had been restarted and appeared to be working. That was acceptable after it stopped once. Even after it stopped twice. But after the 4th restart the hosting company should have pulled the obviously faulty drive.

The drive was finally yanked yesterday. It took almost 24 hours for a new drive to be installed and properly configured. Every request for help would result in a 2 to 4 hour wait for a response. In 80% of the cases, the information in the responses was either incorrect or incomplete. We’d do as instructed, discover it didn’t work, then have to wait for another 2 to 4 hours for the original request to be fixed. The errors involved things like not plugging in the drive correctly, not installing the control panel software, and overwriting a bunch of files. These are very basic problems that would have been easily avoided if the tech people had taken a moment to test their work.

This didn’t just affect theblogstudio.com, but a number of our friends and client’s sites as well. To those folks I deeply apologize.

We’ve changed server companies, and so far are very impressed with mosso.com. Not only are they literally half the cost of serverbeach, they have actual human beings in tech support you can reach 24/7.

That’s it for now. I’ve got a couple of days worth of work to catch up on, and a beer somewhere calling my name…

Peter

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New Digs

The Blog Studio has new a new home! After a couple of years of doing the “virtual office” thing, we’ve bit the bullet and opened and honest-to-god office. Things are still a bit of a mess, so I’m not going to share pictures quite yet. Suffice it to say though that we’re in a very cool creative space. There’s a lot more news to share in the next couple of days. But for now, back to painting the walls!

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Server Woes

Yikes. After a couple of years of constant up-time, our server has recently developed the rather nasty habit of shutting itself down for naps at rather inappropriate times. As such, I’d like to apologize to anyone who’s had trouble accessing our site over the past week. We’re in the process of moving to a new hosting provider. Fun!

If you try to comment on this article, you’ll find that comments have been turned off until we’re done with the move. Seems there’s some kind of low-level demon living in our commenting system. We’ll be performing an exorcism while transferring the files to the new machine.

How come this always happens when one is at their busiest?

Peter

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WordPress 2.5 preview

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WordPress 2.5 is available today for a sneak peek. It looks like the most major overhaul to date of the entire backend. I’m going to install it on a test account. Unless you backup your own blog daily, don’t use this test version.

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We’re hiring: Lead Developer

The Blog Studio is adding a Lead Developer to our core team. In the three years or so that we’ve been in business, we’ve worked with a broad range of clients, including Turner Broadcasting, Fox News, Unicef, and 100s more all over the world. In addition to our client work, we’re about to launch a fully funded network of socially driven content sites, designed to compete with the very best on the web.

In order to help us grow, we’re looking to add a full-time lead developer to our core team. This person will work with the project manager and myself on project planning, strategic direction, and implementation.

Our ideal candidate is a master of PHP, with mad skillz in javascript, xhtml and css. Ideally you have experience with CodeIgnitor or other PHP frameworks. We do a lot of work with Expression Engine and WordPress, so experience with those content management systems is a big plus. You should also have some degree of experience setting up and configuring Linux servers.

Although we’re located in Toronto, we’re not super picky about your location. We’d prefer to meet in the same location a couple of times a week, but are willing to be flexible for the right candidate.

On the money front, we offer a competitive salary, extended health if you’re Canadian, and shares in our new media wing.

If you’re interested in this position, please watch the short video above for further details. Resumes can be submitted to jobs@theblogstudio.com

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Expression Engine 2.0 preview

We’re back from SxSW in Austin, and everyone wants to know about the EE 2.0 preview. Rather than telling you myself, why not get the info straight from the horse’s mouth (English has some very strange expressions…)

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My two cents? It looks very, very slick. There’s a lot of new technology under the hood. It’s too early to comment on the details, as I expect the product that launches will be pretty different from the early peek we’re getting now. None the less, I’m excited to start using it. Launch is expected for “Summer 2008”. In other words, don’t hold your breath!

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And we’re off

Lucia and I will be out of the office from March 6th through 12th while we attend the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. Email, phone, and responsibility in general will be put on hold while we “learn” and “get inspired” through extensive late night “brainstorming” sessions.

This year, I’m bringing Purell and am going to be totally germ phobic. No bringing home the black plague this year.

In all seriousness, if you need to reach us, email will probably be your best bet. Expect up to 24 hours lag for a response.

See ya soon!

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New site: Bumblee Blog

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Most of the work we do is business-related. It’s not often we get the chance to really get wild and totally creative. So when Robin approached us a few months ago about redesigning her personal site, we jumped at the chance.

The site is filled with fun details, from the post footers:

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to the date container:

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to the bee that follows you as you hover over the links:

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I just want to say thanks very much to Robin for letting us have so much fun!

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Primetime Politics update

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We’ve been very hard at work over at PrimetimePolitics.com adding new features and refining the design. The Featured Debate is now loading using Ajax, which speeds up the page load quite dramatically. I also recently added a bit of javascript that pulls in the favicons of the sites we’re linking to, which gives an immediate visual cue to what the site is about.

The hard work is really paying off. We’ve seen average daily visits jump from the low hundreds to 1100+ in just a few days. Of course, the content might have something to do with that.

We’ll be rolling out a very cool addition to the site early next week that we hope will really increase the usefulness of this already useful site. Stay tuned for more!

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Weekends are sacred

This is probably not the most appropriate venue for this rant, but I’ll live with the consequences.

People: like you, we work hard. Like you, we have families, friends, hobbies, and passions above and beyond work.

Especially on long weekends, we like to get out of town, unplug, and recharge.

As a general rule of thumb, emails sent and voicemail left after close of business on Friday will be replied to when we’re back in the office the next working day. Please do not send email freaking out when we haven’t responded by Sunday.

Thank you, I feel better now.

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Feist: I feel it all

Done in one take!

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Primetime Politics Facebook application update

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The Facebook Application we built for Primetime Politics is really starting to take off. If you’re a facebook user, please check it out!

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Update to my personal site (hey, at least I’m blogging somewhere!)

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I’ve just redesigned, my personal blog almost cool. Rather than try to find the time to come up with insight or original thought, I’ve started to quickly post shiny things that catch my ears and eyes. I think the content has improved ;)

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Another Bloggie nomination for a site built by The Blog Studio

Congratulations to the talented team at The Budget Fashionista for being nominated in the best fashion weblog category. The Blog Studio recently completed a complicated data migration/merge and total redesign of this very popular website.

The Budget Fashionista is in some very fine company. Category compatriots include Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself, Fab Sugar, and The Sartorialist. (Danger: high likelihood of major surfing distraction)

Please do us a huge favor, and vote for The Budget Fashionista for best fashion weblog of 2008!

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Happy holidays!

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Portfolio updated

I’ve managed to squeak out a couple of minutes to update the work section of the site. Look for a bigger update soon-ish.

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Information R/Evolution

A new video from Michael Wesch, the University of Kansas prof who brought us the thought provoking video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. This latest short video examines our relationship with information, and how the web has changed it from a relationship based on physical constraints (storage, location, media) to a relationship based on content.

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How to create a great website

From Seth Godin, who continues to amaze me:



1. Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker.

2. Change the interaction. What makes great websites great is that they are simultaneously effortless and new at the same time. That means that the site teaches you a new thing or new interaction or new connection, but you know how to use it right away. (Hey, if doing this were easy, everyone would do it.)

3. Less. Fewer words, fewer pages, less fine print.

4. What works, works. Theory is irrelevant.

5. Patience. Some sites test great and work great from the start. (Great if you can find one). Others need people to use them and adjust to them. At some point, your gut tells you to launch. Then stick with it, despite the critics, as you gain traction.

6. Measure. If you’re not improving, if the yield is negative… kill it.

7. Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.”

8. If you hire a professional: hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. 10 mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star.

9. One voice, one vision.

10. Don’t settle.

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Painting with my kids

I’ve been having a lot of fun painting with my daughters, Zoë, age 6, and Ella, age 4. We’ve been producing some startlingly beautiful things. We’re learning so much from each other. I’m learning to paint with the abandon of a 4 year old, and the kids are experimenting and learning new techniques.

We went through about 75 sheets of watercolour paper over the weekend. Initially, I had fits of anxiety at the thought of letting my kids use my fancy paper and nice brushes. But at one point, I realized that the paper only cost 25 bucks, that the paint cost less than 10 – cheaper than going to a movie, and far more rewarding.

Here are a couple of my favorites. I’ve posted more to my flickr account.





By Zoe, age 6



By Peter, age 37



By Peter, age 37



By Ella, age 4



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Exchange rate woes

For the past 30 years, the Canadian dollar has been worth less than the American dollar. As a Canadian doing business almost exclusively with US clients, this meant that I put about $1.25CDN in the bank for every US dollar I was paid.

Today, that’s changed. I now get $0.97CDN for every US dollar. This is the first time in my lifetime that the dollar amount that hits my bank account is LESS than what it says on the cheque.

I’m no economist, but I know this: for doing the same work, I’ve seen my income drop by almost 30% in less than six months. The leading reason for this? Currency investors are scared of the US dollar. Between the war in Iraq, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, the growing US debt rate, and the sluggish state of the the US economy, the green back is losing its luster.

For us, that means we face a tough decision. Do we increase our rates? Or do we insist on being paid in Canadian dollars, to the significant inconvenience of our clients? It’s a lose/lose from where I’m sitting. I’m sure there’s an upside to this somewhere, but I’m not seeing it at the moment.

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RAPIDLY DYING 47-YEAR-OLD PROFESSOR GIVES EXUBERANT ‘LAST LECTURE’

I’ve never posted a video from youtube et al here (to the best of my knowledge), so the fact that I’m doing so now should give you some idea of how I feel about this video. Don’t let the title fool you, this will make you feel great (if not a bawling mess).

If you’re reading this via RSS or email, there may not be video player above. If not click on this to view the video.

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iPhone impressions

I’m deeply sorry for contributing another “I love my iPhone” post to a web sagging under the mass of their combined weight. But I can’t help myself.

It’s just that good.

Being in Canada, I’m simultaneously late and early to the game. Because of our limited and bass ackward carriers, Apple is not selling, and has no short term plans to sell the iPhone in Canada. Until very recently, it was impossible to use the iPhone on a Canadian cell network. With the recent release of a couple of software unlocks though, the situation has changed.

It’s now possible to run a program to “unlock” the iPhone from it’s AT&T dependency, allowing it to run on any EDGE equipped network (Rogers and Fido in Canada). This has opened the door for technological opportunists to purchase iPhones in the US, and sell them unlocked, at a markup, in Canada. The market for these grey-market phones is hot hot hot, as I discovered when calling around to find one. Craigslist pointed me to at least a dozen opportunities to purchase a phone, at an average markup of $150 or so over purchase price and duty.

I paid $700CDN for mine, which sounds like a fortune, until you factor in the $400 I earned from selling my previous phone and 30 gig ipod. And let me tell you, this thing is certainly worth the $300 difference. It’s a game changing device. It’s utterly unlike anything I’ve previously seen or used. The screen, the Wi-Fi, the browser, the touch interface and more combine to form a small marvel of usefulness. In three days, I’ve become addicted to this. I can’t imagine going back to life with a regular phone.

This all smacks dangerously of hyperbole and fanboy-ism. I’m shaking my head at myself as I type these words. Yet it’s true. I’ve been in a protracted nerd-gasm for 72 hours, with no sign of it waning. Everyone who sees this thing has the same reaction, btw. If you buy one, be prepared to do a bunch of explaining every time you take a call in public. Hell, my 88 year old grandmother is desperate to see it.

There are of course a couple of caveats. First is not knowing how future Apple updates may affect the unlocked phones. Worse case scenario here is that I may miss out on features included in iPhone software updates. This is a low probability, and will do nothing to limit my enjoyment of the features already available. The second and more pressing caveat concerns the prison-rape that passes for data plan rates here in the great white north. Rogers, my carrier, wants $15 for 1.5mb of data, or $25 for 3mb. This is insane. In practice, this means that I can’t use my phone for web browsing when away from a Wi-Fi connection. Luckily, jumping on an open wifi network is easy. But this makes hating my cell provider just that much easier.

Let me share one last story that highlights my iPhone experience to date. Moments after purchasing it, while driving home, I remembered I had an important call to make in the evening. Knowing I’d forget it, I decided to set an alarm. Never having seen the clock program on the phone, I was able to set a one-time alarm, with my left hand, while driving, in 10 seconds. Try doing that with your old phone.

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est posting from my new iphone

wow. Amazing.

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Blog Design: Hello my name is Scott

It started at the airport. I was waiting for my flight to be called, when I recognized a guy sitting a few rows away from me. More specifically, I recognized his name tag. “Hello”, it read. “My name is Scott”.

“Hey Scott!” I said with some excitement as I walked up to him. “I read your blog” I told him.

Scott has a very successful blog at hellomynameisblog.com. Scott has made a name for himself by writing about approachability, and by always wearing a name tag. He’s kind of a walking social experiment. He’s also incredibly inspiring, and a total machine when it comes to creating captivating content.

One thing lead to another, and Scott and I exchanged cards. A few months later, my phone rang, and Scott and I got down to the business of redesigning his blog.

He was already using a customized Blogger theme, but it was looking tired, and couldn’t gracefully contain the various widgets and whatnot that had been added to the sidebars. The blog is one of Scott’s most important marketing tools, and it needed to reflect his growing expertise and credibility, and better position his books.

Designing Scott’s new site was fun for a couple of reasons. First, the name tag is such an obvious thing to draw inspiration from. The only trick here was to limit it’s use to key areas. Too much of a good thing is still too much. Second, Scott had a fantastic photo for me to use on the header. It’s a pure “super hero” shot. From the moment I saw that picture, I knew it was going to be the star of the site.

The rest of the design came together around those elements. The site has a nice mix of rounded and square lines, the text is easy to read, and the overall contrast is easy on the eyes. The site does a great job of conveying who Scott is, and what he’s about.

Please check out Scott’s new blog, and let us know what you think of his new digs.

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Inspiration: Graphic-Exchange

I’m always looking for design inspiration. Lately, I’ve been finding a lot of it at graphic exchange. Most of the work posted here is print based, and tends towards exotic textures. There is a HUGE collection of work here, so be careful, or you might get lost for a while.

As an aside, the site doesn’t have an RSS feed. What’s up with that?

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Tuesday Link Roundup

Kevin O’Keefe hosts the weekly Blawg Review, and focuses on the “art of blogging”. He features a number of seminal posts from the likes of Dave Winer, Duncan Riley, my friends Susannah Gardner, Darren Rowse, and many more blogging luminaries.

Speaking of Darren, he’s asking for questions about blogging to answer at problogger over the next couple of months.

Blog Action Day is coming up on October 15th. The site’s mission states “On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.”

Completely unrelated to blogging, check out Bloxorz, a simple yet highly addictive free game.

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Aaron Wall: “The single most important part of my business right now is blogging”

During an interview with Darren Rowse, SEO expert Aaron Wall responds to the following question: How is blogging important to your overall business?

It is huge. Where others are buying $5,000 booths at conferences and spending $500 a day on AdWords my marketing spend is next to nothing because I get many sales from people talking about me. Plus blogging got me media exposure which makes it easier to get more media exposure down the road. I was a no name SEO with one popular article before I started SEO Book, but now I have thousands of subscribers and thousands of customers. The single most important part of my business right now is blogging.

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The World’s Greenest Video

Check out the latest video from Birds of Wales (featuring our very own Mike Caputo on guitar).

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Finding Inspiration

There’s a certain inevitable repetition that comes from being a specialist designer. Whether it’s brochures, business cards, or blogs, there are sets conventions and content that appear time and again. Keeping each project fresh and distinctive requires a steady outward flow of creativity. Fueling that creativity is that most elusive and intangible state: inspiration.

Inspiration as fuel is a fitting metaphor. It’s required to power the engine that cranks out great design. Unlike fuels derived from a single source (say, gasoline), inspiration can come from a myriad of places.

I get my inspiration from fiction, music, print design, art, and nature. I’m hugely inspired by the act of inspiration that went into creating the thing I behold. When I read fiction, I think about the fact that another human sat down and drew together characters and a plot. When I look at art, I think about the movement of the artist as he translated a blank canvas into a finished piece. For me, the inspiration comes not from the the piece that I read, see, or hear, but from the act of creation that brought it to be.

In that sense, what I do is recycle. I get inspired by inspiration, and use that energy to fuel the birth of something new.

What about you? What are your sources of inspiration?

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An effective email routine

Email sucks. Ranging from a torrent to a trickle, it brings a never ending series of chores directly to my inbox. The chores themselves are not the problem. Managing them is. I’ve found an effective routine for doing just that.

This routine is based on the key principal of doing as little as possible. I am not in the business of managing email. I am in the business of building great websites for great clients. Anything that distracts from that takes me away from my purpose.

Principals

I did not sit down and think through the following principals. However they are the key underlying reasons other email management techniques have not worked for me in the past. This new routine embraces these, and thus, works beautifully for me.

The fear of not knowing is the root of all fear. That which lurks forgotten in the pit of an inbox causes fear, stress, and mental noise.

My time is mine. Nothing is more precious than my attention. I cannot possibly respond to all the requests for that attention. That is not my problem.

Act only when it’s necessary. Assign my attention to an issue when it is time for that issue to be handled. Minimize the number of times an issue must be brought before my attention.

Use the power of my tools to work for me. Use search tools to draw out the information I need, when I need it.

Software Used

This routine uses a couple of Mac specific programs. There are Windows equivalent programs that Google can help you find.



* Gmail isn’t a technical necessity for this routine. However, I recommend routing your email through gMail, so that you have an automatic backup of all incoming mail.

Workflow

Mail comes in to Mail.app and is run through a series of rules. Email from my workmates is coloured red. Email from basecamp goes into a specific folder. Certain cron jobs generate a ton of mail, and those too go into specific folders. The goal here is to minimize the number of messages hitting the inbox, and to make those that need my attention more obvious.

Going through my inbox, I use four options to deal with each message:

  • respond right away, then move to archive using my MailActOn key combo
  • hit F6 to send the message to iGTD
  • send directly to archive folder for possible future reference
  • delete it

See what I’m doing? I take anything email that requires action and either respond to it immediately, or move it out of Mail.app and into my action manager, leaving my inbox free of unknowns and hidden job bombs.

Once in iGTD, I can assign the email a priority, a due date, add notes and files, and link it to a project. Everything I need to do is kept in one place. iGTD imports the content of the email, and better yet, links directly to the message, regardless of where in Mail.app it’s stored. This gives me single click access to the original message

iGTD will in turn sync my actions with iCal, which can in turn sync with my portable device du jour.

I lean heavily on Mail.app’s search function to help me find specific messages from my archive. While this is occasionally tedious, it’s much less so than organizing thousands of messages into an ever growing tree of nested folders. It’s possible to save searches as smart folders if you need to access the same group of emails more than once. Just save the search, then trash it when you’re done.

Summary

This routine is fast, dependable, and clean. It requires the minimum of thought, and more importantly, puts all my actions into one container. I have the ability to prioritize my responses, and even set due dates. Keeping my inbox empty is simple and automatic. I hope you find this useful.

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Inspirational Upload

I’ve just uploaded the 600 or so screen shots I’ve collected over the past 2 years to my Flickr account. There are some great examples of good design, plus some beautiful artwork to behold. Till now, I’ve stored these images in iPhoto, but thought it might be useful to share them. Enjoy.

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Have you tried Crazy Egg?

Crazy Egg has been around for a while, but I’ve only just got around to trying it. I had trouble taking anything with such a silly name seriously, to my own chagrin.

Crazy Egg is a stats package unlike any other you’ve used. It offers a visual overview of your site activity, showing (amongst other things) the number of clicks per link on a page.

This is incredibly useful. It allows you to immediately grasp what your readers are doing. Are they clicking where you want? Are they reading your whole page? Is one graphic over powering another? Is your site doing what it’s supposed to do? The site itself says



What do the results tell me?

Where your visitors are clicking speaks for itself.

Here are just a few things you can discover:



  • Find the right spot for your ads


  • Find the right layout for a page


  • Find the right place to put everything


Crazy Egg’s admin interface is amongst the best in the business. It’s intuitive, powerful, and easy on the eyes. The actual software making the thing run is extremely impressive. The page updates happen using javascript, meaning there is very little refreshing of the web page you’re looking at. This gives the site more of a desktop application feel. Very slick.

Cost for the service ranges from $0 to $99/mo, depending on volume. Currently, I’m playing with the free account, but can see upgrading in the near future to access some of the more advanced features. If you’re interested in making sure your site is doing what you want it to do, I highly recommend checking Crazy Egg out. Now, if only they’d do something about that name…

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New (School) Year Resolutions

This is a monumental day in my life. Both kids are heading off to school for the first time. This is a big deal for more than the obvious “closing one chapter, opening another”. It’s the first time my whole family is getting up early.

Until now, the girls have been going to half-day kindergarden. They didn’t need to be in class until 1pm. Having to have two kids at two different schools by 8:30am is a whole different story. It’s the start of a new regime, and as good a time as any to review and tweak my own routines.

The big thing I hope to change is the productivity of my mornings. While I enjoy getting up early, and having a couple of hours to ease into the day, I don’t succeed in getting much actually done. Design inspiration doesn’t usually strike until later in the day. Instead of fighting that, I resolve to use my mornings to research the latest and greatest in blogs and social media.

Keeping up with the changes in this space has become a full time job. I resolve to use this blog to condense my findings into digestible morsels. This will serve to create some accountability, and to push me to think through the ever changing blog landscape.

My record for sticking with resolutions is so-so at best. That said, they usually involve doing something that goes against my existing momentum, ie changing my eating, changing my sleep/wake habits, etc. I have good hope for this resolution though. It just formalizes something I’ve been doing on auto-pilot for a few years now.

What about all of you? Any back-to-school resolutions on your end?

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Redesigning the Captain’s Quarters

Shortly after the launch of Michelle Malkin’s new site, Ed Morrissey from the Captain’s Quarters blog approached us about redesigning his extremely popular blog. Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity.

Ed’s blog was looking tired. The content had outgrown the template. The sidebars in particular were really messy. In short, it looked like a blog in need of a freshening up.

Ed (who is awesome, btw) wrote a post telling his readers that there was a redesign in the works. While some respondents were pleased, the majority were worried. What if we messed up the site they had come to love?

What we did: Wireframes

As usual, we started by wireframing the site. Wire frames are a critical step in the design process for a bunch of reasons. The wireframe focusses on the layout of the content. We’ve found that once you introduce design elements, it becomes nearly impossible for a client to focus on the details. Color and imagery take over their minds!

With Captain’s Quarters blog, we focussed on the sidebar, and trying to better integrate the main ad and comic strip into the top of the design. The readers made it very clear: the comic strip had to stay at the top of the page.

Designing a wireframe is a lot like doing a puzzle. You start out by examining the pieces, and getting a sense of what will fit where. Because they are both quite wide, the comic and the main ad determined the column widths. Click on the thumbnail of the wireframe graphic to see what we came up with.

What we did: Design

Good blog design is all about balance. A blog page has a lot of content on it – often very visually jumbled content. Making sure it isn’t overpowering means giving everything space, and making sure elements are properly aligned. Our brains do not respond well to jumbles. They need to make sense of information. Information is much easier to make sense of when there is a clear visual hierarchy. Balance helps set that.

When I sat down to work on the design, I took at look at the graphics Ed had sent me to use for the header. They were terrific scenes of naval battles. Very Hornblower. The thing is, they were quite small. We had planned on a 960 pixel wide header, and I couldn’t up-size the images to that width without serious image loss. That meant I could either stitch a couple of images together, limit the image to only a part of the header, or shrink the header.

I chose the latter, because it solved a big problem, involving the comic and the ad.

With the layout we had designed in the wireframe, the comic and the ad were right next to each other. These two visually heavy blocks were creating a disconnect between the header and the content. There was a 200px high divide across the upper part of the page. By making the header narrower, I was able to break that divide, and use the header artwork at full resolution.

Following that, the design just came together. The previous design used the font Charlemagne for the header. I think it’s a totally appropriate font, so reused it for the navigation and sidebar titles. You can see from the graphic below that the first comp is very close to the site we eventually launched. I reused the blue background from the previous design, but it just didn’t work. Ed gave me the go-ahead to change it, and we were all but done.

What we did: Functionality

A key weapon in our fight against sidebar bloat is javascript. Using javascript, we can selectively hide and show content, based on user interaction. Ed has a massive blogroll. It’s easily in the 100s of sites. We decided to chop it into more digestable sections, and “hide” each section behind a button. Clicking that button causes that section of the blogroll to scroll down.

(Depending on your browser, you may or may not see that behavior as of today. There’s a conflict with some of the other JS that we’re still sniffing out.)

What we did: Markup, MT Templates, and launch

The only point I’d like to make here is that when working on a MovableType site with over 11,000 posts, be prepared to wait a very long time between rebuilds.

Usually, we’re able to launch a site in a couple of hours. We transfer the files and database from our development server to the client’s, make a few tweaks, and we’re done. With Captain’s Quarters blog that process took a couple of days. Ed’s server was having a melt-down! The server was under a harsh spam attack, and kept buckling under the weight of multiple simultaneous comments and massive site rebuilds.

I respect the heck out of SixApart and what they’ve done for blogging. But man, it can take a lot of time to launch an MT or TypePad site.

Big kudos for Ed for keeping his head cool through all of the hassles and delays.

The end result

The response to the site has been really positive. You can’t make everyone happy, and frankly, that’s not our job. We seem to have accomplished our mission. The site is fresh, with a whole new colour palette and re-jigged layout. Yet it retains it’s essential quality and character.

Most unusually, I’m quite happy with this design. Usually, I quite detest my work. Something about this sits well with me. There are still a few tweaks to be made, and the site will continue to improve.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you found it useful or interesting, please let me know, and I’ll write some more.

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Micro branding, Market stalls, and Social networks

I’m listening to William Gibson talking to Cory Doctorow about innovation, the cost of retail space, and the limiting opportunities that exist for micro-brands to reach street-level audiences in our ever more expensive cities.

Their point is of course valid. I know only too well how the cost of retail space can force bankruptcy on an otherwise healthy business. But I’m surprised that neither Gibson or Doctorow brought up the nearly zero cost involved with setting up a storefront online.

Yes, I can already hear you saying “but online is no match for street level retail when it comes to selling local micro-brands”. But frankly, that’s outdated thinking. Instead, I’d ask “why are you still thinking of geographic markets when you could be thinking of social markets?”

I’m working on a couple of fashion related projects at the moment (three of them actually), and as such have been immersed in the world of online style for a couple of months. During this period, my mind has been blown time and again by sites like stylehive.com, notcot.org, etsy.com and others. These sites allow the tiniest of micro-brands to flourish. The pyramidical model of social networks allows these micro-brands to reach markets far faster and for far lest cost than by setting up a retail storefront. If, as a micro-brand owner, you can get a social influencer to buy and recommend your product, you have instant legitimacy within a wider market.

So it isn’t true that skyrocketing retail costs are killing the micro-brand. It is true that the skill set needed to succeed at small level retail has changed dramatically. But that’s a story for another post.

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Taking Blogging for Granted

As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently went through my feed reader and cut my feeds down by about half. My criteria for choosing who to trash was pretty simple: does this site regularly published original, relevant content? To my surprise, I found that I was removing many of the feeds I’ve been following for years.

When I considered why, the answer was obvious: blogger burnout. But that’s not t