Author: Michael
Date: December 24, 2008 at 6:42 pm

I changed my twitter username from MichaelAtCommTD to mikeridley to save space.  When I signed up for twitter I hadn’t used twitter before.  Shocking and logically consistent, I know!  So I hadn’t thought about how having a long username would steal space from reply messages.  But now that I’ve been using twitter, I do think about that.  So I’ve changed it.

Even mikeridley is longer than I’d like, but mridley and michaelr were both taken.  Sad.  Turns out I don’t have a global monopoly on my name and initials.  Who knew?

So anyway, if you’re already following me then I think nothing changes.  It’s the same account, I just changed the username.  But going forward I can be found on twitter at mikeridley.

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Categories: Communications Tool & Die
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Author: Michael
Date: November 26, 2008 at 6:35 pm

We haven’t been particularly good about updating our blog lately, but in case anyone thinks we have dropped off the map - we haven’t!  So what have we been up to?  Well, we have been busy with some web design work but not as much as I would have hoped to have.  Perhaps a reflection of the economy as a whole.  Perhaps a reflection of the fact that we haven’t yet built a big name for ourselves.

In any event, we have been keeping busy with other projects.  We have a very exciting web application in the works, tenatively called Collapparatus.  It’s still early in the development process so I don’t want to say much more at this point.  But it definitely fills a niche on the web that isn’t currently being addressed.

Next week Heather is off to a marketing conference.  I’m hoping she’ll blog her experience.  She says she’s not much of a blogger but I’m hoping I can twist her arm a little bit.

Also next week we should be back to our regular weekly Delicious Day feature.

Those are all the updates that pop into the top of my head, so I’ll keep this update brief and wish the American readers a wonderful Thanksgiving.

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Categories: Communications Tool & Die
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Author: Michael
Date: October 22, 2008 at 10:42 pm

When I first started looking at Zen Cart templates, I approached the task from the perspective of creating a WordPress theme.  The Zen Cart template documentation, such as it is, does a good job of explaining the directory layout to use for a custom template, but it doesn’t actually explain what PHP functions can be used in template files.

I started looking for documentation on Zen Cart “template tags” and became frustrated by the fact that there isn’t really any such documentation.  I then decided to go about documenting the Zen Cart template functions myself.  It turns out, that’s actually not the best approach.

(more…)

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Categories: web development
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Author: Michael
Date: October 6, 2008 at 6:23 pm

We have added the wonderful Twitter Tools and Disqus plugins for WordPress.  Twitter Tools is a plugin which allows automatic Twitter tweets when blog posts are published, as well as automatic posting of Twitter content on a WordPress blog.  For now, we only have it configured to go from WordPress to Twitter, which makes sense as our company twitter account is not particularly active and isn’t intended to be.

Disqus is a cross-site commenting system which has become very popular over the past few months.  We want to encourage high quality conversations on this web site and having a modern commenting system is a great way to start.

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Categories: Communications Tool & Die
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Author: Michael
Date: October 3, 2008 at 3:32 pm

I was supposed to write the Delicious Day post for last week, but I got busy so here it is Friday and I’m just getting it out.  Over a week late.  Sorry about that, gentle readers.

I do have two great services to cover so hopefully that will make up for my tardiness.  I’m going to cover Browsershots, a free alternative to BrowserCam and Total Validator, an (X)HTML validator with more features than the standard W3C Validator. (more…)

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Categories: Delicious Day
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Author: Michael
Date: September 26, 2008 at 8:41 am

We have started using the web-based Toggl application for time tracking at Communications Tool & Die.  Initially we were tracking our time using a module in our SugarCRM system, but that just seemed to clunky for our relatively simple needs.  We don’t bill by the hour, so we don’t need incredibly precise time accounting but we do want to know how much time we are spending on client projects so we can make sure we are billing in line with what it’s costing us to do the work.  We also want an idea of how much time we spend on internal projects versus customer revenue generating work.

I searched around looking for a great time tracking solution that was free or cheap and Toggl seems to be the best one for our purposes.  We’ve been using it for several weeks now, and while it’s not perfect it meets our needs.  I would like to have better batch time entry capabilities and a few other features.  But all in all it works for our purposes.

Toggl offers a premium paid version, but the free service is sufficient for our uses.  And perhaps yours as well.  Check them out!

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Categories: Communications Tool & Die
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Author: Michael
Date: September 25, 2008 at 7:41 pm

One of the services we provide at Communications Tool & Die is custom Zen Cart integration.  Unfortunately, the existing documentation on Zen Cart template creation is…limited.  I have been working on documenting the template page functions internally for our developers but once I have this in a presentable format I am going to release it here publicly as well.  It’s silly that such a popular package doesn’t have good documentation for its template system.  Hopefully the first of my Zen Cart posts will be coming out in the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!

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Categories: web development
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Author: Michael
Date: September 19, 2008 at 12:36 pm

The proliferation of web browsers is a real pain from a development standpoint.  Every new browser is yet another platform to be supported.  Every site now has yet more idiosynchrocies to take into account.  So when Google announced Chrome recently, I was curious to see what the carnage would be for our design and development efforts.

As it turns out, there’s none at all.  Chrome uses the WebKit engine, which is also used by Apple’s Safari.  So pages visually render very similar to how they would in Safari.  Because our design and development focuses on using web standards, we don’t employ a lot of browser-specific hacks in our (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or otherwise.

When a new browser comes along that also is focused on implementing web standards, the cost of supporting that additional platform is…zero.  Somehow I suspect the same will not be said when Internet Explorer 8 goes out of beta.

Fighting against standards is fighting against the tide at this point.  Futile and exhausting.

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Categories: web design, web development
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Author: Michael
Date: September 19, 2008 at 9:38 am

I recently wrote about the Dojo Docs project and how the existing Dojo documentation leaves something to be desired.  There was a Stack Overflow question asking for Dojo resources and a really good list was provided.  If you’re looking to learn more about Dojo, the Stack Overflow response is a great starting point.

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Categories: web development
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Author: Heather
Date: September 18, 2008 at 12:37 pm

Delicious Day is a new weekly post that will showcase our favorite findings we have bookmarked at delicious.com through out the week.

I am a huge fan of checklists and use many in my personal and professional life. So, naturally, my first favorite is The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! This page is a compilation of what author, Stoney deGeyter, has put together, during his experience as a web designer, on what needs to be done for a web site for all its online marketing needs. It covers over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, and much more. It’s not so much a how to as it is a guide. Stoney is always modifying the page to refine, add and delete as online marketing is always evolving. It is a great resourse to keep on hand.

Along with checklists, I love cheat sheets. Jacob Gube, of Six Revisions, put together 28 cheat sheets for web developers. The list provides cheat sheets for for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, typography and other web development topics. These will come in very handy for the beginning web developer as well as the experienced. One can always learn something new, right?

Do you have a favorite cheet sheet or checklist you use on a regular basis or have made yourself? Feel free to share your own resourses in the comments below.

Stay tuned each week for more of our favorite delicious bookmarks.

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Categories: Delicious Day
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