About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
A year or so ago, I had this ‘Website-in-a-Weekend’ idea. Walk a group of people from nothing to a nice looking, easy-to-update, custom website in a weekend using WordPress. Something like this; Day 1: Install WordPress (t d), define categories, pages, generally get everything in place. Add some images and text. Day 2: Edit the …
Continue reading “How long does it take to build a website?”
A year ago I dropped REALbasic. Since then, I’ve struggled to get my head around Cocoa and Objective-C. With the recent hype around Ruby on Rails, I started looking at Ruby and found a Ruby/Objective-C bridge. To me, this means there’s a huge potential to have tightly-integrated desktop and web-based applications in a single, easy-to-maintain …
Last winter, I biked at least 10 miles everyday. From the home office to coffee shops and client meetings. Only missed 2 days due to awful weather. This winter, traveling to my clients wasn’t as convenient. Both my road and mountain bikes gathered dust all winter. This week, just in time for spring, I got …
When putting together a prototype for usability testing, it’s best to use realistic data. If you’re evaluating the readability of a search results screen, put in the actual results. If you’re evaluating a check-out process, make all the information throughout the entire process real. Then, after, tweak the data just slightly. Make it humorous, make …
Continue reading “Fake Data to See if Anyone’s Paying Attention”
(originally published at MNteractive.com) Jim Cuene noticed Forrester has finally followed Jupiter Research into using weblogs to increase their analysts’ reputations and GoogleJuice. I agree with 2.5 of Jim’s 3 suggestions for both Forrester and Jupiter. ‘Go out on a Limb’ and ‘Allow Comments’, both of these reinforce the ‘your readers know more than you’ …
Doc Searles comments that expensive hotels aren’t offering valuable amenities to their guests. Reminds me of my previous thoughts on how Hotels could improve the guest experience: If a Sign is Needed, Something is Wrong. Cost of Stolen Towels Comes Out of Marketing Budget
If you enjoyed First Crack #12. The Winter Blanket at Marysburg Books and will be in Minneapolis on Friday night (Mar. 25), head over the Triple Rock Social Club. The Winter Blanket will be playing 2 shows with Mark Mallman and Melodious Owl. All ages @ 5pm, 21+ at 10pm.
On my way to better understand object-oriented programming (t d) and thereby check “Learn enough Objective-C to be dangerous” off my ThingsToDo list, I picked up The Object-Oriented Thought Process by Matt Weisfeld. Not having formal training in software engineering, I found the book’s focus on the language-agnostic basics of OO extremely helpful. Here’s what …
For a couple weeks straight, I kept forgetting to charge my phone overnight. A single charge is only good for a couple days, so I was stuck with a useless phone more than I’d like. With my addiction to BluePhoneElite, not having my T610 charged is like not having a phone at all. One day …
I’m a big fan of MarsEdit, I use it for all my weblog posting. The other day, I was wondering about making any arbitrary text a Technorati Tag. The result was the Tag Maker Applescript for MarsEdit. It takes any selected text and appends a ‘(t)’ to it linking to the corresponding tag at Technorati, …