2013 Q1 Wrap Up
Apart from ongoing support for Clorox web sites, the Fresh Step site launched a campaign called CatDance as a feline homage to the Sundance festival that included a film contest.
2012 Q4 Wrap Up
In this last quarter of 2012, we launched a redesign of glad.com on the Expression Engine platform, the first in an effort to make all sites for Clorox use a content management system (CMS).
Strongly-Typed Thinking
In computer science, we talk about programming languages being strongly- or weakly-typed. A strongly-typed language insists that variables be of one type: an integer, a floating-point number or a string. The stronger the typing, the less tolerant the language when you use the "wrong" type. At the extremes, a strongly-typed language might reject arithmetic between an integer (e.g. 13) and a floating point number (2.40). A weakly-typed language will offer some implicit type conversion. PHP, our language of choice, will do its best to promote strings of text into numbers if you write code that treats the value like a number (e.g. "2abc" + 3 is 5). This strong typing concept can be anthropomorphized like so. The strongly-typed language sees that you declared that variable as an integer. When you ask it to add…
Consulting in 2D: Innovation vs Conversation
Something I read recently by David Maister about the four different kinds of consultant keeps coming back to me, similarly to how I play with the rules to a boardgame in the moments when my mind is unoccupied. Maister uses healthcare as an analogy. Consider four roles: pharmacist, nurse, brain surgeon, psychotherapist. Each dwells in his own quadrant of a 2D space where the dimensions are innovation and how willing they are to talk to you. The pharmacist performs a well-defined task for you with very little input from you. You merely tell him which drug you need and he provides it. Even if you couldn't perform the work yourself, you expect it to be performed in a well-defined way. He provides solutions to solved problems. Between handing over the…
2012 Q3 Wrap Up
Aside from normal maintenance on sites, we helped Clorox refactor a large library used for managing consumer information and launched a promotion for glad.com called Mom Made.
2012 Q2 Wrap Up
During the second quarter of 2012, we continued to supported Clorox with Web site maintenance for Hidden Valley Range, Glad, K.C. Masterpiece and Kingsford sites. The new Fresh Step site also demanded a lot of attention.
2012 Q1 Wrap Up
The first quarter of 2012 found us continuing technical leadership for Clorox in supporting sites for Hidden Valley Ranch, Kingsford and Pine-Sol. More significantly, we lead the team in launch an all-new site for Fresh Step cat litter that includes a loyalty program provided by 3rd party vendor ePrize. We wrote documentation and unit tests for a javascript library maintained by gaming social network Hi5. Tests were built in Jasmine. We built a blog for Legacy Games to keep fans informed about their new Jane Austen game. The platform is WordPress using a commercially available theme. Standing up these marketing sites is fast and cost effective for marketers with thrifty budgets. The build included integration with MailChimp.
October Newsletter
Welcome to the October 2011 18INT newsletter! Which browsers to support/test your site on? How do you decide which browsers to support or test on with your web sites? During the past year, global browser usage stats show Chrome doubling its share of the market, from just under 12% of users to just under 24%. Their gains seem to have come at the expense of Internet Explorer and Firefox, though each of those browsers are still used by more users than Chrome. Safari and Opera continue to hold steady with their small share of the market (under 6% and 2%, respectively.) Of course, there are current and older versions of each browser to consider, as users don't all upgrade versions right away. The gs.statcounter.com site is a good reference for…
July Newsletter
Welcome to the July 2011 18INT newsletter! You can trust us to do the job for you Does the title of this section make you feel more positively about 18INT? The Neuromarketing blog recently reported that adding that phrase to the end of an ad for an automotive services company caused customer trust to jump significantly. Their positive take advises us simply to remind our customers that we can be trusted. And yet, I hear the dark side whispering to me about how these magic words will win more business, regardless of anything else that's done. The truth is authenticity wins. Tricks just eat up good will, and then they stop working. We have seen how a decade ago, SEO was all about tricking the search engines into showing your…
June Newsletter
Welcome to the June 2011 18INT newsletter! Google, Microsoft and Yahoo present schema.org A couple months ago, I wrote about how Facebook's Open Graph tags improve links to your content in the news stream. Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to does much the same thing--elaborate on the meaning of your HTML to improve user experience. Professional programmers know standards and best practices provide the best long-term strategy. Like design patterns and test-driven development, we know it makes life easier even if it's more work up front. This month, the major search engines agreed to a standard for adding more detail to HTML to aid search indexing. The technique annotates the information on the page without disturbing the display. This new tool is more detailed than Open Graph…