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A site that I developed while interactive creative director at CHANGE* won an award in the 2007 TCIA Professional Communications Awards. Evidently, this is the premier award for marketing and communications for the tree industry. The entries were evaluated on their overall appearance, content quality, adherence to ANSI and OSHA standards, and their success in achieving the company’s marketing and communications goals. The website was built in Expression Engine and required quite a bit of customization with custom queries, and a few handmade plug-ins. It was a challenging project and took several months and stretched me in many ways. I was responsible for the bulk of the site including design, front-end development (html and css), CMS integration with Expression Engine, and all back-end customization (including custom MySQL queries). It’s wonderful to be recognized for this site – now if I could just figure out how to get to Aruba for the presentation of the award that would be swell.
]]>So, you can imagine my excitement when I received an email a couple weeks later that said that my bill had been traveling around the country and had made the journey from Illinois to North Carolina. The cool thing is that I will receive an email everytime somebody registers the bill on the wheresgeorge.com website. It reminds me of the times as a child when I would attach a note to a helium balloon and wait with baited breath to see how far the balloon got. I don’t think I ever got a reply. I imagine the kid that found it lived a few streets over and felt that it wouldn’t be too impressive to send the 3×5 card back to me on the pre-stamped envelope that I included when he could just walk it over. At any rate, here’s the link to my bill.
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So what’s a company to do? Well, we decided to hire ourselves. And to that end we took the day off today to get away from the office and take a look at who we are, who we want to be, where we’re going, what we need to do to get there, etc. Basically we asked ourselves all the questions that we ask our clients. It was really interesting and should lead to an improved identity.
So what about the shoes?
Long story short, the facilitator of the meeting asked everyone on the team to wear an old pair of shoes in. We were asked to take them off and throw them in a pile – this symbolized where we’ve been. As a company that cares about cause, we were then told that these shoes would be given to charity. After a few people got over the shock of losing their favorite lawn mowing shoes and realized that there are people in the world who don’t even have shoes, we were presented with a new pair of shoes. These aren’t just any shoes, these are shoes that are changing lives. They’re called Tom’s Shoes. Basically, if you buy a pair of Tom’s, they will give a pair of shoes to a child that doesn’t have shoes. It’s a sweet story and a sweet mission. (the shoes are slightly odd, but it feels good to help someone less fortunate and to be part of a bigger story). Check them out, buy a pair, feel good.
What is redbox? Only the coolest things since netflix. I never liked netflix though I will admit they have a few nice features. Redbox is the happy medium between netflix and rental stores. Basically there are these video vending machines that are going to be at grocery stores, libraries, McDonald’s etc. all over the country. You’ll create an account and then anytime you want to rent a movie, you stop at any redbox, enter your code, select the movie you want, and out it spits. Pretty cool really. However, suppose you’re sitting at home and decide you just have to see whatever is the latest movie. You simply login to your account on the website reserve the movie at a redbox near you, and then whenever you happen to stop by, you enter your code and the movie pops out.
So what’s the best part? Each DVD rents for the low price of $1. That’s it one little dollar. I think we’ll probably use it next time we rent to see if it feels as good as I’d like it to. I’ll keep you posted. One catch though mom…they don’t have VHS...it’s time for you to upgrade. 
Here is a quick rundown of what makes Coda cool.
Probably the coolest thing about this idea for a web app is that you never have to switch programs to do what you need to do. In my current workflow, I’ll write my code in one application, switch to my FTP app to upload, switch to a browser to preview and back to the editor to start the whole cycle again. Granted the Mac makes things like switching between apps as easy as hitting Apple + Tab or F9, but all those microseconds spent jumping between applications adds up over time (like the butterfly effect). So it’s my hope that using Coda will help to reduce the time spent out of my applications and should lead to increased productivity and efficiency.
Sites
This is a visual area to organize all of your sites. Simply double click on the piece of paper that represents your site and it automagically restores the Coda environment how you had it for that particular site. It’s kinda like the smart keys available in the luxury cars that allow a couple to save their seat and climate control settings on a chip on their key so that when the put their key in everything adjusts accordingly. Smart that. Coda also tracks your local changes and updates them on the server automatically when you press the big, shiny publish button.
Transmit
Nice. They packed Transmit into this application. Very nice.
Editor
Elegant and powerful text editing leads to maximum hand-coding hotness. Packed with the features including syntax coloring, line numbering, auto completing, block editing, etc.
Preview
See how your code is going to look while editing thanks to Apple’s WebKit (the engine behind Safari). Dang™!
CSS
The built-in CSS editor allows you to choose between visual or text mode for tweaking your CSS goodness. Cool for when you need some GUI action or when you like to go it your own.
Terminal
Should you need to use some SSH, you can do it without launching that ugly Terminal app. Okay, this one’s still ugly….but it’s easier to get to.
Books
An awesome reference built right in. Need to remember that one obscure HTML tag, or what’s that one CSS property. Books is a complete reference library at your fingertips to find all the info you need on HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP without leaving Coda. As much as we love Google, it’s nice to have what you need without having to dig through pages of results.
And I guess there’s more. I’m going to start playing with this thing and see if it lives up to my expectations. I’ll keep you posted.
]]>Not only is the bike cool, but the site is pretty fun. Clean, simple, effective. I dig it.
Be sure to check out the accessories link too…the only thing they seem to have missed is an Ace of Spades for the spokes.
]]>So you can imagine my elation when I stumbled upon the CSS TYPE site. Their tagline perfectly states their purpose:
web safe typography on screen for pixel perfectionists
This is great news. Not only is it another tool for feeding my pixel precision need, but it confirms something that I have suspected for a long time. There must be more people out there like me…people passionate about pixels…freaks.
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I’m proud to announce the launch of a new website. My good friend Zach (DropStudios) and I collaborated on a pro-bono project for OneP3.com, a really neat organization. He did the design while I handled the CSS and Expression Engine development. I was worried initially about working with another designer on a project since I typically handle all aspects of a project from design through back-end programming. However, I decided to give it a try and it actually ended up being a neat exercise working collaboratively and was almost therapeutic coding someone else’s design. The best part of the project was knowing that our gifts were being used to help out a good cause.
]]>I started looking around for an email application that could be used to check and send from all of my accounts and could be accessed from multiple computers. That’s when I stumbled upon the ability to send from different addresses within Gmail. I’ve been trying it for a little while and so far it seems to work good but I’m not completely sold on it yet. At any rate, here’s how it’s done.
How to Set it Up
Now when somebody writes you at your alternative address, it’ll forward to your Gmail account. When you’d like to compose a new message, you will be presented with a drop-dwown menu from which you can choose which address you’d like to use as your sending address. You can also setup your account to reply using a default address or using the email address that the email was sent to.
As you can see, this has the potential to really consolidate things and make checking and sending email more efficient for folks that have multiple email addresses.
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