Taxi cabs crowd a street causing wasted time and confusion. Similar to how lights and road signs guide traffic, TGFI helps to eliminate the stress of technology with solutions that just work.
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Archive for May, 2006

Contracts, more contracts
jkay - May 31, 2006

Not much to add this last week… busy working on some new .NET/ajax stuff, which I am pretty excited about. But now it’s time to write the contracts. I wish I had some friends in law school who need practice at this stuff…

At the end of the day, I would love if I could just write “I will build what the document says, with reasonable changes allowed, for $zyx amount of money.” Of course, we all know where that gets us….

So, off to finish another dead document. At least this one (somewhat) guarantees us payment. :)

Making Your Last Impression First
Greg Benedict - May 12, 2006

The typical process in creating a website goes something similar to the following:

  1. Determine what information is important and organize it (IA)
  2. Create one or more designs and choose the best
  3. Layout the website in HTML, CSS, etc.
  4. Program any interactive parts to the site
  5. Fill the page templates with content
  6. Rinse and repeat

Notice any thing wrong with this approach? That’s right. The most important information is left until the end.
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Throwing another log on the Campfire
jkay - May 12, 2006

We love the products from 37signals. Specifically, Campfire is becoming a great asset for us, and we use a pay version of Basecamp. Finally, we even attended the 37signals conference on ‘Getting Real’ in Chicago a few weeks ago - great stuff.

So, to 37signals - keep up the good work, and hopefully our own internal efforts to bring forth a product will be found equally useful.

Logos and alignment
jkay - May 10, 2006

We generate a lot of documents… which is both good, because it’s something we get paid for, and bad, because a lot of them quickly become dead documents. There is, I am sure, a happy medium, and we do constantly strive to get our clients to only request stuff which they will actively use.

That all being said - documents are generally labeled, e.g. we add the TGFI logo to the top. It does quickly become interesting how strong of opinions our clients have about whether this logo be on the left or right side of the header (we currently choose the right side, for no other reason than to have made a choice).

Just the daily rant…

Traffic today
jkay - May 9, 2006

Driving to the office today (the lovely Majestic Plaza), I found myself behind an oversize vehicle. It was a semi carrying a giant tractor with wheels hanging 4 feet off of either side. The driver was doing an excellent job staying all the way to the right, so as to let traffic through in the middle lane… and then it just slowed down to a crawl. Turns out that someone was parked in the side lane to make a cell phone call (or to take one?) The oversize vehicle couldn’t get past without going to the middle lane.

While I do applaud someone taking the initiaitve to ‘be safe’ and pull over for a call - especially if an important one - I just couldn’t help but thinking that they had no clue that what they had done was a) dangerous, and b) causing traffic to come to a halt. So, to anyone reading this, just remember that there is a valid reason the interstate has ‘no parking’ as one of its primary rules.

Moving from language to language
jkay - May 8, 2006

I am spending today writing Java and JSP for an MVC framework engineering application. Tonight I am switching back to VB.NET to update a telcom application. Tomorrow I am working with Ruby on Rails on a few new websites. Oh, and the Databases switch from Oracle to SQL Server to MySQL along the way.

Sometimes it is enough to make my head spin, but overall I am glad that I have this flexibility. I am not particularly sure which one I prefer the most, though getting the opportunity to work with Rails is pretty fun. Now, if I can only find some more CFML or PHP to make my week complete…

AJAX, Flash and Web 2.0
Greg Benedict - May 8, 2006

Since my early days of web development back in 1996 I have taken a strong stance in using the right technology for the job. There is no reason to over engineer things and waste money doing it just because you think it’s cool. Along with that belief has come my agressive distaste for Flash. In the work circles I’ve been around it has always been used because it was the coolest and could create a nice fade/move/zoom effect.
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