October 2004 Archive

Blog Business Summit

posted by DL Byron on October 30, 2004

The Blog Business Summit has launched. Publish and Prosper is the tag line and the theme for the sessions, panels, and speakers. Textura Design designed and built the site. We'll also participate in the sessions and blogging.

Release Notes

• Blogs, subblogs, CMS - each page and subpage is published by the system (gallery excluded). The sub pages are sub blogs. We used Movable Type 3.11, with some customization. As the site progresses, we'll look at options like syndicating the sub blogs to the main blog, etc.
• PHP includes, PHP gallery via QDig
• Valid XHTML, CSS, and fully Accessible
• Full cross-browser support, Netscape 4.7 deprecated. A series of crazy-whack hacks and workarounds incorporated into the stylesheet.

Design Notes

The point of the conference, is "to show you how your business can leverage current real-world blogging techniques, tools and platforms to promote and enhance your ventures." We want to appeal to bloggers and business people alike. During the comping process, Scott wrote, "My primary goal with the site design was to create something that felt like part of the blogoshpere, but was crisp and professional enough to inspire corporate customers to fork over their money. So I'm trying to straddle the line between cool blog and corporate focused conference site..."

I think Scott's design achieved that goal.

If you're interested in attending, and a business blogger, note that the organizer is offering discounts for bloggers that attend.

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A blast from the spooky past

posted by DL Byron on October 30, 2004

Back in the day, before Clip-n-Seal, blogging, and all the evangelizing I do, Textura Design was a creative outlet, where a group of us published art projects. Earlier this week, Keith reminded me about Two Days Dark, a halloween site we did in 2001. I pulled the piece he worked on out of the archive and created a stand-alone page for it. A blast from the spooky past.

Thanks for the reminder Keith.

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Standing in a WaSP Stance

posted by DL Byron on October 19, 2004

Last week I opted out of the Mike Davidson argument. One, cause I drink beer with Mike, and two, cause I felt some of the argument thread was irrational and all over the place. The problem, whether we like it or not, is that WaSP can be perceived as Standards Nazis, Code Priests, assholes, you name it, and to what end?

There's nothing wrong with taking a stand on an issue, as we've done, but what we need to do now is effectively communicate that. To convince a software company that building Standards support into their tools is a good thing, or demonstrate how much bandwidth a publishing company can save, or how a small business can sell their product across browsers and platforms now and into the future.

WaSP has done a good job convincing the designer geeks that it's the right thing to do. In my opinion, now it's time to take the case to business and that's part of what I work on everyday. I'm hopeful that one day Standards will just be part of our trade, it's exhausting evangelism, but the work must go on.

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Thanks for that perspective

posted by DL Byron on October 13, 2004

At times, when busy with various projects, launches, and all that work we do, I like to ground myself with another perspective; a dinner with my wife, a long bike ride, or a friend with a new baby. Today, I read the very candid Business Week interview with Steve Jobs and it reminded me how important it is to focus on what we're doing, not get distracted, too stressed, or to try to hard. Next month, on the 13th, we'll be at year 2 with Clip-n-Seal. We've accomplished a lot and have much more to do.

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Ongoing list of blog entry titles

posted by DL Byron on October 12, 2004

Here’s a list of blog entry titles I’ve saved as drafts to be posted on later. Realizing later may not come, here they are now with notations.

• “Damn Ampersands” — regarding the ABCNews relaunch. Jason noted that was a cool name for a band. The Damn Persands
• “RSS Radio” — podcasting, whatever, give me Boing Boing radio.
• “Messing with perfection” — I cracked open the thin, new iMac to replace a noisy power suppy and man did that make me nervous. Not nervous about replacing the PSU, just that I was about to mess with perfection.
• “That’s one dollar for each piece of comment spam I’ve deleted” — regarding the 10M in Venture Captial for MovableType.

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