Not just launches with new sites, or the final touches on the standard web development projects, but launches for a lot of our partner’s personal projects.

First there was our favorite copywriter’s first book launch. A few updates to her custom WordPress theme and she was off and running.

Then our favorite designer launched a new boot camp which donates all of its proceeds to charity each month. WordPress to the rescue (of course!)

Not to ignore the fact that we launched a few sites for some other clients as well.

But our favorite launch this month had to be the one you’re looking at right now. Even Paper Canopy got a refresh and a fresh start! And we couldn’t thank UXpertise enough for the design.

It’s only February! And the best news is the new Paper Canopy theme is only the beginning. We’re looking to get in on the fun and launch a couple of our own projects as we keep rolling along on a few more fun WordPress themes and web development. So stay tuned for our first announcement which should happen later this month!

The easy thing to do would be just to ask the designer. And most of the time I do, and it works out great. But I’ve found that there’s this gap between a designer and the producer where the designer doesn’t necessarily know what the producer can actually build (and what’s not impossible to do) and the producer doesn’t know what to suggest because he doesn’t know what the designer really wants, and around and around we go.

So here we are, trying to bridge that gap a bit. It’s a little instruction on what can be done, and where to go for inspiration for people who  may not necessarily know what’s interactively possible.

Let me introduce you to jQuery.

jQuery is a JavaScript library. And JavaScript is what powers most if not all of the client side interaction on a web page. So: jQuery is a library of JavaScript code that lets you do interactive things quickly and esaily.

A JavaScript library is nice because different browsers (*cough* IE *cough*) do things differently and sometimes with weird effect. For example if you want to get the current year in javascript Firefox returns 2010, but IE returns 110. So you have to add 1900 to the number in IE. So you do browser tests, and add code just to find out the year. Yeah, then try to get the next or previous day or month or if it’s the last day of the month or if it’s the last day of the year… Snowballs quickly eh?

jQuery is nice because it’s base code with all that weirdness done for you. You just ask jQuery for the year and it does all the aggravating cross browser stuff automatically. As a disclosure, there are plenty of other JavaScript libraries out there. Yahoo! has one, Moo Tools, and plenty others. jQuery is just my flavor of choice.

That’s a simple example, but when you get into more complicated stuff like navigating the Document Object Model (divs, classes, ids, HTML elements) it starts getting super frustrating to deal with all the browsers. jQuery does all that for you.

To build on that, jQuery has tons and tons of code that does really complicated stuff so all you have to do is call the function. They break them up into modules called Plugins.

For example, making a calendar pop up when you click in a text box is a plugin.

You just download the plugin code, include it on your page, and call one line of JavaScript to make that text box open up a calendar when it’s clicked.

Usually plugins come with some css, some javascript, and a bit of documentation to tell you how to use it. But the takeaway is they do really powerful things, are extremely easy to use, and take infinitely less time to get going than writing the whole thing from scratch.

Some plugins are pretty awesome and graduate into core functionality. One example is jQueryUI. A collection of pretty useful plugins for User Interaction: http://jqueryui.com/demos/

Some examples: Drag and drop, resize, sorting unordered lists, carousel slideshows

That’s basically how it works. Now it’s just a matter of finding plugins that do cool stuff and sending on the link to your production guys to ask “can we make it work like this?”

Here are some good resources to get you started:

• jQuery User Interaction plugin: http://jqueryui.com/demos/
• other jQuery plugins (some interactive, some not) http://plugins.jquery.com/
• Ajax Rain – This includes a lot of other javascript libraries outside of jQuery, but for the most part cool things get spread out pretty wide: http://www.ajaxrain.com/tag?tag=jquery

So it’s always fun to see how big corporations or people use this stuff. Like Oprah with Skype, or the military with Google Earth.

One cool discovery I made was how Oracle was using Delicious. Basically they linked all their documentation and help files that they had on the web through Delicious bookmarks. The benefits seem pretty obvious: Tagging, descriptions, organization of their site. Seems like a great way to organize a lot of links and data, but extend the organization beyond a simple site map by using Delicious’s system for bookmarks.

All that to say I’m trying to follow in their footsteps.

I noticed that I had started to amass a good amount of WordPress links. Links to plugins, themes, official documentation, and articles that have turned out to be pretty useful. But only about half were uploaded to my Delicious account.

So I spent a bit of time organizing my links, and set up a “corporate” Delicious account. Right now it’s mostly WordPress, but I’m sure I’ll be updating with links to notable documentation on this site as well as other arenas.

So for the time being, take a look at my WordPress tagged links, I’m sure there are a few things you might find useful in there.

There’s a lot there, in fact there are 76 tricks to peruse. Most of it is somewhat technical as far as how to implement it, but I wanted to share because sometimes examples of what you can do with a tool gives you that “Aha!” moment to really add on some cool stuff to your own projects.

So peruse that list. Find some cool stuff to do, and know it can be done so you can ask for it.

One thing I think I may do with that list is show examples of how to use that added functionality in your own project. First up Meta Descriptions without a plugin. This is a pretty easy one, and you can see it in action on the LegalOut.com site that I set up in WordPress. Outside of just the meta description we set up several custom fields to display different content on different pages.

I’m definitely looking forward to pulling a lot of added functionality ideas from this list.

Easy to use and you can spit out awesome stuff pretty quickly and easily.

My latest conquest is drag and drop ordering. Basically what I wanted to do was have two lists. Then you can drag options from one list to the other, and order items within each list.

Here’s a demo of the drag and drop functionality in action

Originally I built this to use in a WordPress plugin I was writing. The point would be to give users some options and let them order the options they selected.

The nice part of this is what goes on behind the scenes. When a user moves an item around (either from one list to the other, or within the list itself to reorder things) the code fires off an ajax call and stores/updates the list in a database.

This is the pretty basic instance of this functionality though. The plugin comes with a lot of options that you can use to really customize the user experience.

Some other options you have is triggering an event (an alert, popup, changing colors on something, etc.) when a person selects an item, when they drop the item, when they put one item above or below another item (before or after they drop it there, warnings anyone?). It’s a nice way to give a lot of feedback to the user as they are interacting with the page and the lists.

And the effects don’t have to stop there. By re-ordering a list on one part of the page could effect layout or content or any other number of things on a page.

Recently did a quick job with a client to update some of their mailing lists.

In a nutshell they needed some custom data added for each contact. The data was created using an algorithm provided by the client, but relied on some unique information from each subscriber.

So the process in pseudocode:

1. Connect to Constant Contact’s API
2. Get all of the contacts in a specific list
3. For each contact get some of their information such as the user id, email address, etc.
4. Build a string based on this data
5. Update the contact’s information in Constant contact with this new data

Simple process, but a nice challenge.

Here are a few fun facts I learned:

• Constant Contact returns its contact data in paged lists. So you can’t just ask for all of the contacts in a specific list and get one result set. You have to ask for each page. Yay recursive-ness.
• There are limits to how many characters you can put in a field. Since the url that got built didn’t really fit logically in any of the provided fields I decided to use the custom fields CC provides. Fun fact: you can only put 50 characters in each custom field.
• From the sending side of things, Constant Contact only allows you to enter subscriber fields into an email if the email is XHTML. And you must have valid XHTML or no dice on even getting the email out of draft stage.

All in all it was a bit frustrating, but successful. Which adds up to a fun programming day. And I got this nice little code sample I can post for you guys which includes a PHP class provided by Constant Contact, and my own custom code to use that class to do stuff to subscribers in a list.

If you’re interested in the code you can check it out here: download Constant Contact Class and case use files

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

It’s a good read, and I found a lot of good points especially from the maker’s side of things.

Mostly he talks from the angle of meetings, but for me this goes for any type of interruption. Conference calls, emails, IMs, tweets, text messages, letter, anything.

Anyway, it’s a good reference, especially if you’ve called me and I’ve seemed a bit distracted on the phone ;)

I don’t know how we found her, but she was great. I mean she really earned her commission, answering our noob questions, finding great houses based on our wants/needs (and not based on her commission or what she wanted to sell). And there was a happy ending with us finding the house that fit us and our budget.

So of course when a friend started their house hunt we recommended her. She did a great job for us, and we knew she would do a great job for them as well. Which turned out to be true.

A few weeks back our realtor asked to take us out to dinner to thank us for the referral. Apparently that one referral had turned into 3 more listings and sales (one of which she was both the buyer and seller agent!) and led to a contact which got her out from under a terrible boss and under someone she really respected as a mentor!

Basically the one referral had taken her business to a whole new level.

And at dinner she kept saying thank you thank you thank you. And I kept saying that she was the one who did all the work. But without our referral she wouldn’t have gotten those leads. But without her hard work we wouldn’t have referred her.

It was round and round the whole dinner!

I don’t know if she ever got what I was saying but I made the realization later that just because you do great work doesn’t mean you will get a referral. And sometimes people who don’t really do great work get referrals. But when that combination of great work and a good referral happens it can be great.

Are you doing both great work that deserve great referrals and referring great work?

The main reason for all this detail was the massive amount of redundancy in the construction. Basically if you’re flying into enemy territory and start taking fire you don’t want a bullet or shell to hit the wire that links the joystick to the wings. Or any wire for that matter (turns out they’re all pretty important) . So you put the wire in a place that has the lowest percentage of being hit.

But there’s still a chance (even small) it could get disabled. And when millions of dollars of aircraft and at least one human life are at stake, you want to get as close to 0% as possible. So you add in another wire that does the same job in a different place. Just in case.

But there’s still a chance right? So you add another wire in another spot.

The end of the story is, there are several redundant wires, nuts, bolts, hardware, software, everything. All in different spots. All to back up the other. All to make sure that if one fails the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky.

And why not? If one little wire is the difference between life and death, and there’s room and time and money to put it in, why not?

Luckily Twitter does not work for the military

A less dire example (and the point of this rant) is Twitter. For me the twitter service is sketchy at best. I set it up to get the tweets from the people I want to hear the most directly on my phone. The rest I monitor through the web or rss.

It rarely works 100%.

Case in point, this morning I got an email from twitter about a direct message from someone I follow. It was about some potential work. Even though I have my account set up to send his tweets to my phone I never got the message that way. I went to my feed online (and rss) but since it was a direct message I didn’t see the notification there. Luckily I’m a big fan of redundancy so I have direct messages sent to my email. Crisis averted. And luckily so because the work that came from it looks to be a good gig, and has tons of upside for a future working relationship.

The question is, does your web site or application have that redundancy? If someone is trying to contact you, do you have fail safes in case one way doesn’t work? Will it lose you money if it fails? Do you give your users the opportunity to be paranoid, sometimes justly?

If not, maybe now is a good time to check out your processes and add in that extra wire.

Theme Options

Yeah it’s been around for a bit, and it’s probably just a baby step to writing full blown plugins, but I’m excited.

Mainly it gives me a way to extend a theme outside of the page/post level of things and get specific functionality available in the admin. My first foray on my latest project (from the killer design by Winters Interactive) is on the new incarnation of the  Ask a Bachelor site. In the header is a teaser for a question and answer article. Since this teaser didn’t necessarily coincide with a new blog post it needed to be somewhat removed from the post interface in the admin.

Enter theme options.

Theme options gave me a way to set up a new form that housed the data to be displayed in the header. It removed it from the post itself so gave the admin a little more control over what was displayed and how it was linked. Basically a form that had the three fields of the title, question, and link. All managed through the admin panel in WP. Pretty cool!

I found the handy how-to at NomeTech.com and can’t wait to work it in on more projects and expand the functionality a little bit as well.