Responsive Design Themes are beginning to show up in larger numbers. 

Ahmed Esam – @drtemon
Good Minimal A Responsive WordPress Theme. #wordpress http://t.co/tj017Vr9

As responsive design continues to move into the mainstream, we’re going to be seeing a lot of themes pop up with responsive design characteristics built in. The Good Minimal theme’s menu breaks down at one point in the page width adjustments, but it’s a good example of what’s to come in this area. What are your favorite themes that have responsive design built in?

Dre Armeda on WordPress Security

bkmacdaddy designs – @bkmacdaddy
#WordPress End-User Security by Dre Armeda – http://t.co/iOvaLm0g

Dre Armeda is our favorite WordPress security expert. If you’ve never seen one of his security presentations, here’s a chance to see him in action online. Even if you have seen his presentation before, chances are you’re not doing everything he suggests, so watch it again.

WordPress 3.3 is on its way

beAutomated – @beAutomated
As of today, we are a steamroller paving the way to WordPress 3.3 launch http://t.co/m9qixnCw #web #cms #WordPress

Yes, WordPress 3.3 is on the way. For those of us lucky enough to have been given indepth tours and insight into coming features, the update is eagerly awaited. This is a great post by Jane Wells, and she rightly comments, “For the people working on the release, most of whom run trunk on their own sites for at least a month or two (if not longer) before each launch, it’s easy to forget that features we had done months ago — flyout menus, drag and drop uploading — are still being hoarded by us (and more recently by the lucky recipients of a merge onto wordpress.com) and are not available on the sites of regular users.” This kind of sentiment is what makes the WordPress community and platform so great. We at Zeek are proud to be a part of it.

And some thoughts from Mashable on important 3.3 features:

dean guadagni – @deansguide
Do you use #wordpress for your business? http://t.co/1mrtmIUZ v. 3.3′s 11 most important features

Resist the urge to take shortcuts

Todd Carpenter – @tcar
How ghetto is it to use an HTML table to format a WordPress Page? #idontwanttowriteacutompagetemplate cc @housechick @zengy @ReggieRPR

The answer, and I know that Mr. Carpenter knows this, is yes, and it’s also just a bad practice. “The problem with using HTML tables,” according to Steve Zehngut, “is that page sizes are much larger, the tables often take longer to load and by using tables, you’re not really future proofing your site. In addition divs are simply more SEO friendly.”

And A New Feature in Jetpack 1.2 – Email Subscriptions

beAutomated – @beAutomated
How to use Email Subscriptions in Jetpack 1.2 http://t.co/qqMB8es3 #WordPress #Automattic #Jetpact #Email #Subscriptions

According to Automattic, “All features in Jetpack 1.2 are on by default. So subscriptions, like all other features in Jetpack, requires no magic to activate. Visitors to your blog can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they have already commented on.”

Where will the email subscription links appears on your blog? ”Two places. One is on by default, the other you have to activate manually. By default, you will see two new checkboxes on every blog post, at the bottom of the comments form. To add the Subscriptions Widget to your sidebar, go to your Dashboard. Then click on Widgets. You will see a widget called ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’. Click on it, and drag it to the sidebar on the right.”

This conversation will cover the following:

• Setting client expectations throughout the software development process.
• Asking questions that help eliminate unnecessary work.
• Executing a Statement of Work (SOW): why it is mandatory and what goes in.
• Eliminating small problems before they become big problems.
• Putting yourself in your client’s shoes when building a website.
• Getting clients and (more importantly) keeping clients.

What qualifies me to speak on this topic? Over Zeek’s 16 years in business, we have enjoyed long-term relationships with several great clients. And we do this by being honest and open with our strengths as well as our limitations. There are no secrets that we keep from our clients and we make it clear what they are getting into at the start of the working relationship. We have realized over time that this is a key differentiator between Zeek and other developers. Both developers and clients will benefit from the session.

I need votes! Please click the “thumbs up” button now on this page: http://bit.ly/oIDGeU

Gahlord Dewald clued me in on this one. He knows how much I desire to listen and we have shared a common listening strategy for years. We try to listen to help. Gahlord likes to look for “the special hashtag people use when looking to be helped.” It’s called a question mark. And it’s a powerful hashtag indeed.

The folks at inboxQ understand this: “We started InboxQ because we realized that there were lots of questions being asked by people on Twitter but most weren’t receiving very useful answers. In fact, most questions go completely unanswered on Twitter.” And that’s a fact.

What inboxQ does is find that special hashtag for you. Pop in a few keywords and inboxQ begins scouring twitter, looking for people you can assist. Your first step is to create what they call “campaigns.”

A campaign is simply a category of keywords or hashtags used to delineate possible questions to be answered. You can create as many campaigns as you wish. The campaign opened for view above is called “wordpress.” And I’ve been using the inboxQ Chrome extension to answer questions using the Zeek Interactive account on Twitter for a few days now.

It  has been uncovering 20-30 questions each day.

You can answer the questions right in the extension’s window, without having to fire up Twitter or any of their third party apps, as you can see above. Of course, you can also see that I could be a bit more diligent about opening up the extension. Questions, after all, are best answered when someone is around to listen. Though, my results have been pretty good so far, even without constant attention.

Blog Post Fodder

Another thing the questions are good for is blog post ideas. I’m using the “TODO” tab to save questions I feel require more than 140 characters. Like these:

After a few days, the results have been very positive. I’ve been able to answer a few questions and create some good dialogue around WordPress, conversations we want to take part in. I’m not answering the question with any other desire than to help. But sometimes the questions open up an opportunity to talk about what we do as well. Witness this exchange:

I didn’t know James Hicks before I saw his question. And I know I would never have seen his question before inboxQ. I have no idea where it will lead, but I already consider the minute (total) I spent on it valuable. I hope James does as well.

What’s missing from inboxQ?

It does what it says it does really well, so there are only two things I’d really like to see added. First, the ability to add multiple accounts. I’d like to use the tool for other Twitter accounts I monitor, but it only allows for one account to be connected at a time right now. I can’t imagine this isn’t part of their future development strategy. Second, I’d like them to charge for it. I’m tired of seeing services like this drop off the map because they don’t have a way of making money. I’d pay for this one.

What kind of “listening to help” campaigns would you create?

And make no mistake about it, we’re cats. Self-herding is not in our nature. We need help. Luckily, we’ve found it. We are happy to announce a new member is joining our team – Kelley Koehler, aka @housechick.

While Kelley is best known for her work as a REALTOR® in Tucson, Arizona, and as a nationally recognized real estate blogger, she has always thought of herself as “just a geek in realtor clothing.” And for good reason.

She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Arizona, Tucson with a degree in Systems and Sofware Engineering and immediately moved into the tech space as a Systems Engineer at Siemens/Gardner Transportation Systems. In her duties at Gardner Systems, Kelley was responsible for the creation, implementation, and maintenance of quality control and testing for the company’s various software systems. She was also Co-Owner of Applied Real Estate Technology, where she helped develop and market a cutting-edge IDX solution with an indexable WordPress aspect. She is a member of the advisory board for the Social Media Marketing Institute and is a highly regarded speaker on topics related to optimizing lead-generating websites and social media profiles to drive sales.

We are honored to have her join our team. At Zeek, she will combine her sales and marketing background with her passion for all things geek to help us better serve our clients and insure that every product we create is delivered with the highest level of testing and quality control.

She will be moving from Tucson to Southern California to join us full time in early April. We can’t wait!

___________________________________________
edit: from Kelley: “Making The Next Leap”
edit2: from Jay: “Bidding A Fond Farewell“

Lesson for today? Don’t judge too soon.

I commented on the drive for CNN on Showbiz Tonight (above) and said I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that they wouldn’t raise the money. But I was also asked a question that didn’t end up in the commentary. The question was whose followers do you think will have the greatest impact on the campaign. The answer to that question requires a bit more analysis.

Big Number Don’t Necessarily Translate To Big Engagement

My response was that big numbers don’t necessarily translate into big engagement. I cited the difference between Justin Timberlake and User as an example. Justin Timberlake has roughly 3.5 Million followers on Twitter, compared to Usher’s almost 1 Million. But when you look at their Klout numbers, Usher’s engagement with his smaller audience creates between 5 to 7 times the number of retweets and mentions as Timberlake’s engagement. The differences between their Facebook fan pages is fairly stark as well. When you read the status updates from each. Usher tends to be more conversational in the updates to his 10 million Facebook fans, while Timberlake’s 5 million fans get what feels more like a series of press releases.

The success of this charity endeavor would seem to fall on whether their fans were truly engaged and whether NOT being able to use their social media channels would hinder their ability to raise the funds.

In truth, the accounts are not really dead. They’re mostly dead. The various Twitter accounts have continued to put out sporadic messages, like this tweet from Alicia Keys, “@aliciakeys – is dead but Elizabeth & her sone are alive thannks to KCS http://bit.ly/1Z5t7P Text ALICIA to 90999 & reply YES to give $10.”

At the time of this writing, two days into the campaign, they have raised $183,603. More than half of that was raised on the first day. At this current pace, the $1 Million goal won’t be hit until after Christmas. Will they really refrain from using those channels for anything but the sporadic updates to reach the goal until then?

Annette Gallagher, a Facebook friend, had this to say about their absence this morning: “I think the pics and such may have creeped out some potential donors, as well as the “stunt” aura around the whole thing. It is a fantastic charity though, and hey, I won’t complain if it takes Ms. Kardashian a little time to get back on the internets. ”

It’s the last part of that comment that I’ve heard several times, “I wouldn’t mind if (fill in the blank) stopped tweeting. Others have chimed in with their thoughts as well, and they all lean toward, “I don’t really care if they stop.” This falls in line with a post this morning about four social media myths that fooled marketers… one of them being that “Twitter’s success hinges on celebrities.” I never personally bought into that one, and the truth of that becomes clearer every day. Personally, I hope they get to the $1 Million goal quickly. It’s a great cause.

What’s your take? How do you think this campaign will fair and how influential do you believe celebrities are in the social media space?

According to the Fourtrace website, “Fourtrace is a research project in “Advanced topics in Computer Networking” at University of California, Santa Barbara. Our goal is to find out if it’s possible to predict where a user is at a given time.”

The site uses only the public Foursquare check-ins found on Twitter, so it is limited to only what Foursquare users choose to share. However, even those who limit their public sharing have the potential to display predictable patterns of behavior. Over a long enough period of time, even small amounts of sharing begin to add up. How could it the information be used? Time will tell.

“We want to make sure you see important Tweets even when you’re not looking at Twitter at the moment. To help with that, today we’re launching push notifications for @mentions.”

TWEXT.ME?

Since this is essentially why we created Twext.me for Ben Martin, we will be evaluating what to do with Twext.me in the next 24 hours. For those of you with one Twitter account, we’d advise switching away from Twext.me immediately. The mentions notifications are sent almost instantaneously.

To set up your Twitter account to notify you via SMS when you get mentioned, go to your settings on Twitter, select Mobile and tell it how you want it to act. The illustration to the right shows you the setting for having all mentions from anyone sent to your phone.

Note: Twitter will only allow one account to be associated with a phone number. So if you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can only have mentions sent to a single phone number from one of those accounts.

My iPhone has become my main camera.

It’s not because the quality of the camera is so amazing, thought it’s certainly not bad. It’s because of the applications available to edit photos and create effects on the fly. I’m particularly fond of the analog camera simulation apps like Hipstamatic, PictureShow, Lo-Mob, Plastic Bullet and Infinicam. But I love AutoStitch, You Gotta See This! and Pro HDR as well. Each one, individually, has it’s place in my photo arsenal. And I post photos to my main photo blog, In The Viewfinder, almost exclusively using edited iPhone photos.

But one of my favorite things to do is use the apps in combination. And I may be doing it in ways the creators never envisioned, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite ways to combine apps. The photo to the right is a photo of a sunflower straight from the iPhone without having been processed through any app.

Infinicam + Pro HDR

For this example, I used two photos manipulated using Infinicam. I then combined those images in two different orders in Pro HDR. I have used this technique with exports from Plastic Bullet and PictureShow as the starting point as well.  Here’s a finished example from two different Plastic Bullet exports combined using Pro HDR – Rush Hour.

Pro HDR is my favorite HDR app for the iPhone, and I use it a great deal in the way it was intended to be used. However, using the “Library HDR” option from the main menu of the app, you can force it to process any two photos of the same size. Your results will change based on which photo you choose as the “darker” image and which photo you choose as the “lighter” image. Example:

The results can change dramatically when you simply choose the alternate photo to begin the process.

There is no way to predict what the end result will be, but that’s the beauty of this process. I love the surprise of a beautifully random and unexpected combination. You may prefer the first result above. I preferred the second and published that photo to my photo blog. All of the original files can be seen at full size in this Flickr photo set -  Using Pro HDR To Create Interesting Effects.

Give this simple technique a shot on some of your photos and be sure to come back and put a link to your results in the comments. I’d love to see them.

We are currently working on the new website for Flashback Heart Attack, a fantastic local 80s cover band. As a part of the site, I wanted to build an 80s music playlist and embed it as a sidebar widget into their new site.

I’ve used Blip.fm in the past as a “Be Your Own DJ” type of service. Lately, however, Blip.fm just isn’t cutting it. Most of the songs I search for either aren’t available or I get some obscure version of the song. When I do find songs that I want to blip, they’re usually the YouTube video and the sound quality is typically terrible.

I asked my Facebook friends for a recommendation and they turned me on to GrooveShark. I’m totally blown away by this site! It is everything Blip.fm should have been and more. I highly recommend that you give it a spin.

Most of the songs I searched for were available and they were all high quality versions. For the few I didn’t find, I uploaded my own mp3 files to the library quickly. I created a playlist called “80s” and then added each of the songs I wanted into that list. Once I had the list the way I liked it, I clicked on the share link (under “options”) and created this widget.

The interface is simple and the whole site is very easy to use. I am not sure if any of this is legal or not, but it sure is fun! Enjoy!

The universally accepted “send an update to Twitter using the headline via the one allowed account tied to my blog when I hit publish” option just ain’t cutting it for me anymore.

Can we be smarter about this? A headline is not always the best status update message. I may want to hit publish and send a message out to Twitter or Facebook at a later time or to each one at different times. I may want to make sure a second or third update gets sent out later in the day or the following week. I might want those to highlight the post from a different angle.

And I’d like to do all of those things at the same time that I’m writing the post, so I don’t have to think about it or remember to do it later. Let me choose from several different Twitter accounts. Let me publish to those different Twitter accounts at different times, with different messages, suited for their specific audiences. Is this too much to ask?

One more thing… add this same functionality to the Press This bookmarklet. This would make me happy. For now.

If you know of a plug-in that will make this happen right now, let me know.

Sorry for the tone, but that just seems ridiculously obvious to me.

So I read the article, then posted a tweet with as much sarcasm as I could fit into 140 characters, and headed to the gym. Since I’ve been trying to give Foursquare another shot (blame Brian Copeland), I dutifully checked in to my LA Fitness and noticed that there were three tips for that venue. I had never bothered to check them out before.

Imagine how thrilled I was to see the second tip from a local loan officer. “Almost 50% of the Santa Clarita Valley is upside down on their mortgage. Go to www.blahblahblah.com for more information.” Apparently he thought the name of the place was LA Financial Fitness.

Things that are “ridiculously obvious” to me seem to elude some people. Clearly this well-intentioned guy thinks dropping his ads all over Foursquare is a perfectly good way to use social media. Or perhaps he realized it was silly and tried to cover it up by posting the incredibly helpful, “Guys, rack your weights when you’re done.” Thanks. Good tip.

My reaction to this is the same one I’d have to someone pissing in my pool: You picked the wrong place and the wrong time. And now you’ve ruined the water for everyone.

I showed this to a friend a bit later, someone who is not a Foursquare user, and they had a similar reaction.  Their immediate comment was something to the effect of, “That would turn me off to the whole service.” I think that’s a fair reaction.

Context. Context. Context.

Had this tip been on a bank, or his office, or a house with a foreclosure sign in the front yard, then I might have had a different reaction. The context would have been more appropriate. Heck, I might have actually clicked on his link. Context matters. Always has. Always will.

Phoster is a cool app.

Phoster is an incredibly easy to use iPhone application that walks you, step-by-step, through the process of creating and editing visually appealing posters and invitation graphics. The app comes with 37 free and easy to edit poster designs. You can change the position, size, brightness, contrast and saturation of the photo in the design, font style and color. The poster text is edited, in position, which I love. I think it’s worth the $1.99 price.

Here are some screen captures to give you a sense of how it works. The last three images in the gallery below are examples of final output. Click on the images to view them at their full 1086 x 1536 size.

A few months ago we were approached to build a Facebook app that would collect data about the conversations taking place in a persons personal Facebook stream. The goal of the app was to help someone identify who they were having conversations with and who they were not. It would alert the user to communicate with someone if they hadn’t poked, commented, like or messaged them in a period of days or months. It was something we had talked about internally and at conferences many times, so we set out to create it.

Not so fast. I’ll reserve comment on the sketchy documentation in the Facebook API, that only slowed the process. But after several attempts, it quickly became apparent that Facebook was purposefully limiting access to certain actions in the personal stream. We could not track, for example, we could not successfully pull back the correct number of “likes” on videos and photos. And we found this reported by many in the developer forums. While those are seemingly insignificant actions, the simple press of a button, not being able to get to that kind of data made creating an accurate picture of interaction impossible. So we stopped trying.

Listening As A Strategy

I’ve been speaking a great deal recently at various conferences about listening in the social media space and writing about the need for better listening tools. I try to make the best use of what’s available. Example: I use Facebook’s friends list feature extensively. It helps me segment conversations and listen with intent. When I ask audiences if they use it, the vast majority answer “no.” Mark Zuckerberg confirms my anecdotal findings in the video below.

Tell me who my friends really are.

Last week I spoke in Virginia and related our Facebook app story to the audience. I said at that time that an effective form of social CRM would be a killer app. In truth, no matter how many “friends” you have on Facebook, you only communicate with a small subset of those friends. Who do I pay the most attention to? Who pays the most attention to me? Who pays no attention to me at all? This is valuable information, especially if I’m attempting to be somewhat purposeful in my networking.

The value of identifying the connections in the social graph has not been lost on the Facebook team. They want to control the social graph. They’ve been mapping our conversations without the limitations of their API all along and have created “an index for each relationship.” And they are now ready to tell us who our friends really are.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing what they’ve come up with, whether I like it or not. Are you?

With all due respect, Ira, I’m not worthy. Kevin Kelly, the author, is an obviously gifted writer and dedicated to the education of his children in a way that I’ve never, ever dreamed. And while he calls the type of home schooling they did “nothing special,” I’m in awe of the efforts put forth on behalf of his sons. In addition, there were nuggets embedded in the article, like the mention of the Khan Academy, that were eye opening and timely.

Technological Literacy

In reflecting on the fact that his son’s “eventual adult career does not exist yet,” Kelly explained the “technological smartness” he attempted to impart during his home schooling. What he wrote is some of the best advice about technology I’ve ever read. Here are Kevin Kelly’s thoughts:

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything you need until the last second. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete.
• Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.
• Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix it, modify it or hack it yourself, that is a good sign.
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Every technology is biased by its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. The crucial question is, what happens when everyone has one?
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.
• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

I was moved by this article. And humbled to be associated with it in any way.

This BBC video above questions the benefits of how Starbucks is engaging with its 14 million Facebook “friends.”

My favorite segment: reporter, Rory Cellan-Jones asks, “Aren’t companies which try to engage with their customers on social networks almost as sad as people who obsess about how many Facebook friends they have?” “People become absolutely transfixed by this stuff,” says Lucy Kellaway of The Financial Times. “Just as people who monitor their own reputation on Google. And what are they really learning about their business that they couldn’t learn better from actually looking at the business itself, rather than looking at the second order thing of what people actually think about it?”

Both are interesting questions, for many reasons. I think some balance is in order. What do you think?

In fact, I think the folks who built it are evil geniuses who probably sold their collective souls to the devil to be able to magically identify just about any song from a few seconds of sound sent streaming over the wireless internet while traveling at 70 miles per hour down the freeway, or even standing still.

But I don’t like their social sharing interface. Truth be told, I don’t like the social sharing interface for most apps. They too often force their thinly veiled sales pitches into the messages, either by brute force, not giving users the option to edit, or by hoping we’ll be too lazy to delete their suggested messages.

“Just used #SoundHound to find…” is a waste of precious Twitter characters in my opinion. That fact will be obvious to anyone who clicks on the link, since it will take them to a SoundHound song sample. And their brand message is not the message I want to send. If I’m sharing a song I’ve just heard on the radio, for example, I’m doing it because I like it, and want to lead others to it.

Give me more control. What I’d really like is for app creators to give me some options in the application preferences. In the example to the right, let me set my own default prefix for the song, artist and link. Let me choose my own #hashtag if I want. And let that be my new default message format. It would be a simple enough change to make and I, for one, would use SoundHound more often if I didn’t have to take the extra time to select and delete their advertising copy on every use.

Pandora makes a similar mistake with their web service. I’m assuming they’d both like people to use the sharing features or they wouldn’t put them there. If I could set my own default message, or get rid of theirs, at a minimum, I would probably play a larger role in leading people to their services. But I can’t, so I don’t. I gotta believe I’m not alone here.

Give me control. Give me a choice. I’ll share more. How about you?

“Formulists is a list creation and management tool that allows users to effortlessly generate dynamic and personalized Twitter lists that continuously self-update.” You select from a menu of pre-sorted filters that you edit and customize to meet your needs. The resulting Twitter lists generated by the service are then updated from daily to every few days. I’m looking forward to using my newly created “people I recently followed” list.

I’m a huge fan of intelligent listening tools. If this works as advertised, it definitely falls into the smart category. Here’s a screencast to show you how it works.

I did tests using their new “automatic” modes first. On both apps, this mode selects the light and dark extremes of the dynamic range automatically, True HDR taking three photos and Pro HDR taking two photos. But I quickly realized the only way to get a true comparison was to use the exact same base images in manual mode. So, the two images below were used to produce the comparison shots I’m sharing here today.

True HDR

First I fed the two images above into the True HDR app. The app took 26.5 seconds to process the two images and returned the 2496 x 1856 pixel image you see below. Click on the image to view it at actual size.

Pro HDR

I then fed the base images into the Pro HDR iphone app. The app took just 8.4 seconds to process the two images and returned the 2590 x 1933 pixel image shown below. Click on the image to view it at actual size.

I’ll be sticking with the Pro HDR app.

In every test I performed, including the test shown above, the Pro HDR app produced better results than the True HDR app. This was true regardless of which process I chose, including the automated processes. There seemed to be no advantage at all to the three photos used in the automated process that True HDR uses compared to the two photo process used by Pro HDR.

In addition, the difference in the time it took to process each image was dramatic, and surprising. The True HDR app took three times longer to process it’s final images. It also returned an image almost 100 pixels narrower than the original photos and the Pro HDR app.

The ability to control brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and tint before saving out the final image gives the Pro HDR app an additional advantage. There is no ability to adjust photo settings in the True HDR. As a result, there is also no way to save various versions of a processed photo to see how one compares to another at full resolution.

Of course, your results may vary. I’d love to hear from other’s who’ve done comparisons of the Pro HDR and True HDR iPhone apps.

The “Guru”

Turns out this “guru” trainer was not even paying attention to his client. He was having a ridiculous, loud conversation with someone else while his client was busy acting like she was working out. He was paying only casual attention to his client and when he did, his instructions were cliche, at best. None of his instructions were specific to his clients needs. Not a single one. He was loud, exuded cockiness and was doing absolutely nothing to help his client.

The Pretender

The client’s form was horrid and her level of intensity was below average at best. But there she was, paying a trainer to get her in shape. She wasn’t saying much. She wasn’t working hard. She was just going through the motions. I’m sure she left feeling like she had accomplished something. Perhaps she did, but not nearly what she could have. The same was true of the lady holding the attention of the “guru.” She was there, but her mouth was moving more than any other part of her body. They will probably both tell people they had a “great” workout today. They didn’t.

The Inspiration

To our left was a woman singularly focused on one of the most amazing yoga/gymnastics/core strength workouts I’ve ever witnessed. And I’m not overstating this. I wish I could have videotaped it. She was working out in a way that made me feel honored to be in the same room with her. Both Rocky and I engaged her and she politely engaged us back, never once breaking form or altering her workout. It was a thing of beauty. Her actions and her polite engagement around her workout  inspired me to work harder.

Universal Social Truth: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The small, glass room we were working out in this morning contained about 15 people. We were, in that moment, a very small, very open social network. People from outside our network could see us and choose to come in, or not.  Inside the room, everyone could hear everyone else. We were free to engage or not engage as we saw fit. In that setting, I desperately wanted to mute the “guru” and his chatty pretender. I desperately wanted to go save his client. I couldn’t do either in a socially acceptable way.

I also desperately wanted to be better as a result of watching this one woman display a level of commitment to her workout that was truly amazing. I know many who passed by outside the room felt the same way. I would have gladly paid her to be MY trainer. I would seek her out, without her having to ask. Her public actions were harder to ignore than the loud banter of the the “guru” and the pretenders. And they spoke volumes about her knowledge and her character.

As you move through your social networks, which person are you?

So my initial tweets this morning reflected my reaction to the quick test above. This also prompted @big_eyebrows to send me a link to Gizmodo’s post on improving your iphone HDR photos. I appreciated the link, but Gizmodo’s post was really about making any HDR photo better and didn’t address the iPhone specifically, in my opinion. Their suggestions, hold still, focus, make sure the photo is HDR worthy and play around, are all good, but these rules apply to all HDR photo apps.

The Real Key To Better iPhone HDR Photos

So, as I was stopped at a traffic light on my way to the gym, I decided to see whether or not initial exposure had any impact on the iPhone HDR.

As you can see from this first test, letting the iPhone find it’s own automatic exposure produces an entirely different final HDR than forcing the camera to focus on the darkest portion of the image, the dashboard. So, I decided to try a few more tests. In each case, initial exposure had a definite impact on the final HDR.

In the test above, using the default focus didn’t produced and extremely underwhelming HDR. But both focusing on the darkest and lightest areas produce better results. In this case, the top example, focused on the darkest area, still left the windows overexposed. Again, focusing on the brightest area created a completley different result.

In the next example, focusing on the darkest area created the best HDR result.

All of the hints given in the Gizmodo article are good, but if you really want to make a difference in your iPhone HDR photos, the tests above seem to indicate that your initial exposure focus will have the most dramatic impact. Learning what settings require which initial focus will result in better HDR results from the iOS 4.1 update.

Let me know what your tests show.

Our very own Steve Zehngut has a presentation up for consideration at SXSW Interactive this year and we’d love to have it chosen.

Steve’s presentation focuses on breaking down the communication barriers that can make working with a developer more difficult than it needs to be. The presentation will cover Interviewing Your Potential Developer, Planning & Project Managment, Using A Version Control System, and Bug Reporting. The session will give the audience a reality check on how to go about working with a developer to get a custom WordPress site (or any digital project) built on time and on budget.

Questions Answered

• What questions should I ask when interviewing a developer?
• What are the communication pitfalls that I should avoid?
• How can clients get involved in project management?
• What is version control and how does it benefit me?
• What is the best way to handle bug reporting?

So, help  Steve out. Click Here To Vote

Of course, I could make excuses and say that this visual clutter is the reason for my consistent lack of consistency in writing here. But I won’t.  Those are demons to exorcise another day. Suffice it to say, we need to eat our own dog food and stop putting our site last on our development list.

So, today I submitted my ideas for how the site should be organized to our designer. I must have changed these wireframes 20 times over the past few weeks, but I think I’ve finally settled on something that will remove the clutter, get us focused and make Steve and the rest of the team happy at the same time.

For those who want to play along, I thought I’d share parts of the process with you. The first step – wireframes. For those who are unfamiliar, a wireframe is “a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.” A designer (in this case, our designer, Kiran) uses this basic visual guide to direct her efforts when laying out her interpretation of the graphic elements. What she delivers back are three or four beautiful graphics that are based on this UI direction.

The graphics in this post represent the home page and one inside page structure and were created using Omnigraffle. I hope you enjoying taking a look into the process. I’ll be back when I’ve got some comps to share.

While there is cognitive recognition of this by most of the clients we work with, this is not a concept that is quickly internalized. In the early phases of many projects, we find that even the most sophisticated and educated of clients find themselves distracted by the lure of pretty graphics way too early in the process. When bidding on projects this is particularly true. A heavy emphasis is placed on visual design and the critical  issues of function, how the site is built, special software requirements, and where and how the site will be hosted often take a back seat.

The most creative aspects of site design are often unable to be seen in the browser.

Creative design is subjective. Whether a site can handle a traffic spike created by a link from a highly influential website, like The Drudge Report is not. The design of the hosting services, the architecture of the content management system, and the way different pieces of software work together to insure that a site stays up and working can and should be as as creative as the visual design.

One of the mistakes we see a lot of clients make is basing the decision about what company should build their site on the look of the visuals in a portfolio. If impressive visual design is not backed up by equally impressive programming skills and system knowledge, your project may look good and not function in a way that supports your business objectives.

Design plays an important role in whether a site will be used properly by those who visit it, this is a fact. Great visual design makes a site simple to navigate and leads the visitor to the pages you want them to spend time on. But it is just one of the factors you should be considering when choosing your site developer.

Here are some other factors you should consider.

• When your developer describes your project, are they leading the technology brainstorming or merely reacting to features that you have requested?
• Are they using a home baked platform to build your website? If so, this may lock you in to working with that developer to make what would be minor changes with someone else.
• What open source platforms is your developer familiar with?
• How involved is your developer in the open source community?
• What kinds of “pet” projects is your developer working on?
• Is your developer showing you multiple possibilities to help achieve your goals?
• Is your developer sought out for their opinions?
• What associations is your developer actively taking part in?
• What conferences do they attend?

Feel free to add to our list in your comments.

Greg Meyer, from Gist, does not. We received this in the mail today. It was a followup to our face-to-face meeting at Buzzre Portland and conversations about their upcoming API release. We’ve had several digital conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, email and even a GoToMeeting session, but in the midst of all that, this handwritten note stands out. It cuts through the noise like a knife.

We now have “design a card we can use to send handwritten notes” on our to do list. Thanks, Greg.