SilentGap

Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names. » Read the rest of this entry «

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Through a little bit of research, I found a few Agencies / People who i thought were interesting that they were using twitter. Below are a few.

• http://twitter.com/CitySiouxFalls
• http://twitter.com/SenateFloor
• http://twitter.com/USAgov
• http://twitter.com/HouseFloor
• http://twitter.com/NRSC
• http://twitter.com/TheWhiteHouse
• https://twitter.com/Drudge_Report
• https://twitter.com/rushl (maybe rush limbaugh – not sure)

Can you think of anyone else?

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

So, at 5.30am I was trying to get my kid to fall back asleep (and my swaddling skill’s have yet to improve past the point where he doesn’t get one arm loose), and in the process found myself waking up, wandering over to check my email and my reader. In it was a post recommended by boagworld from A Beautiful Web titled “Time to stop showing clients static design visuals“

The post brings up a few good points, the first one being:

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

And as an example the post points the reader to http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2008/09/21/index.html.

I love the idea and agree with the author that a working mock up is extremely handy, and leaves a lot of un-answered questions, answered.

But for sites mock’s that are complicated or too time consuming to turn a static mock into a working build, how practical is this? And when the site requires some Ajax work, how far do you take it if the ajax has to integrate with a database?

Andy Clarke brings up some other good points about having a working mock up, read the full article at http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/time_to_stop_showing_clients_static_design_visuals/

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Jeff Atwood had a good post on protecting your site / blog from being hacked. » Read the rest of this entry «

Last weekend I read an article from Smashing Magazine on “How To Communicate Design Decisions to Clients?“

In it, Brian Armstrong lists out five points a persons should consider when creating a web design template for a client. After reviewing the list, I thought that they are a few good points for clients to review when looking to redo or restructure their site. Below, are the five points that Brian lists:

1. Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend!
2. Every design should have a measurable goal
3. Your site should have one clear path
4. Remember the swiss army knife
5. Provide performance metrics

What you, as the client, needs to know:

1. From the clients perspective, think about this point. Ask yourself – “What static’s do we currently have on our site?” “What is our site demographic?” “How many of the people visiting our site are returning visitors or new visitors?”

If you’ve thought, “I don’t want to implement anything new on our website until the new design is ready”, you’ve thought the wrong thing. Start collecting stat’s on your site, today! Many don’t want to pay for stats, but how can you tell what your ROI (Return On Investment) is if you don’t have a way to track, analyize or measure the results of your “message”. There are many services out there that are cheap and will give you more infomation then you know what to do with.

If you still don’t want to pay for stats, you can check with your hosting company. Many times they’ll have some sort of free built in stats available. If they don’t, Google Analytic’s or FeedBurner (for blogs) provides free services to start recording these stats. Just sign up for their account, and they’ll walk you through what you need to do.

2. Measurable Goal – Ask yourself – “What do I want to accomplish with this site?” Unfortunately, the answer “Attract more people” is not a very good one. Stop. Think. What do you really hope to accomplish with this site? If your thinking about your church site, maybe the answer could be “I hope to use our site as a social networking tool, so that the people under 35 at our church can stay connected with each other, and meet new new people who will encourage them to live for Jesus”. Now that’s an answer & a measurable goal.

What a client then can do is go back to the statistics they have in place and analyze the results to see how close they are to this goal. From there, they can talk with the designer and communicate with them the results and any ideas they may have to reach this goal.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

On July 31, an article was posted on ZDNet.com about some worms on the web, squirming there way through Facebook and MySpace. The actual method of attack seems to be through,… [long pause] … Social Enginering (which means, you’re curiosity get’s the best of you and someone tricks you into thinking you’re doing one thing, when you’re actually doing another).

Some of the messages and comments posted to the social network sites include:

- Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street
- Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet
- Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam
- Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others.

The messages and comments include links to a fake YouTube-like site. Clicking on the link redirects the targer to another YouTube clone fitted with a note to download the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player.

However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine; this file is also a network worm. Kaspersky said [from Kaspershy Lab's]its security suite detected the threats proactively and signatures were added to the database on July 31, 2008.

In short – don’t download anything unless you read the file name and know exactly what it does.

Original article can be found here

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

So I subscribe to a few of ZDNet’s newsletters & blogs, and in my inbox was a headline that said “AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010″. Naturally, being a developer myself, this peaked my interest. So I started reading. There were two subjects that really stood out to me. One subject dealing with the title, but another one that I’ve been hearing bit’s of rumors here and there, but wasn’t sure if it was true.

Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK said the following:

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

Which I’ve thought about often, how much more the current infrastructure (I.E. servers, backbone (internet cable and wires), organization of systems & protocols, etc) will be able to hold out as the user’s hunger for online video increases.

Think about it, the idea of renting video’s online & downloading it to play on your entertainment system of choice (Steve Job’s talked about this in one of his keynotes for a feature in the newly updated Apple TV), is good one. Not only that, but now you can watch YouTube Vid’s in Hi Def – or at least in it’s original uploaded quality (A whole different post for this guy).

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said.

Then comes the next subject that I was totally not expecting, but was glad he covered it. It’s in regards to “Net Neutrality”.

Net neutrality refers to an ongoing campaign calling for governments to legislate to prevent Internet service providers from charging content providers for prioritization of their traffic. The debate is more heated in the United States than in the United Kingdom because there is less competition between ISPs in the States.

Content creators argue that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers and keep all Internet traffic equal. Network operators and service providers argue that the Internet is already unequal, and certain types of traffic–VoIP, for example–require prioritization by default.

Meaning, there’s been increasing concern & even fear that the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – like Midco, Comcast, AT&T, etc.) will start limiting what can & can’t be viewed on the interent. Also that, these companies will give priority to larger companies – over the little guys. Even some rumors say that the internet will become like the TV / Cable system of today. You have your basic free service, your basic cable, your upgraded cable, your Hi Def cable and then satalite or anything else out there – only it will be for the internet

Personally, I’ll have to wait and see, i think some of these rumor’s are nothing to worry about, but there is not doubt, there will have to be a change in the way the internet works with the increase demand for user content.

~tim

ZDNet’s full article can be viewed at http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6237715.html?tag=nl.e550

.