Archive for the ‘Under the Hood’ Category
Redundancy: Good Things Come In (at least) Twos [February 25th, 2009]
A large part of the work NewCity does deals with the conception, organization and construction of websites. In all aspects of this process, short of a repeal of Murphy’s Law, redundancy is something that cannot be ignored. In truth, that’s a great rule of thumb for anything computer-related.
Consider that virtual pile of digital photos that [...]
Developing in CakePHP [February 4th, 2009]
Over the last year or so, NCM has begun utilizing a tool called CakePHP to build some of its websites. CakePHP is a PHP-based flexible framework which allows developers to quickly build web applications in a manner similar to Ruby on Rails. It has a large, very active community and is based on free, open [...]
Skoolpool cool – Facebook connection for students & colleges [July 25th, 2008]
I traveled to Eduweb 2008 this week in Atlantic City (Pamela Michael of Imperial College London and I gave a presentation) and saw some cool new ideas for higher education and the web. One of those is SkoolPool. It’s a Facebook application that allows:
Colleges to create profile pages within Facebook, and
Students to create lists of [...]
Lessons learned from Imperial College London [March 6th, 2008]
Jeannine Everhart and I traveled to London in early February to meet with Imperial College London for an end-of-project review. We met with the entire web team and went through all aspects of the project including feedback from students and staff, analytics, review of project objectives and a discussion of lessons learned.
Foley Fun [August 20th, 2007]
Creating Sounds for Tweetsie Memories
Sound on the web is a tricky thing. We’ve all seen, heard actually, gratuitous flash sound effects or techno music that make us reach for the mute button. But sometimes a piece of interactivity really benefits from sound.
Our team recently finished a new feature for the Tweetsie site, called Tweetsie [...]