Archive for July, 2005
July 28, 2005
Architecting CSS Files
Here is a nice article in Digital Web Magazine on Architecting CSS.
With nearly ubiquitous standards support among modern browsers, we’re turning to CSS to handle presentational heavy lifting more than ever. The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex CSS files become. These files bring with them a few maintenance and organizational challenges.
Gone are the days of creating a single CSS file and dropping in rules as needed. As we build new sites, it is necessary to spend time planning how to organize and structure CSS.
Following the tips in this article should save you quite a bit of time during initial design and when going back to revise later.
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July 20, 2005
Crawling Robots!
Search Engine World did a crawl recently of 75k robots.txt files. (robots.txt files contain instructions for search engines that index your site. You can use them to prevent search engines from indexing certain directories, blocking specific search engines, etc.) They report on their findings of common errors made in the files.
The worst robots.txt error I ever saw was for a site whose owners complained that they never showed up in google search results. I took a peek at their robots.txt file and sure enough someone had set it to disallow all search engines. Oops! This was probably a leftover from when the site was in development. Have you checked your robots.txt file recently?
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July 20, 2005
Google Moon
Google has launched Google Moon in honor of the Apollo landings. This uses the same interface as their excellent Google Maps. Be sure to zoom in all the way to learn exactly what the moon is made of.
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July 19, 2005
ASAE’s Annual Meeting Event Blog
I am participating in ASAE’s Annual Meeting Event blog, which just launched yesterday. My first post there is about a Flickr group we have set up for attendees to use to share photos they take during the event. If you are an association person (or want to be!) I suggest subscribing to this blog to see what is going on at the meeting.
Sue complained about the title of the blog (which is “XtremeASAE Blog”). I have to agree that the X theme is a bit tired these days but, as Jeff pointed out in a comment on Sue’s post, we’re just going with the theme established for the meeting. Rumors of bungee jumping from the top of the Opryland glass dome have no basis in fact whatsoever.
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July 19, 2005
Public Relationships
David Weinberger makes an interesting point about the nature of the change that is impacting public relations:
Now I think PR is entering a phase where it sees itself as helping companies with their public relationships. (”Public Relationships — Adding hips to public relations”?) I first heard this term at EdelmanPR (disclosure: to whom I’m a consultant), but I don’t know who coined it. I find the phrase useful because it asserts a connection to traditional PR while pointing to a new dominant possibility. It implies, in line with Tim’s thinking, that PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there’s persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.
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July 15, 2005
Association Entrepreneurship
Kevin Holland is continuing a thread of discussion he started a while back about how associations can easily be disrupted by a start-up who uses newly cheap relationship-facilitating technology to do better what you used to need a national infrastructure to do.
The tools available to associations now — open source! affordable! surprisingly powerful! — are overwhelming compared to the options we had ten (or five) years ago. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how many are actually taking advantage of them. I still see a lot of associations who think of technology as “the database” (and maybe “the website”) being run by “membership” or “IT.”
What a dangerous error and huge lost opportunity. You wanna compete in a world where anybody can raise $100k and start competing with you, then realize that it’s not about managing data. It’s not even about managing relationships. It’s about being managed by relationships.
I totally agree with his premise. And I don’t think it would take $100k in most cases either. In fact, this very topic will form the basis of a scenario I am preparing for a session at the ASAE Annual Meeting next month. The session is titled “Missing Conversations” and is scheduled for Saturday August 13 at 3:30 p.m.
A related idea I came across recently was an essay by Paul Graham called Hiring is Obsolete. He says that the best way to get hired at big internet companies these days is to create your own start-up and prove the value of your ideas. If you have good ideas and can execute then you have a good shot at being acquired by an existing company. Bingo: dream job and a nice nest egg.
Associations can do the same thing with self-forming groups or competing organizations: Identify the highest energy groups out there and recruit them into your association. ASAE has done this to a certain extent with the GWSAE merger and talks with the Northern California SAE.
One benefit of that approach for the organization is that it pre-qualifies new membership segments/communities that can be brought into the fold. It may also identify a market for a new or exiting product that the association would never have figured out on its own. It basically solves the issues of large organization’s inherent inertia that dampens innovation. (See also the Innovators Solution for more on that theme.)
So what might this look like in action? A simple one is to hop onto Yahoo Groups and look for active groups with a related topic. Join the conversation as a peer (not as the National Mothership Who Knows Best). Offer meeting space to the group at one of your next events, invite them to meet with your Board, get them engaged! Actually, get yourselves engaged with them, since these groups usually have plenty of engagement already, just not with you.
Associations have the infrastructure that these more ephemeral web-based groups cannot create on their own in most cases. Use that strength to create mutually beneficial relationships and see where it takes you.
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July 15, 2005
Contrary View on Podcasting
Earl Mardel has posted a concise contrary view on podcasting. I think cold-water viewpoints like this are always valuable when trying to figure out a new twist on an old medium, which seems to come along daily with the Internet these days.
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July 12, 2005
Scaling Applications with Ruby on Rails
One of my more geekly habits is to track up and coming technologies for the web. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new development framework that focuses on allowing rapid prototyping of database-driven web applications. Here is a nice post on how RoR can scale up under heavy load.
Bonus link: a 15 minute video on how to create a weblog system in RoR in considerably less than 15 minutes. Assuming you know RoR inside and out, of course.
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