Un-cool

I just checked on a site that I built — for free — for some friends who have a little non-profit organization they run. I redesigned their site from the ground up, I battled Yahoo! for six weeks to get their domain name released, I put the whole shootin’ match into a nice little CMS, and I hosted it for more than half a year, all for free, because they’re good people doing a good thing.

Except when they turn around try to screw me.

When I went to the site, I noticed that they had some other developer rebuild (again) their site. This hack person totally ripped off my design, put the site back in tables, and put his (?) name on it. At least it’s on his server. I’d like to send him (and CC my friends) a nasty-gram explaining in great detail what bad form it is to steal my work. I’d like to send my friends a slightly-less-nasty-gram asking them WTF?

I think I’m pissed off because I put a hell of a lot of time into this project, and to have this kind of outcome feels like I’ve totally failed. It feels like I’ve failed as a developer by making a site my clients (friends) weren’t happy with, and it feels like I failed as a friend by (apparently) screwing up what could have been a nice gift for them. I think the worst part is that they didn’t even bother to email or call me and say something like, “Gosh, aj, we really appreciate what you tried to do for us, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction. Thanks for all your work.” Even, “Man, aj, you suck! Go get a real job,” would have been better that the whole lot of nothing they gave me.

Any thoughts on how to approach this garbage?

NAGW Conference Roundup

Now that I’m back home, I figured I’d do a brief roundup of the NAGW conference, both for my own edification, and (supposing that Google will potentially work its connection magic in the fullness of time) potentially to help make future conferences better.

First, the good:
I had some totally awesome pre-conference sessions. The rapid prototyping session led by Marc Drummond was super-helpful and crammed with good ideas (even if I couldn’t remember his damn name for the first couple hours!). Bill Brown’s presentation on the Holier Grail was exactly how I like my technical sessions: hard-core, fast-paced, and full of useful information while leaving my brain feeling like deep-friend mush. Thanks and kudos to both of you!

The first day of the conference proper started out with a great opening keynote by Joe Rotella addressing the need to keep my sites’ users foremost in my mind while building my shiny toys. He also strongly suggested (is demanded too strong a word, Joe?) getting actual input from actual users, then following the time-honored creative writing tradition of Killing Our Babies (see I.6). After that, I went to a session led in part by Bruce Blood about the future of government websites. After framing the conversation, Bruce and his co-hosts turned the discussion over to the room. After an hour of give-and-take, the consensus was pretty much this: We all know how and (potentially) when to deploy all the cool tools out there; the sticking point comes with the legal aspects (particularly moderating comments vs. First Amendment protections).

We finished off day two with a trip out for pizza at dinner, then beer around the fire ring back by the pool, during both of which the discussions and stories flowed freely. Very cool!

You’ve (probably) already ready about the Day Two Debacle (below), and I don’t really have anything to add but this: That’s the way the ball bounces sometimes; you just get unlucky with the choices you make. Oh well…

On day three, I decided to bail right after a breakfast session of geeking out with a new friend about custom ROMs for smart phones. The closing keynote was about “What we can expect with IE 8.” Considering I spent about 90 minutes the previous night fighting (and losing) with my computer to remove IE 8 and return to a working IE 7 configuration, I fell like I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. And I’m glad I did get out of town, too, or I might still be down there, doing the breast stroke.

The real sum, though is my answer to the key question: Will I try to go next year? Answer: Hell, yes. Especially because we’re supposed to meet in Galveston. During the peak of hurricane season.

Fer cryin’ shame

Today was pretty much a total frickin’ waste at the NAGW convention. I actually got “shushed” (seriously) by an uptight woman at breakfast when I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else, I went to three sessions which featured:

• “CuttingEdge.gov” presented by a CMS vendor who, in the first paragraph of his presentation, mentioned how his showcase site “has dropdown menus.” Pardon me while I pick my jaw off the ground…
• “An Introduction to Adobe Flex” which featured the presenter giving us a blow-by-blow account of application development. As he did it on the screen. For an hour. Ugh.
• And finally, just to make me wonder what planet the hotel elevator took me to today, there was the old lady from Texas who (sort of) gave a presentation about how to build a website for free because “I spent $39 on my site in the last three years.” Boy howdy, did you ever. My favorite quote from her presentation, though, was definitely, “My city ain’t gonna give me money to piss away on something just ’cause I don’t wanna do the work.” That would have been right before she regaled us about how she spent all this last summer picking up and dropping off some poor high school kid who volunteered to be her “intern.”

I had so frickin’ after that session that I went cross country, through some parking lots and through a stream of pissed-off Chicago rush-hour traffic to get me some Chipotle lovin’. And then I had a beer. And then I skipped the NAGW award banquet because, quite frankly, I don’t think I’d be good company tonight.
The part that really gets me, though, is that the previous two days were so damn good. I’ve had a really useful session on prototyping, a pretty damn hard-core four hours of css presented by a genuine guru, a really inspirational keynote address by Joe Rotella, and some awesome conversations about where government websites are headed and how they’re going to get there. I’ve been out for pizza and beer with some new friends, and had more beer around a (gas fed; for shame) fire ring.

Maybe those first two days just set the bar too high…

ChiTown

I’m in my hotel room in St. Charles, IL, working on upgrading an ecommerce cart for one of my clients tonight. The cool thing, though, is that I’m attending the annual conference of the National Association of Government Webmasters. It’s a great smallish, youngish organization that I’m proud to be part of.

And it’s fun to get to go on a road trip, too, even if my brain suffered a meltdown in a hell of a CSS session this afternoon, and I’m hittin’ it hard again tonight. It’s all good. Especially with a little Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the fridge. Who knew Target was so well stocked? I just went for a belt…

Milepost

It’s been four years since I started blogging. Or, as Rick Penn would have me write, “keeping an online journal.”

I think I started (I can’t remember, exactly) because blogs were shiny and new, and there’s one thing I’m always interested in, it’s “shiny and new.” Over time, I’ve bitched, complained, apologized, analyzed, commented, solicited, updated, urged, and ignored. And you’ve read it. At least some of it. What a match made in purgatory.

Now, onward!

My Technical Bookshelf

I’ve had a subscription (via work; thanks boss-man!) to O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf for a couple months now, and I’m starting to think that it’s one of the Best Things Ever. I can read (online) pretty much all the xhtml/css/flash/php/MySQL/security/programming/certification/business logic pr0n I could ever want right there.

While I’m pretty sure they don’t carry a lot of private label training/certification labels, and though it seems like some of the publishers involved (SitePoint, for sure) hold back a few of their publications, I can get both high and mid-level information about any technical (read: computer-related) subject I can think of. Most of the time, I’ve been able to find something to help me get down and dirty, when I need it, too.

So, to recap: Safari Bookshelf = sweet!

Cloud to Ground Email

Warning: This post is a little link-heavy. Welcome to how I use Teh Interwebz.

I’ve been slowly moving more of my computing into the cloud. I tweet, I blog (duh!), my RSS cup overfloweth, I do online backups of my data, I occasionally use Google Docs, I IM, I Skype, but most of all, I email. And my email client of choice for the last couple years has been Gmail.

Gmail, My Love

I really like the Gmail interface, extensibility (via Firefox extensions like Better Gmail), mailbox size limits, and flexibility of piping many of my other email accounts into my Gmail account so that I can read, respond to, and archive them all from one place. There are, of course, things I don’t love so much about Gmail (why are signatures such a pain in the butt, why can’t you check my other inboxes just a little more frequently, and what (in the name of Harrison Ford) is with your EULA?), but over all, it’s an incredibly useful cloud application, and my daily workflow would be poorer without it.

Trouble in Paradise

In the last 36 hours, I’ve noticed significantly more spam getting in to my Gmail inbox. There are (at least) a couple of pretty good reasons for this. The one that concerns me the least is that a bright spammer (that’s probably not an oxymoron) somewhere made a breakthrough in his/her process that allows the spam to slide past Gmail’s filters. That’s no biggie, because the filter definitions will get updated in a day or two, and life will be good again. My other hypothesis, which is more worrying, is that there’s technical trouble somewhere in the depths of Google’s server farms. There’s no notice of anything amiss at Google’s official marketing site blog, and a little critical thinking about Google’s probable backup strategies implies that my first scenario is significantly more likely. Still, I’m feeling a little nervous.

Cloud to Ground Email

Gmail doesn’t take any responsibility for the safety of the data on its servers. Basically, the EULA says “Use our services at your own risk.” So, pretty much like everywhere else in the computer world, it’s up to each of us to backup our own data.

I did some looking around (ie. consulted the Oracle) and saw that probably the easiest way to make this backup was via Gmail’s IMAP interface using Thunderbird.

I’ve used Thunderbird in the past, and have always appreciated what it can do, but gave it up in favor of Gmail a couple years ago. Now, however, it looks like it can fill a couple blank spots in my emailverse, so it’s back on my computer. Installation and basic setup of Thunderbird is super-easy (as per pretty much all Mozilla tools), but configuring Thunderbird to talk to Gmail via IMAP took a little more time, but everything worked as advertised the first time.

The Final Step

My computer is banging down all my Gmail, and that’s good for backing up my Gmail account. But I also need to backup the stuff on my computer (Murphy’s law would seem to suggest that the moment the Googleplex explodes, a fiery meteorite will plummet from the heavens and annihilate my laptop). So, I guess it’s back to the cloud (ala Mozy) for me.

How Do You Like Yours Cooked?

I’d like to hear how ya’ll set up your email systems. I’m especially curious how Chris, Omar, and Joe do it.

Gmail spam on the increase

I noticed today that it seems like a lot more spam is suddenly making its way into my Gmail inbox. I don’t know if that’s because a crafty spammer somewhere made a breakthrough, or because Google is having trouble, but it’d sure be interesting to find out.

31,517

That’s my number, since apparently, there are 31,516 folks who started following the Mars Phoenix mission’s Twitter account. You can do it too! It’s fun; it’s free; and if you “don’t get it” right away, don’t worry, you’re not alone – just play with it for a couple days and watch it click!

Vista x64 & Netflix

Man, talk about the easiest support call in the world: I just got a new laptop, and tried to install Netflix viewer on the computer. The install ran, but when I tried to watch content, the web page went right back to the “Hey, we need you to install our software” message. After about 35 seconds on hold, I talked to a tech who politely told me I need to run the x86 version of IE, not the x64 version. I did, and voila! Life is good!