The Local Wisdom Blog

A recent New York Times article about how Vice, a hipster media company / magazine is partnering with Dell and Intel, two large tech companies, got me thinking I haven’t given much thought to in a while: content.

I know, I know…we are inundated with tweets and Facebook statuses all day long, and news is just a click away on Google Reader or Google News. So content is readily (and freely) available. What’s interesting to me is how Dell and Intel are both trusting Vice (a brand known for controversial imagery and content) to curate two microsites for them, and…this is the great part, that aren’t pushing Dell or Intel products!

Motherboard - Exploring the Culture of Technology

Motherboard, the Dell side of the partnership, is little more than an aggregation of short posts and snippets about cool and quirky left-of-center technology trends both new and old. Resting alongside posts about Chinese hackers turning their laptops into touch phones and old Demoscene 3D Graphics are some genuinely interesting trends and cultural detritus that are worth perusing for a bit, even just as a distraction while at work.

The Creators Project strives to be “a new network dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media, and around the world.” It highlights individuals who are pushing culture and technology forward, and has video interviews with the creators featured, like Joachim Sauter from ART+COM.

The Creators Project

What’s interesting for me isn’t the success or failure of the individual sites – both, actually, deviate from the User-generated carnival that are Facebook and Twitter. Instead, we find large, well-known brands trying to connect with large segments of clued-in consumers they otherwise might not be able to reach through traditional advertising. Can better content drive through the advertising noise and be better heard? Are creating these networks the best way to do it? I’m not so sure, but it’s an interesting experiment.

The other aspect that resonates with me is the process of curation in digital culture – large brands turning to smaller, ‘with-it’ digital agencies and culture studios to not just create another broadcast spot or Facebook fan page, but instead create a longer, sustained endeavor – a network in-and-of-itself that, ironically, isn’t selling Netbooks, but is promoting the people that (might) use them. This will resonate more with some people than trashing the other guy or rattling off tech specs to get their attention.

James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:

We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.

This one was interesting since there were so many answers out there that didn’t work   This is actually pretty easy, you open up the IIS 7 manager, go to the website you’d like to turn JS compression on for, in the menu you’ll see the MimeType icon, open that up:





When you open it up, look for the .js Mimetype as such:





And change the .js Mimetype to “text/javascript” as such:





It should take place immediately as it makes the change in your application’s web.config file for you under “System.Webserver”. BTW, just getting the JS files to compress does so much for the site speed!

I’ve used this PSD a few times to get a quick “Site Down” up while we do maintenance or the site is just down due to servers going down.  I had to refer to it so everyone can make use of it.  Soh Tanaka shows how in a few short CSS lines and with his PSD you could get a nice looking Site Maintenance message up in a couple of minutes.  The PSD is available here and the CSS code you can find here.  Shoutout to Soh Tanaka!

This was shown to me by Tim Carter over at Pedrera as a way to streamline design into development and create efficiency between the two by using a simple system around both.  Here’s a short description:

“The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.  The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements.”

When used by both the design and development teams, it will lead to much more accurate positioning of objects on the page which should lead to faster turnaround times.

To get the 960 Grid files click here

Sometimes you just need to start from scratch.

You probably didn’t notice that we have evolved the Expertise section of our website.

The redesign to the section is a total. We changed the visuals, the technology, and even the way that we approach our work throughout a project.

Instead of redesigning based on the content and process that we had in place, we looked at the way we actually did work, and changed the stated process to better reflect reality.

The visuals were all carefully crafted by RJay in 3D. His attention to detail is always astounding. He managed to make a incredibly detailed design that doesn’t feel cluttered.

RJay’s design were technically demanding. Melissa rose to the occasion and pushed herself to make all of the jQuery animations work as RJay envisioned them (there is no Flash on this site). It was a painstaking process, but as always, she triumphed.

Finally, the copy is written to convey hours and hours of work in as few words as possible. It was a challenge to take our in-depth stages of production, and detail them in lighthearted, meaningful, and brief passages. Writing for brevity and clarity is always tough.

Go have a look at the new Expertise section of LocalWisdom.com.

Just recently used for one of our clients. Few too many files for my taste, but it works:
http://jquery.bassistance.de/tooltip/demo/

For anyone looking to become a content writer, check this out:

“Web content is a newer form of writing that demands its own sets of rules and etiquette. A good website content writer will know how to write content so that a viewer will be able to read without becoming bored or clicking to another site. There are several rules that all of the best web content writers follow.

Sentences

Short and to the point. Good web content is direct without using any unnecessary words. This goes for paragraphs and even for words, too.

Reverse Pyramid

A good web content writer will put the most important information, or the conclusion, at the very beginning, grabbing a reader’s attention.

Word Choice

Simple, easy to understand words are the best to use. A good web content writer understands that people of all reading abilities browse the web, and to connect to as many readers as possible, the simplest words should be chosen at all times.

Highlighted Text

The best web content writers put important words in color or bold so that a reader can scan the text and find the information that they want easily and efficiently.

Brevity

Again, probably the most important, good web content writers are careful to only include the most important information because long, wordy paragraphs will turn off the reader and end up in little readership. The Internet is a place where information is found quickly with little effort spent. The best web content writers always say what they are trying to say using the fewest words possible.”

Read the whole story here

Pretty cool site that gives you alternatives to other software you use, found this originally on twitter and it’s pretty interesting to see what alternatives there are to software we use everyday!

“AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what applicatio

n you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with. And the “blog posts” are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes. “

http://alternativeto.net/

“Delivering informative structure is the primary task an interactive user interface should be able to cope with. The more intuitive layout structure is designed, the better users can understand the content.

Whatever content you have to present, you can present them in a more interactive & more responsive ways. In this article we’d like to present 10 smart javascript techniques for showing and hiding content using different JS libraries.”

Whole post here