Through some not very scientific testing, I found that 100-300 DOM elements is my sweet spot (though IE really needs it towards the low end of that range). Any higher and the browser noticeably chugs during rendering. I was surprised that once rendered, the browser didn’t seem to perform any worse during scrolling or resizing. Another thing I noticed was that Firefox visually added each element to the page iteratively (taking much more time), whereas all other browsers immediately showed all of them after the initial CPU churn.

Images

using images for custom typography doesn’t necessarily have a negative impact on a site’s performance and search engine optimization. If file size is carefully considered, and the proper alt text is used, typographic images can be a good solution. Of course, this technique should only be used for short bits of text, like page headings, pull quotes, and drop caps. I will argue that there are better options available today, but at the end of the day, images are a perfectly valid option.

Flash

The value of embedding fonts in your SWF files cannot be overlooked. Although it would be considered bad practice to utilize flash for only this purpose, if Flash is going to be used anyways, one of it’s major benefits is the cross-browser pixel perfection and ability to embed dynamic type.

Web Safe Fonts & the Font Matrix

The list of “web-safe” fonts is very limited. Normally, most web designers don’t stray too far away from Helvetica, Verdana, and Georgia. This list from 24 Ways helps expand that list to fonts that are common across many computers, operating systems, and installed software. Used correctly in font stacks, developers can target most computers that have software like Office and Creative Suite. Check out the list, you might be surprised by how many fonts are available.

sIFR

It’s worth mentioning sIFR here, although many developers have abandoned this technology in favor of Cufon, which I will talk about later. sIFR (which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a flash replacement technology. The philosophy here is creating the ability to bring rich typography to web pages without compromising accessibility or semantics. Additionally, one of the great advantages of sIFR was it’s fallback to plain text if Flash is not supported. Although it’s been criticized as hard to implement and somewhat buggy, this was the first real jump forward for web typography, and is still very popular to this day. sIFR laid the foundation for many great resources for custom web typography.

Cufon

The best way to describe Cufon is a next generation sIFR which is built with Javascript rather than Flash. This method has it’s benefits like not requiring the Flash plugin – good news for Apple devices. It’s also extremely easy to implement, and has very good performance, even for large amounts of text. You upload font files (with the proper licensing) through the Cufon site, and convert’s the file to SVG format. Then, the SVG file is converted to JSON which can be added to your site through simple Javascript. One downside to using Cufon is that many custom font licenses do not permit usage on web pages, so check the license or use a great free or open source typeface. There are many good ones out there.

If you’re looking for some high quality free fonts, Smashing Magazine is a great place to start your search.

Font-Face

This is by far the easiest method to integrate custom typography on the web. Using the @font-face property allows you to access fonts via CSS, and host the files on your web server. Of course, the same licensing issues remain, so make sure to chose a good typeface with no constraints. From there, you can use @font-face to access that font file for use with any CSS property. Add the font name on the top of your font stacks, and that’s it. There are a few hoops to jump through, mainly to accommodate Internet Explorer. IE requires a .eot file (Embed-able Open Type) to render custom fonts. Luckily, there are a few good online converters that will take common font files (.ttf and .oft) and convert the fonts to .eot. On a side note, I wrote a recent blog post about getting @font-face to work correctly in all major browsers.

TypeKit

TypeKit aims to take all of the hassle out of setting up @font-face, and they do a killer job at it. For as little as $25 per year, you can use fully-licensed fonts which are hosted on TypeKit. All of the licensing issues as well as the compatability woes are taken care of, and in turn you get an incredibly easy-to-use and extremely large font library at your fingertips. It’s definitely work a second look.

Google Font API & Font Directory (beta)

In the same veins as TypeKit, Google recently introduced their font API and font directory. Google hosts fonts that are licensed and ready to go, you just have to target these fonts on your site, and Google will do the rest. Their library is currently very conservative, but hopefully this will grow in the near future.

Google Calendar for scheduling projects:

At the heart of our scheduling setup is Google Calendar. Each employee at BKWLD has a calendar, and this is where we assign people to a project for each day of the week. The point here is to provide a broad overview of every employee’s week, not to provide granular details of specific milestones or todos. Each Friday Dan and I cover who is working on what for the following week and input it in GC on that employees calendar. We keep it high level, listing only the project name, and one or two words of what employee is working on, such as  ”Project name, flash dev.” If someone is out for vacation, it goes here too. In order to have access to coworker’s calendar’s just add them on your GC homepage under “add a coworker’s calendar” by entering their email address. Here is a screenshot of GC settings tab. You can sell the coworker’s calendars that I have access to edit, and other that I can only view. :

Google Calendar for day-to-day tasks

As producer, I’ll also use Google calendar to schedule internal meetings, client calls, or events outside of work for all us Buk folk, such as Ignite Seattle, the NW Pinball Show, or our upcoming Paintball outing. I know some producers prefer to use iCal for scheduling meetings, but I like Google Calendar because everyone invited can see the relevant info directly on the invitation, instead of having to open the invite in iCal to view the time, location, call-in number, ect. I’ve found that many clients don’t use iCal so it’s nice to have a tool that’s browser based.

Managing project milestones in Basecamp

At BWKLD we use Basecamp for most of our projects. At kickoff a producer will add the milestones from a project schedule to BC. From there, everyone assigned to the project can view the milestones and have visibility to both their portion of the project, and the overall scope. We also assign milestones directly to employees in bc. This is important because both Google calendar and basecamp milestones, as well as Unfuddled milestones, sync to iCal. To subscribe to a milestone calendar in basecamp, just go to the milestones tab, and click on the “subscribe to iCalendar” in red. You can subscribe to a global iCalendar where you’ll see all the milestones for each project, but I prefer to subscribe to each project individually. The advantage to subscribing to individual iCalendars is that iCal allows you to color code each project’s iCalendar different. This is really helpful if you are working on multiple projects concurrently. Check out this link for more info:

Using calDav within iCal to sync it all together

Now you can sync google calendars and basecamp to iCal. Consequently, by looking at iCal you will have ONE place to look to see the following:

a) events from your own google cal (meeting invites and your schedule on a daily level)

b) calendar of other people you have access to on google calendar (helpful if you are ever making a schedule or want to see who is working on what)

c) all milestones from any basecamp projects you’ve subscribe to. If the dates are ever changed in basecamp, just refresh iCal and you’ll see new dates updated.

It’s great to have one place to look to see how the project milestones from basecamp are lining up with individual employees schedule. To set this up, follow the steps here for syncing using calDAV on iCal Desktop by following this link and clicking on “Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal”:

Recap:

Below is a screenshot of how your iCal will look after you’ve done all the setup:

On the top you’ll see Dave.Brown@bkwld.com – this is my BKWLD google calendar only. This is where I’ll see my meeting invites, and receive pop-up reminders throughout the day for upcoming meetings.

Next down is Gmail – this is a personal calendar, so by checking this box I’ll see anything personal. Helpful when I’m checking to see how a travel schedule lines up with  my personal life. I also add my wife’s calendar so we’re all synced up too.

Next down is Delegates. This is the list of all the people you’ve added on Google calendar under “add coworker’s calendars.” If you want to add/modify these settings directly in iCal, go to preferences>Accounts>Delegation.

Finally is Subscriptions – this is the list of projects subscribed to on basecamp. We’ve also be using Unfuddled at BKWLD recently and you can also subscribe to individual calendars through Unfuddled.

Now you’ll have complete access to all the info you’ll need for any project, easily accessible for a project. If someone asks you “who is assigned to x project and can I move them help on project y” you can easily see who is working on each project, look at when the next milestone is due, and see who else may be available to help based off of current workload.

Syncing with iPhone

You can also setup calDAV on your iphone so you will be able to keep your iCal and iphone calendars kept in sync wirelessly. You’ll be able to add/modify event made in Google Calendar on either you iCal desktop or iCal on iPhone without having to do a physical sync. Here’s how to setup CalDav on your iPhone:

Regarding seeing your Basecamp milestones on your iPhone the best option is simply periodically doing a physical sync between iTunes and your iPhone. Within iTunes you can choose which calendars you want to sync by going to the info tab> Sync iCal Calendars and selecting them there. This works for me because I often do a physical sync daily to update my podcasts and other content. Frankly we don’t move milestone dates around that often, so doing a physical sync every few days works out fine.

My favorite thing about this setup is that everyone involved in a project has the info they need. All devs and designers know when the next milestone is due for each of their projects. As Mr. Dan Fields would say, “Project Managed.”

Once again Brian Gossett and Bryan Lee bring us a sweet new poppin’ mix. It’s a straight up booty shaker so if you aren’t up and dancing by the 3rd minute then you’re missing out. Check out more of Brian’s mixes on his website.

Since78: Poppin’ Bangin’ Slangin’ Guest Mix

BKWLD has successfully had two – but not self-sufficient – offices for about 7 years. When Robert went to Seattle to open our second office out of his bedroom, we always knew it would be our main development hub due to Seattle’s inclination towards tech, while Sacramento would stay focused on design, production and management. The lines have since been blurred, and each office is much more talent varied, but the fact remains that working as one, finely tuned Frankenstein of interactive is crucial to our success, and inter-office communication needed to be second nature.

Here’s some thoughts on how we successfully keep morale high, the work awesome and use our two locations to our advantage when working with out of town clients and agencies.

“Work” based Pros
Having two drastically different locations has lots of merits. Having experience with what it’s like to work across borders internally is good practice for the ‘real world.’ Not having as many great local opportunities for work as we’d like, but loving the lifestyles that Sacramento/Seattle afford us, we’re able to easily work with out of town locations like LA, NYC, Denver etc. because we constantly work with people hundreds of miles apart – each other.

We know all of the tricks and tools to make working ‘remote’ efficient:

• iChat/Adium/Aim etc. – a constant barrage of conversation, sometimes bordering on stream of conscious, but the lifeblood of BKWLD
• Skype/video chats – for when we need some face time
• A weekly status meeting between both offices where we catch up on all projects, housekeeping stuff, etc.
• WebEx/Gotomeeting – for walking clients through CMS trainings, creative presentations, alpha builds of sites
• Basecamp – the best way we’ve found to house all files, pertinent messages, client feedback etc. It’s the nucleus between our offices and a client.
• JIRA – for testing and QA of a site, we’re having great results with JIRA and it’s bug reporting and classifications
• www.supportdetails.com – no more “what browser and version of flash are you running?” it’s the perfect way to find out the client’s boss is still running IE6 and Flash 5.

In an economic climate where a traditional agency in LA/NYC/London wants to test out a digital shop in a new location, since we have working remote on lockdown, it’s an easy sell to an out-of-towner why they shouldn’t be worried one bit to use a non-local agency. In fact, I have some clients who I just adore, and have actually never met in real life.

Furthermore, the pros of having multiple offices from a ‘business’ perspective are pretty obvious – multiple markets for talent, multiple markets for new business and just the perceived value of having multiple offices. Office-wise we keep morale high by having interoffice get togethers a couple times a year, and having a handful of internal ‘mailing lists’ that serve almost like forums. For everything from ‘check out this awesome website/article’ to video game reviews to funny viral videos, the inner office banter is always going on.

“Work” based Cons
It’s certainly not all rainbows and cupcakes, there are some things that aren’t wonderful about working with clients and coworkers across the country.

Some people are more visual, and just NEED face time to connect, to be held accountable, etc. It’s pretty easy to be a ‘telephone tough guy’ or hide behind emails, when just going out to lunch or grabbing a drink in person could have helped solve an easy problem. We always have a face-to-face kickoff and launch meeting with clients, but during the middle, some clients might need more attention, and a quick flight isn’t always an option. And sometimes a client wants someone local, no matter what.

Another con is something I call “Island Syndrome.” Suppose a project is being managed and designed in Sacramento, but only ONE person in Seattle is developing on it. It can be easy for this Seattleite to feel isolated and alone on a project, since no one in their direct vicinity is working on it or talking about it in passing conversation. We try hard to not let this occur from a resource standpoint, and the nature of our offices tend that people always want to know what everyone is working on, but it can still occur. Additionally, there’s nothing like some “designer-developer-one-on-one” when it comes to hashing out whether a design is possible, whether an idea is too big or just arguing whether or not flash is dead (which of course it isn’t).\

Lastly, sometimes we get “Sacramento? Why would anyone want to live there?” We shouldn’t be so quick to forget it is the capital of the greatest state in the world! It takes little explanation to prove why we love this quality of life, it’s proximity to Lake Tahoe and San Francisco, etc. But other people might want the gloss and glitz of a NYC or LA agency.

Overall, it’s more rare these days to find a successful company with just one office – it just makes sense to have a bicoastal presence. I think what makes BKWLD unique is our adherence to the west coast, with offices not in the largest of markets, and still finding ourselves playing successfully with the big guys nationwide. To this success I attribute everyone’s adherence to staying nimble, staying connected and staying on top of our projects, clients and co-workers.

Some of the apps listed are pretty standard and some not so much. We are always interested in exploring new apps so, please recommend away!

Jeff Toll – Creative Director

Photoshop - “Open and running every day, all day.”
TextEdit – “I get grief for using this but it’s lightweight and simple, simple, simple. I’ll start using a more robust text editor sometime soon. I use it for writing quick storyboards and concept explanation etc. ʻPagesʼ is upon the horizon…”
xScope- “Covers my ass for screen resolution guides at the very least.”
iChat- “Communicating with our Seattle office and random jackasses.”
iCal -“I’ve been getting better and better with my organization.

Robert Reinhard- CTO & Partner

Pages - “I haven’t touched MS Word in over 2 years and haven’t looked back. I love how it handles styles, it’s like easy CSS in a word processor.”
OmniOutliner - “For taking notes on conference calls.”
MAMP Pro - “Powers My LAMP dev environment. Makes it easy to setup additional testing vhosts (test dev rather than local host).”
TextMate – “When is 2.0 gonna come out?! I’ve been flirting with switching to Coda, but I miss some of the hotkeys.”
Socialite -“Aggregates feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Digg all in one place, plus allows me to post comments/tweets.”

Scott Thiessen – Flash Developer

Safari -“The Activity Window and Web Inspector alone are enough to make me feel like the king of the Internet.”
TextMate - “Lots of power for so little toolbar.”
Sequel Pro – “This is phpMyAdmin’s gorgeous, sophisticated sister. Unbelievable that this app is free!”
Spot Color + Developer Color Picker - “Slick way to grab colors from the screen, tweak them in your favorite gamut, and spit out hexadecimals.”
Quick Look - “Not really a stand-alone app, but I’ve definitely forgotten what it’s like to use a computer without it.”

Matt Aebersold – Flash Developer

Flash + AS3 - “Although thereʼs a steep learning curve, learning object-oriented AS3 has opened up so many doors, and is such an intricate and expansive programming language. Itʼs allowed me to create some kick-ass web designs.”
Coda – “Once a site project is completely set up, the complete integration is incredible, and so intuitive. Once I made the switch I’ve never looked back.”
MAMP - “Helped me do PHP dev on my local machine. Extremely helpful in every way.”
Things - “Awesome to-do app. Easy to set up and manage. So simple, and It’s what’s not included that makes it great. plus syncing over dropbox has make this invaluable. That said…”
DropBox – “Awesome cloud storage. If I point my apps there, than they sync on all my computers (iTunes, Things, etc…). Plus online file recovery is very easy.”

Sean Monahan – Flex Developer

Eclipse w/Flash Builder 4 Plugin - “Paraphrasing a Josh Reddin-ism, ʻItʼs a text editor for fully grown men.ʼ Upgraded from Flex Builder 3 stand alone and my opinion of Eclipse has greatly increased. Eclipse also has plugins for PHP dev, Unfuddle (our ticket tracking software) and Ant (for oneclick builds)- all this allows for a one-step development environment for Elastic.
Calculator -  “Boring, I know, but good for doing quick math. I use this a lot when programming Uls. Bonus: it has a “programmer” view for doing fancy binary math.”
Last.fm – “I like its music picks better than Pandora and the artist bios and photo streams are freaking sweet.”
Photoshop – “What doesnʼt it do?”
Adium - “A slick IM client that supports just about every IM service in existence.”

Aaron Egaas – Web Applications Lead

Chromium - “Browser of choice, nightly version of web inspector is as good as firebug without the performance hit.”
TextMate - “Code keeps me paid, and TextMate keeps me sane.”
iChat - “Remote communication, PM requests.”
MailPlane - “Multiple Gmail accounts? Like to keep ‘em separate? Notifications? Native web app feel with label and everything? Gets me into GCal, too.”
Terminal - “I gotta ssh into servers to push code, so I use some sweet aliases to keep it all organized.”

Dave Brown – Senior Interactive Producer

Adium
OmniOutliner - “Great for taking notes.”
FontLab Studio - “Converting fonts.”
Justinmind Prototyper - “Havenʼt really used this yet, but Iʼve heard great things.”
Adobe Media Player - “Checking/watching native flv.”

George Plendl – Front End Developer

Linkinus - “Best IRC client for a mac. irc.freenode.net, #jquery is a great place to learn and ask questions.”
Alfred - “Quicklaunch application for which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Replaced ancient Quicksilver app!”
Snippley - “Basic text and organization app.”
Beyond Compare - “Easily compare files, folders, images, anything. Itʼs great!”
TextMate - “The best text editor for Mac and a powerful abbreviation engine for HTML and CSS. Saves hours!”

Shelby White – Design Intern

DropBox - “Best app for managing projects between projects. I also use it for freelance in getting assets.”
Adium/iChat - “Adium manages contacts better but iChat actually sends files.”
Coda - “My favorite app with FTP for html/css.”
Wordpress - “ Where I’ve spent most of my last year and a half.”
TweetDeck - “Nice for managing my tweets…”

Joe Leoni – Producer

TweetDeck - “Best way to stay informed of Chad Ochocincoʼs daily workouts or Snoop Doggʼs ʻbreakfast activitiesʼ.”
iChat - “Instant messaging: extreme convenience and extreme inconvenience all wrapped up into one.”
Garageband - “Now anyone can be a MC, and youʼll probably be better than 99% of radio hip-hop.”
Pages - “Iʼd rather be using Word, but close enough.”
Solitaire - “The best way to play with yourself.”

Veronica Skarshaug – Administrative Assistant

Stickies - “Nice way to save on physical sticky pads, and info that I need on a daily basis is easily accessible.”
TaskMate - “Great for keeping my to-do’s in order.”
Numbers - “I like to make spreadsheets, I’m a total nerd.”
Preview - “Makes things easy, easy, lemon squeezy.”
iChat - “Because, duh.”

The Hit List – “Awesome and free GTD app to keep my days/life organized.”
Transmit – “Gorgeous UI and experience to easily upload my files.”
Adium – “My favorite chat client especially when used with the iPhone message style.”
Cicero – “Dashboard widget that fulfills my Lorem Ipsum needs. Used and abused daily.”
Photoshop – “There is a light on under this icon all day. Content aware fill has come in handy on more than 1 occasion.”

1) Follow these instructions from Rocket Theme to the letter.  I didn’t need to deal with any of the “Possible Issues” section.
2) Go into “/Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/ssl.conf” and add a new vhost within the <IfDefine> blocks at the end of the page.  This vhost will mirror the settings of the vhost you would have already setup in MAMP:

<VirtualHost test.dev:443>
DocumentRoot "/Path/to/document/root"
ServerName test.dev
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/ssl_crt/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/ssl_key/server.key
<Directory "/Path/to/document/root">
Options All
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

3) That’s really it.  Restart MAMP and you’re good to go.

Thanks Greg Patterson of ground(ctrl) for putting this together.  Game time in a couple hours!

Update:

BKWLD Wins!  It was a great day and a close game.  Ground(ctrl) led with an early lead that they kept through most of the innings but BKWLD gradually wore away at it, eking out a victory in the last inning thanks to Shelby.

Over the last couple years we have had the opportunity to speak to various classes and programs full of folks enamored with the sort of work we get to do, and clients we get to do it for.  What’s funny is that we are always beside ourselves and left slightly confused with how enamored they are.

Just about this time every year for the last nine, I get several emails from local, national, and some international folks looking for a summer internship.  And for the last nine we did not offer anything.  The truth is we never saw the value, for them at least, in having a handful of young people running errands, and handling miscellaneous to-do’s.  Nor did we believe we had the time to really offer the hopeful lot what they might be looking for.  But that was then, and this is now…

This year we decided to kick-off a new kind of summer program.  One not for the faint of heart, lazy, or half-assed.  If you are looking for an internship that sends you on coffee runs, or where most of your time is spent on your own Facebook page, this isn’t for you.  If you are looking to get a first-hand, and hands-on perspective into what and how it all really goes down, this is for you.  It will be fast-paced, stressful, fun, exhilarating, you will want to pull your hair out, you will want to dance in circles.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Over the course of six weeks, a select group of six interns will be fully immersed in one fast (normal in the real world) paced project. You will be a part of client management, pitching ideas, and complete digital strategy including web, mobile, social and experiential…as well as all of the production headaches and home runs that we get to experience in a full day here at the Buk.  All of this will be done for of a real BKWLD client and if your work makes the cut, the client loves it, your work may even be used in the real world.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We are looking for a small group of dedicated and hard-working people.  We have no age limits, experience requirements, or education minimums.  However, we are looking for people with an inherent interest in marketing, design, and digital (duh). The right candidates will be interested in careers as producers, creative directors, technical directors, art directors, developers and storytellers. We expect this group to take it serious.  100% attendance, attention, and effort is required.  And like our friend Donald, we reserve the right to “fire” those not fully participating.

THE CALENDAR
In a nutshell, the weeks will look a little like this:

Week 1 – Immersion

• Introduction
• What is the process
• Client introduction
• Product discovery

Week 2 – Conception & Planning

• Story boards
• IA / Wireframes
• Revisions & Approvals

Week 3 – 5 – Production!

Week 6 – Case Study

• Document strategic analytics
• Write & submit case study

INTERESTED?
Sound good, want to see if you make the cut? Head over to www.bkwld.com/u to sign up and learn more.

Central Park

Yummy Dinners

Racking up loads of frequent flyer miles for personal use…..

All sweet  perks of tireless travel, however the insights gained and personal bonds created with my clients far out way the value of my deep and diverse Gowalla passport!

Over the past three years BKWLD has cultivated a fairly rich stable of retail clients; challenger brands that need to create a one on one relationship with consumers through a truly “branded” web experience in order to grow market share and earn relevance in saturated vertical categories.  A brand website, not to be confused with a B2C e-store (even though they can work in cohesion) in the one chance brands have to, truly tell a story especially when we are dealing with minimal media dollars  limited to aspirational life-style shots and cheesy headlines for half page ad in the typical industry pubs. To truly look  and the DNA of the brand, the common thread of products sold and the motivation of the consumers purchase decision is a healthy and sometimes eye-opening exercise I enjoy conducting at our now custom and mandatory brand discovery kick-off meetings.

So now myself, the assigned CD, PM and often times CEO Ryan Vanni (he picks great restaurants) all shlep out to: Boulder or Carlsbad or MorrisTown New Jersey to meet with our new clients and learn everything there is now know about these brands and why people actually pay full retail for the stuff they sell.  We start out asking what we think are pretty simple questions: Who is your target,what does your brand stand for, what other brands do they wish to emulate etc. Often to blank stares and confused looks around the table!  Not only is this shocking but exciting as we begin to peel back the layers of what really makes these brands special.  This exercise had lead to some of our best work and would have never happened had we not got off our ass, and pushed these brands to think a little.

Currently we are “getting personal”  with Gregory packs on some product launch strategies, Smartwool on a new brand site, and Chobani Greek yogurt on a new social media platform, that being said my next three weeks are booked with face to face meetings that will lead to  some new Discovery Gold!

My Two Favs:

Gravis http://www.gravisfootwear.com/
Status Quo: T&A, Tats and killer tubs.
Discovery:  Gravis is smart, stylish and interesting to people who just like to be rad.
Results: an award winning brand site that makes the killer product the star, not the killer backside 720 the sponsored athlete can boost.

Red Ledge: http://www.redledge.com/
Outdoor Industry: Beards, Fleece, and snoot bubbles as we climb K2
Discovery: Red Ledge is real, honest, functional and funny as hell!
Results: a site the pokes fun of the industry and speaks to the real consumer, and a tagline that says it all: “Functional, Affordable Clothing – For Those Who Exist in Reality.”

One of the largest drawbacks to flash content is it’s relative invisibility to search engines and accessibility programs. The criticism is true when talking about Flash as a closed platform. The code written is compiled into a SWF, and then embedded online. This makes searching an indexing flash content extremely difficult for most search engines. Accessing Flash content is also a problem for screen readers and other accessibility programs.

These issues, combined with the popularity of the Apple devices, create a lot of hesitancy for companies to fully embrace Flash content in their projects and sirs. I’m going to talk about a few key principals that will help Flash gain visibility and accessibility across multiple platforms, and at the same time make Flash content easier to update and maintain.

Does it need to be Flash?

The first step, of course, is to figure out what content needs to be in Flash, and what does not. There’s no point to constructing a site using flash if the same design can be achieved using more open, standards-compliant code. Once the decisions have been made as to what content will be built in Flash, than it’s time to start thinking along the same lines as proponents of web standards.

Use the Principals of Web Standards

The primary rule in web development today is the separation of content from presentation. The same principal can be applied to Flash projects. Separating the content from the design means updating and maintaining the Flash site will be much easier if the code doesn’t need to be recompiled and edited every time a change needs to be made. Making things like the navigation, links, and photos flexible and external are all great steps to create clean, smart, and flexible projects.

Smart Degradation

If the Flash content and design are properly separated, than re-purposing the content is extremely easy. If the content is in XML format, it can be applied to an XML site-map which will help search engines index the site’s content much easier. In addition, there are browser and platform detection scripts which could allow you to display the XML content in regular HTML format if the browser or device isn’t compatible with Flash. (iPad anyone?) You can also detect older browsers and Flash players. Content can then be delivered in the most efficient way possible to all users.

For example, head over to the BKWLD site on an iPad or iPhone, and you will see that the features on the homepage are still visible and interactive. This helps serve the most people possible the site’s content, no matter what environment they are using to visit the site.

Hybrids

There is also the option of creating hybrid sites, which are very popular because they combine flash elements with standard HTML markup. This allows the user to have a rich experience, as well as giving search engines easy access to the site’s content. Making use of flashvars and XML/JSON add to the flexibility of the site by allowing Flash to communicate directly with the rest of the site.

SWFObject & Deep Linking

Making use of programs like SWFAddress and SWFObject allow the Flash content to be more transparent and visible to search engines. SWFAddress will create a specific URL for each page in a full-browser Flash experience. Knowing what section the user is on, and showing that section in the browser’s address bar allow search engines to look at specific pages, and create extremely accurate analytical reports.

SWFObject is a way to create valid code though the W3C Validation tools. Also, SWFObject has the ability to replace Flash content with a static image, which maintains the visual design if the user doesn’t have flash enabled.

Conclusion

It’s ultimately about choosing the right tool for the right project. Flash has many advantages, which need to be carefully weighed against the areas in which Flash falls short. The ideas described here can certainly help Flash communicate better with browsers, search engines, analytical tools, and accessibility programs.

This mix was contributed to The Mixtape Club which invites artists, musicians, and all around music lovers to make 10 song mixes. The mixes live on their website for about a month so be sure to catch them.

Cold Wind Blowing in the Witching Hour

I have been playing around with a handful of social integration utilities for Wordpress and so far the Simple Twitter/Facebook Connect plugins from Otto are by far the easiest, most feature useful and stable that I have found.

You will see that this post was simply, and easily posted to our FB Fan Page – http://www.facebook.com/BKWLD and tweeted (http://twitter.com/BKWLD)

The plugins have some really fun features – like automagically grabbing any “@” handles and linking them back to twitter – @BKWLD

Do you guys have any other favorite Wordpress plugins or add ons you find endlessly useful?

This is because the debate is centered around technologies and programming languages. This strife is very prevalent in all areas of the web design industry. Should you use Flash or Javascript for that slideshow? Should we connect to this MySQL database, or this SQL server over here? .NET or PHP? There are some very opinionated groups, which is too bad because all of these technologies are amazing in their own right.

At the core of every project is an idea, and that is by far the most important thing to consider. Once the creative idea has been set, realizing that idea can happen any number of unique and innovative ways.

When figuring out how to produce the project, it’s all about what technology is best suited for the design. How much interactivity will it have? Of course you’re not going to utilize Flash for a site that is just plain, static text, and you’re not going to link up to a database when your site consists of two pages.

After these things have been sorted out, then pick the technology that you are most comfortable and efficient with. For example, I work really well in Flash and Actionscript. I am very comfortable with the language, and it comes naturally to me. That doesn’t mean that Flash should be used for everything, but in at the end of the day it’s all about the idea being produced, —not what technology was used to make it. If you need a slideshow, it can be written in Javascript, Flash, or hell even Lingo, as long as you end up with a killer slideshow.

It’s also not about the newest technology; it’s it’s about the best technology. My old college instructor is a professional type designer for a 1st-class graphic design agency. She stands by Freehand as the best tool out there for type and letterform design. It’s not a new program by any measure, but it works for her, and she produces some incredible work.

So we need to relax about the technology debates, and focus on making kick- ass designs, and have fun doing it.

I initially went about including the Like button the wrong way.  In the demos they showed at the F8, it appeared that they would expect each deep linked article page in a blog to have a unique Like button, like how CNN is implemented.  So I did this:

However, when you click Like, it adds a link in your profile section on Facebook for that specific deep link.  For example, check out the article link added here from CNN:

You could imagine that very quickly this area would be cluttered with all the articles a person had liked on news sites and blogs.  Then I noticed this suggestion from the Open Graph Best Practices:

Make only real-life things into objects. Users don’t want news articles and other transient content as objects on their profile.

This advice makes sense, though it’s inconsistent that Facebook would tout their partner (CNN) whose implementation contradicts this.  Thus, I moved the Like button into the footer, making it site wide, and added a Digg link in it’s place.

Ideally, users clicking the Like button would be added to the BKWLD Facebook page (we previously had a group, which we’re deprecating).  So far, I’m not seeing this happen; users who Like our Facebook page and users who Like us on the BKWLD site appear to be dropped into separate buckets.  The Social Graph markup doesn’t have a field to specifically relate the object (our site) with a Facebook Page.  I assume that Facebook uses some black magic to join the references to BKWLD in the Social Graph metas with the BKWLD references in our Facebook Page.  Possibly this isn’t working because our Facebook page is so new.  Or possibly something got confused during my initial implementation that was per blog article.  It also doesn’t appear that the “fb:admins” meta tag is having any effect.  I’m curious to see if this generated page will be automatically merged into the official BKWLD Facebook Page in the next few days.  Or if a person Likes a site on the Facebook site and that site has Open Graph markup on the home page, does Facebook read it and pull that info in?

In sum, I think the social plugin and Open Graph standard are pretty great in terms of functionality for users that can be added with minimal effort by developers.  I hope some clarification comes from Facebook about how (or if) merging works between different pages.

We went to StackOverflow’s Dev Days earlier this year.  One big plus of it was it’s cost: $100 a head.  The speakers gave us an overview of technologies that we don’t use regularly (there wasn’t a lot of LAMP love) and the FogBuzz keynote made me realize that some of the issues we’ve faced in the growth of ground(ctrl) and Elastic aren’t unique to us.  Which brings us to SXSW, which 6 of us just back from.

We brought a pretty big team to SXSW and it works there since the conference is so multidisciplinary.  During the day we split up often, so that people could meet with other folks who were there or attend panels specific to their interests.  As anyone who is our friend on Gowalla will attest (sorry for all the spam), we “checked in” to let each other know where we were.  Some of the panels I enjoyed the most were on iPhone UI design, new methods of tactile interaction, and the marketing strategy behind the Bing launch.  I was able to meet some the Appcelerator dev’s at the meetup they held, which was a great opportunity for me to ask them questions.  During the night we caroused between the free parties that different companies held (Pure Volume, Gowalla, etc).

So will we go again? I think so.  In talking with our crew, it sounds like we unanimously agreed that the panels lacked enough depth.  Many were overviews or stated the obvious too much.  There wasn’t enough detail and brainy insight.  That being said, there was usually a tidbit or two I picked up from the panels I attended.  And, there was a lot of value in getting time with coworkers in a stress free environment.  As opposed to doing some extracurricular activity (like our snowboard trip in December), the framework of a conference focused our conversation on work themed stuff, spurning creativity and new ideas.  I think this last point is what would have me taking us back again.  While we could plan a fun activity locally for a much lower cost, having a structure based on learning (even if it fell short) is special about going to a conference and led to growth outside of the sessions.

Next up for us is An Event Apart in Seattle.  If your company is thinking of going to industry events and you want to chat about whether it’s worth the cost or not (I’m still chewing on this myself), hit me up in the comments.

Thankfully for the internet I have the luxury of publishing what was sent to them as my true views on the subject, and thankfully for my not-so-very-prolific-blogging-career, I have an article “in the can”.  So here goes:

Quite simply put, it is the designer’s job to visually convey the message they are hired to deliver.  A lot goes into doing that well, and being diametrically opposed to a project’s purpose definitely would not help.  So then even if a designer did try to set their personal beliefs aside in the spirit of “gettin’ the job done,” at what point does that become irresponsible and a disservice to the paying party?  No matter how much you loath the purpose, to me that plain disservice becomes its own isolated case of ‘wrong’ as a business value.

To me I think a number of things go into considering an assignment, and certainly personal morals and values are not the least of which that would play a part of that filter.  Obviously the more typical filters for me as the CEO are, will it enhance our brand, is it financially responsible, will it burn out the team, do we like the idea, etc…Normally the project’s nature is much more innocuous then offensive to any set of morals.  You know, selling a backpack, an mp3 player, a piece of software, and so on.

Being of the more independent mind set, I would provoke any designer, or anyone else for that matter, to simply turn down what they want to turn down for opposing any personal moral or value.  Certainly freelancers have that liberty, and as an employer I give my team that same liberty.  Now sometimes we disagree on whether a project is good for the company, and we listen to those opinions as well.

Earlier on in our history we did get approached to do a couple projects that did in fact oppose my personal beliefs.  I think I’d prefer to not get into the nitty gritty as to what and why, but they started somewhat harmless.  We took the projects, and as they progressed through development, the projects became more and more opposing.  At first I simply personally backed-off from offering my help.  One of which we finished, although I would argue not our best project ever (serving my earlier point), and the other we resigned.  From those experiences I know now to stay away from projects I do not believe in.  But again, that encompasses much more then morals and values these days.

2009 had been a challenging year for all of us.  And in a year that I would of expected to take any paying project, we have turned down more then we ever have.  That does not mean every project is a party, but it does mean to choose whether or not to accept it through some sort of filter that you (either as an independent or agency) have defined so that you, your team, your portfolio, or your bottom line is served, and then in turn the client is best served.

Steve Jobs described the iPad as a magical device but we’ve yet to see anything really magical achieved with it (yes, I realize it’s not available for sale just yet). Running with the magical theme one thing a tablet version of magazine could do that a print version could not is a moving photo/video cover ala the newspapers in Harry Potter. Esquire recently had an augmented reality issue, something like this could be the norm for digital magazines.

My examples aren’t really anything new either — they’ve both been thought up and/or executed already. The iPad and it’s tablet brethren represent a new take on computing and the computer, I’d like to see the apps developed for them offer a fresh perspective and experience as well.

In lieu of Christmas gifts, we here at Buk decided to embrace a great America commercialized holiday and send our clients and partners Valentines instead.

If you did not receive one of these little diddys, one of three things could be possible:

1. We totally blew it and forgot you

2. You are on our shit list

3. We just started hanging out and we are not on kissing terms yet

Either way, much love. josh