I was pretty excited to go to SxSW this year. There’s a lot of hype circling this event, and how it’s one of the best interactive events in the country. I was excited to learn new things and take home tons of inspiring ideas and thoughts.

I left rather disappointed.

I didn’t learn anything. I may have learned the best way to get free drinks and free food at the event, or where to get free shirts, but I really didn’t learn anything. Most every talk I went to started as a promotion “I do this for this company, and this company does all these things, and please buy services or products from this company for xyz reasons!” “Hope you enjoyed the talk! Please visit our website at xyz.com! We do xyz the best!”

or whatever.

Granted, I will say probably out of all the talks I went to, there were about 2 that stuck out. One was the guy from Tom’s shoes who just had an amazing drive to help people and inspire others, and the other was on product design and invoking feelings, and the relations between objects and people.

I couldn’t tell you how much Matt and I spent between the two of us, but it was in the thousands. It wasn’t worth what we took back. So be weary if you’re going to go to it again. We won’t conclude or dismiss the idea of not ever going again, we probably will give the event another chance. But 2011 was the year of suckage for us, and we’d rather spend our money vacationing in New Zealand.

In regards to the location, pretty sweet college town. There’s a great sushi place around the corner and an awesome diner that we both loved to go to in the morning to watch the unorganized madness of the staff. Very entertaining!

Lastly, I will say, if I were to run an event like this, I’d limit talk promotions to 1 slide and 1 minute long. Get to the point of what your company offers and why it’s “amazing.”

Unrelated note: I opened up freelance business again, starting October 15th. Get your project scopes in!

I’ve either been in this business too long and getting old or they’re still just teaching BS in schools. Now, we must remember, everything I know about the web, was never taught to me in a traditional 4 year university like these students have learned. It actually makes me kind of annoyed that these kids aren’t learning on their own. Annoyed and nervous.

CSS started dominating when? 2004? 2005? 2007 tables were dead? Not really sure the turning point of when using tables for layout was a faux pas, but I remember when I stopped, which was about 2007 when I had gotten my first professional web day job and said, okay Alison, time to strap up and ditch the bad practices you do in your spare time.

Today, it’s rare you see tables for layout. Very rare. They still exist in legacy web applications that were originally built. Or you’ll see them used in the wild for other things as well. Not very often. However, when it comes to e-mail design, there is no using CSS for layout. It’s all tables! Props to Apple Mail for supporting virtually every documented CSS3 property imaginable (Apple Mail seems to be doing better than IE9, now that’s just sad). But, not everyone uses Apple Mail. In fact the most used email clients are probably the worst: Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, etc.

Now there are some basic CSS properties you can use such as font-family, font-size, etc. But don’t go whipping out padding and margin thinking that’s going to do anything for you. Because it’s not. Unless your entire list is using Apple Mail, I recommend against it.

So alas, what do we do? We go back 10 years and take it back to tables for layout. Not only tables, but don’t use background images either, gmail hates them.

With that said, you still need to learn how to lay out a design in tables. Table nesting is the best practice for email design. Until e-mail desktop clients and webmail offer better support for CSS, it’s tables all the way. For a list of support, check out campaign monitor.

For e-mail designs, check out Beautiful Spam.

So enough of the day job, I wanted to let you all know about my new blog (which is *gasp!* not on WordPress), Beautiful Spam. It features various e-blasts, mostly rendered in gmail or microsoft entourage. Sometimes the blasts are not so beautiful, others I just poke fun at, or notice small subtle “errors” on the layout.

Definitely check it out though, it’s interesting to see. I didn’t start doing e-mail programming until my time here at Schifino Lee. I’ve learned so much about email marketing and what to do and not to do. There is definitely a lack of standards when it comes to programming and I hope one day that changes. E-mail clients have yet to implement some of the basic CSS properties. Props to Apple Mail though, I think just about everything and then some is supported. Gmail has to be one of the worst for sure- which is surprising coming from Google. Then again it’s not surprising since programmers like text-based e-mails (or so I’m assuming). For the rest of us, we like visuals, but note that we probably don’t like to be tracked. I don’t want companies knowing I opened their e-mail or what I clicked on. While sometimes it’s nice data to have, I’d rather know that traffic increased to my websites after X email went out on Y date. IMO I don’t think e-mails should have a shit load of links.

If you’re interested in doing email campaigns, I definitely recommend to check out Campaign Monitor’s CSS support table. Also check out the Email Design Guidelines and mozey your way over to the E-mail Standards Project. All good stuff.

Personally, I use Mail Chimp to send out things. At work we use Constant Contact. Leave that up to you guys to choose how you want to manage your lists!

Take care, and send your beautiful spam to afox@alisonfoxall.com to be featured on the blog!

I was nervous, but I felt like I needed to give back to the WordPress and tech community, since after all, Barcamp is free to attend with free food and free beer! Anyways, my slides are on slideshare and were also featured on the Slideshare design home page for like a week! My WordPress slides from Barcamp 2010 can now be found here on slideshare.

If there is anything about my presentation you’d like me to elaborate on, make a comment below. ^_^

Thanks guys, and I hope you enjoyed my presentation about WordPress custom theme development!

<!DOCTYPE html>
  <head>
   <meta charset=”utf-8″>
   <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes” />
<title>My Video</title>
  <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”icon.png” />
   <style>
    body {margin:0;}
   </style>
 </head>
<body>
  <video width=”1024″ height=”750″ controls=”true”>
   <source src=”videos/video-name.mov” /><!– WebKit video  –>
  </video>
</body>
</html>

New HTML5 Doctype

Apple iPad meta tags for controlling the viewport / iPad in full screen mode

Native Video Player for HTML5

After thinking it was a rougue plug-in and trying to find off-site links in my site, I couldn’t find anything. I contacted my host about it, and they told me that my site may have been compromised, but it sounded like the issue was coming from your end.

After ignoring my site for almost a month, Google decided to black-list my site until I investigated in further detail, removed the malware, and prevent future attacks.

At this point, I was upset.

Tearing through my website, I discovered that there was an admin user other than myself on my install! But it didn’t stop there, no. My entire grid was infected. Every WordPress install I had on my server, was infected with this attack by “johnnyA.” Naturally, I Googled it. I found this article explaining what happened, how to fix it, and what was going on about it.

To my surprise, this attack was only a Media Temple related WordPress attack. They gave me good information on how to fix attacks by johnnyA.

My theme files were mostly infected. It would be some random file like single.php or archive.php with injected JavaScript. Also, in each case, the footer.php file was also injected. In some cases, my jQuery files were compromised. And lastly, even my non-WordPress hosted client, a flash site, was also compromised, with injected files into their directory. They were deleted. The attack happened at approximately July 11, 2010 at 10:34 am; system wide.

None of my database tables were infected, to my surprise, only theme files, and jQuery files. Naturally, after safe removal of everything, I changed all passwords, etc for basically everything.

So. The point of this post is simple: If you’re hosted by Media Temple, and have a WordPress blog, you need to make sure that you were not attacked. Just check your admin users and make sure you’re the only one there.

Thank you all for your continued support of AlisonFoxall.com!

What motivates us? Purpose.

If we don’t have a purpose and we’re not contributing to the greater human good- we don’t perform as well as others. I’ll let you watch the video.

I’m going to tell you a rather interesting story while I worked at FedEx Ground. Or you can just skip this part since you’ve already seen the video. I dealt with our inbound operation- for about 4 years. I know, what in the world is Alison Foxall, a designer, doing in a place like that? It started out as just a job for college, but quickly grew into MUCH more- so much more that even though I’ve been gone from the place for quite some time now- it remains an active part of my life.

Let’s skip over some personal stories involving FedEx Ground and move into when I was a manager at a smaller facility about 40 miles south of Tampa. At the time I loved FedEx- I lived and breathed it, had a blast working, hitting out goals, and competing with others to be the “best.” FXG is very competitive in that way- especially in the Florida region. Not only were we competitive inside the facility, we competed with other facilities in the region, and the region as a whole competed with regions around the nation. All to do one very simple thing: to provide an outstanding FedEx experience as outlined in the Purple Promise.

Being competitive sure did drive me. Until I was the best. I took a new building, with co-worker Jared Hall, and we turned it into a pretty damn good building with what we had, in as little as a few months with a full staff that was quite untrained. Money was not motivating. I was making a lot more freelancing on the side than I was at FXG. So when I had no competition, especially within in the building- what was motivating me? I had a purpose. I made a goal for myself: Package Handler retention.

FedEx Ground has one of the worst turn-over rates. I’ve seen people quit in an hour. Others have quit right at orientation. Most popular is they won’t come back the next day. Some manage to stay one week, then quit. Why do people quit jobs in the beginning? Usually it’s one or two things: Management or the job really does suck that bad.

Before I became a manager I observed the problem: management. You can’t exactly train a person in a job if you’re not a good teacher- no matter how good you are at the job- if you suck at teaching, you’re going to suck at training. So the problem was that these new people were not being engaged- they didn’t know what to do.

Now let’s get to the other problem: the job sucks. This is a matter of opinion. I loved the job personally. I didn’t have to talk to hundreds of customers going in and out of the door- or deal with snobby customers, or homeless people (when I worked at 7-11). Plus I was getting a work out (loading) while getting paid.

But back to the main deal- I’m getting side tracked. So the job some-what sucks, and management was not engaging. I had my purpose and motivation for working there again. I wanted to retain package handlers. I wanted to make them like working there, and I didn’t want any new hire quitting on the first day or week. I’m happy to report that this never happened to me. Although that may have been due to the different location I was in, and the current state of the market (not a lot of jobs).

I engaged them, made friends, all while making sure we were hitting our goals. One of the basis was building a team. They all had to gel together – like a football team. I remember watching the Tampa Bay Bucs with practically all new players and only a few vets, it was very difficult to not only win games, but to just play together in general. And it showed. The only way I was going to build my team was to have retention, train constantly, and follow up constantly with them. People aren’t going to work as well if they hate their boss- I know because I’ve been there. So back to the job sucking- that was a constant reminder having to wake up around 3am everyday. I made sure all my people knew about all the programs available to them through FedEx to save money- a major incentive to working there, which goes back to the monetary value talked about in the video. Problem for FedEx is working at 10 bucks an hour starting pay was not that great for doing this type of work. It was okay, but not nearly enough to provide motivation for people.

When I was a package handler, in the beginning it was money- but then it got really boring, and there were no challenges to the job. I found motivation through my old manager Ateeq Zahir. I worked for him and I was motivated to make sure he “approved.” We’ll leave that story alone.

So what’s the story in all this? I found my purpose, my motivation at FedEx later on when money was not why I worked there anymore. I wanted to help. I wasn’t interested in helping shippers or customers receiving packages (I had to do that, it was required), but I was interested in helping my employees. I wanted to help our contractors. I wanted to make sure they had all they needed to succeed and that I could teach them all I knew about the company, all the little tricks and tips and whatnot. I wanted to help make the job suck less. And I did. And then I left. I fulfilled my purpose, and I reached my single goal that I wrote down in my review: Reduce package handler turn-over. I’m proud to say that 60% of the package handlers that started in day 1 when this particular facility opened, were still there when I left. The others left for FT jobs and had nothing to do with the job sucking.

My purpose and motivation remains the same for what I do now. I want to help my clients achieve their goals. I want to contribute to people’s happiness and overall success. Helping.

What is your motivation?

Come see what I see.

Team Tampa:

Since there was no specific bill to talk about to our reps, we mostly went to say “Thank you!” We discussed how important advertising fuels Florida’s economy. it is estimated that advertising is responsible for 20 percent of our total economic activity in Florida, and about 15 percent of our Florida workforce depends on advertising. So we shared our thanks for not taxing advertising or making new regulations.

We also told them our thanks and gave support for the House Bill 697 which is a tax incentive for the film and entertainment industry here in Florida. And also House Bill 867 – New laws for new media! Which will re-write our current law on how politicians advertise, specifically for social media.

All in all, it was a great experience not only to meet with our local representatives and senators, but also to meet the great people in the 4th District of the AAF (the rest of the Ad 2 and AAF peeps in Florida). I also sat on the floor of the Senate, in one of their chairs, and went into the senate chamber – tour led by our very own, Victor Crist, past president of Ad 2 Tampa Bay!

I think it was an important thing for me to get involved in. After all, if we don’t speak up and let them know were here, they’ll run right over us! We need to make sure that advertising services remain tax free so we can fuel our economy and most important – so I can continue doing what I love!

To learn more about Ad 2, visit our website at http://ad2tampabay.org/ or become a fan of our Facebook Page and view more photos from the event!

One of my goals when designing an interface like this one is to keep the information presented clear and concise. For the most part, I think the design hits the nail on the head. With good direction from (The) Carl Vervisch, we all achieved a great functional site, and an ecstatic client. I wasn’t crazy about the color palette, but I think it works. I think I remember saying something like “This is the the most website looking website I have ever done.” Usually when I build interfaces, they don’t look like websites at all, they look like desks, or paper.. Or what have you!

Currently Smallbizlaw.us is being maintained by Social Forces on the social media aspect. I’m not sure who is doing the modifications on the back/front-end, but just to add more credit to the site– Jean-Baptiste of Cats Who Code did some custom WordPress applications, which I think he did a great job. I always love his development! I think the only issue we had with Jean was a few words in english that didn’t make any sense! :)

All in all it was a good project to work on and I’m glad to see the client happy. I just hope his marketing techniques are working. I look forward to more strategic websites like this one– but I do hope that I’m more involved in the planning stages. I’m very eager to help more small business owners out.

Check out the site at http://smallbizlaw.us/ and let me know what you think!