What kind of nerds would we be if we didn’t remind you that Sunday, March 14 is Pi Day? The worst kind of nerds, nerds who don’t celebrate their culture. Also, it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday. Two very justifiable reason to throw a party. You can celebrate with a ThinkGeek Pi-Tini, and after a few of those you can start singing songs about Pi.

Related posts:

1. Great Moments in Nerdery: The Muppets sing Bohemian Rhapsody Really, this needs no other comment. ...
2. Great Moments in Nerdery: Falling in love at the Apple Store Was it nerdy enough to write a song about falling...
3. Great Moments in Nerdery: Meet the Elements There probably aren't very many things nerdier than singing...

But I have no thoughts, instead I have a very cool video to share.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Blazing the Oregon Trail; the making of video games in the time of cholera Last Friday we got the inside scoop on the making...
2. Plans start to come together A Dozen Nerdy Deeds, Getting Started from The Nerdery on...
3. House Party Open House from The Nerdery on Vimeo. To the...

So now you can understand when I spied the piece about Panic’s Status Board over on Lifehacker my first reaction was “Holy crap, that’s awesome.”

And it is:

You can get the details about the board and how effective it’s been over at Panic’s blog.

Related posts:

1. A company update in 11 tweets ...
2. How Scrabble is played in The Nerdery Sure this might look like a crappy cellphone picture...
3. The Blogger Oath requires mentioning the FriendFeed/Facebook thing If I don't mention that Facebook bought FriendFeed yesterday, I...

(and because it’s International Women’s Day, I have to tell you to make sure to read the comments)

Related posts:

1. Marketing Favre: Minnesota via Madison Avenue Many football nerds who live and die with the...
2. Clay Shirky’s ‘A Rant Against Women’ The time has come for all you to read Clay...
3. Friday Links: A brief history of the computer Photo essay: A Brief History of the Computer. Periodic...

• In honor of the Oscars on Sunday, AdFreak has complied the 66 best movie taglines of the past 20 years. It’s a fun list.
• If you missed Funny or Die’s Presidential Reunion, you should probably watch it. It’s pretty good.
• IE6 Funeral.
• Make does a nice little Q&A with the makers of that fabulous Ok Go video that took the Internet by storm this week.
• Homer’s iPhone.
• Lego games, four kinds of awesome.
• John Lennon’s Citroën ad fairly indefensible
• For The Nerdery’s bikers: 10 amazing bikes of the future.
• Darth Vader disco ball.
• Infographic of the week: What people are really buying onlive vs. offline.

Related posts:

1. Friday Links: Is collectivism ruining the Internet? Your must read of the week, Caterina Fake's response...
2. Interactive marketing expected to trump traditional advertising by 2014 Everyone who works in the interactive/digital marketing space is sort...
3. Wednesday Links: It’s kind of like Friday but not really Adrian Ho from Zeus Jones, has a great piece...

Second of all, thank you for mentioning us in your post announcing the win. We’re always happy to help!

“Congrats to all involved, especially our boys down at The Nerdery who moved mountains at the 11th hour many a time during the pre-holiday build up.”

Related posts:

1. Take Me Fishing.org wins Bronze Anvil Award We're pleased as punch to tell you Take Me...
2. Local Agency Holiday Cards Earlier this week Agency Spy did a nice round of...
3. Google Chrome OS announcement makes nerd’s pulse race It's been speculated for a while now that Google has...

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. The story begins Overnight Website Challenge: The Story Begins from Sierra Bravo on...
2. Everybody here has someone to lean on As time winds down the nerds and their nonprofits are...
3. Plans start to come together A Dozen Nerdy Deeds, Getting Started from The Nerdery on...

As The Nerdery has grown so has the mountain of bottles and caps. And even though nerds are often mistakenly stereotyped as pasty-faced gremlins who shun the outdoors, that’s just not true. We love the Earth. We dig it so much that we even have a Green Team that sends us all kinds of tips on how we can save energy and be a little nicer to the planet we call home.

To support that green effort, we switched to kegs of beer rather than our traditional bottles. It was tough taking the bottles and caps out of Bottle Cap, but with the kegs we’re no longer filling the recycle bin or wasting beer. And, as you’ll see from the video, we even use glass pint glasses instead of plastic cups. It’s more efficient all around.

So in the interest of educating you all on the proper way to pour beer, we offer you this short instructional video.
The video features Joshua Beardsley, Nerdery Brewmaster, reporting by Andrew Watson, and the intro musical stylings are courtesy of our own Kai Esbensen.

The Nerdery Presents: How to Pour from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Yes, Linus, there is a Great Pumpkin There is still time for you to feel the power...
2. Pentathanerd: Bogglegate rocks Nerdery As this edition of Inside The Nerdery went to...
3. Happy Thanksgiving The Nerdery spent today celebrating Thanksgiving as it's meant to...

Before the nerdy/needy speed-dating began, several secrets of Overnight success were revealed by the Praxis team (defending champs), represented by  Colle+McVoy’s Jason Striegel and The Nerdery’s Brian Litzenger. We’ve copied their notes and posted them verbatim below, but before you read and reread them, check out the good deeds they did for District 202 at last year’s Overnight Website Challenge.

Overnigt Website Challenge Strategery (unabridged), brought to you by Praxis:

In General

Come prepared

• Get your critical thinking tasks done as early in the game as possible.
• Assess risks as early as possible. You don’t want to be solving challenging problems at 4 AM in the morning.
• Work in small bursts. Attack something concrete 30-60 minutes. Accomplish it. Take a 10-minute break.

Teams

Designate roles now:

• server / connectivity / tech support
• database guru
• source control and backup master
• back-end cms team
• front-end html/css integration team
• flash / jquery / front end dev
• design team
• writing / content plan
• ia / wire-frames
• producer
• sweeper
• special ops

Designate a person who can respect everyone’s opinions and who will make tough choices when there are differences of opinion. Democracy and waiting for consensus do not work well on short timelines. Choose the 1 person who you can all be angry at. Ideally, this would be your producer or your team lead.

• Choose your tools – server environment, dev language, frameworks, CMS, plugins, etc.
• Go with what you know.
• Research what you don’t know. You don’t want to be figuring too much out the night of.
• Have an expert on your team for anything you’re choosing to use.

Have a backup plan if things don’t work out. If that new CMS you’ve been wanting to use doesn’t work out the way you were planning, be prepared to fall back on that clumsy solution that you know you know like the back of your hand. Be prepared to make this hard decision within a few hours of starting.

• Set up your server now.
• Get everything you plan to use running.
• Make sure everyone will be able to connect to it.
• Test / simulate if possible.

You DO NOT want to spend the first 3 hours trying to sort through connectivity issues, getting people passwords, and figuring out how to turn off php magic-quotes and get mod-rewrite working correctly in order to get your CMS running.

• Use source control.
• Or, have a really good plan for making snapshot backups.
• Have one or two people on the team make local backups at key checkpoints…
• Count on someone trashing the wrong folder and deleting 4 hours of work at 6AM in the morning – that someone will probably be you.

Plan your attack

• Get the whole team together for the first hour to discuss your plan with the client.
• Make sure you understand their audience(s) before you begin anything else.
• Make a site map. the client will hopefully bring their ideas to get the discussion started.
• Content audit – understand what needs to be written, what images need to be obtained, where to source content for each section of the site map.
• Spend time wireframing.

Listen to your client. Stand with what you believe is the right solution, but if you disagree on something in these early stages, don’t be afraid to listen some more. It’s worth the time. Remember that you both want to make the best site possible.

Outside of the standard CMS and site dev, plan on tackling only 1 or 2 custom features that address a core business objective.

• Have one owner per custom feature.  this is your special ops dude(s).
• Failure or difficulty here should not jeopardize the rest of the project.

Start work on your presentation right away

• Assign a presenter.
• This is a joint effort between the team presenter and the client.
• Your presentation starts when you begin planning. The output of your planning session should be an outline for what you want to accomplish. You want to present that the next day as an outline of what you  did accomplish.
• Do not start preparing this at 6 in the morning. You will have the effective IQ of a can of V8. Nobody cares about what tomato and celery have to say.

Non-profits

Come prepared

• You know your business better than anyone else.
• The better you can communicate this to your team, the more effective your site will be.
• The faster you can transfer this knowledge, the more time your team gets to work on making things to solve your problem.

Delegate expertise

• Your team knows design, understands user experience, and has experience making successful sites.
• Send an expert that can represent and communicate your organization’s’s mission, brand, and message.
• Allow your team to choose the tools they feel will best enable them to solve your business problem.

Understand your objectives

• What does your web site need to accomplish? What’s your goal? What would a successful site look like / what role would it perform? Who does your site need to talk to? Clients? Donors? Volunteers? The Public? Staff?
• Rank those audiences in order of their importance with respect to the site. Who does the site need to serve: Volunteers, Clients, and then Donors or Clients, Donors, and then Volunteers. This is hard, but you need to make a decision here.

For each audience, what does the site need to do for them?

• Why do they come to your site?
• What do they want to accomplish when they get there?
• What do you want to entice them to do?

Make a sitemap

• You can do this on a whiteboard or with post-its.
• Make a page for each piece of content that you can think of: home page, how to volunteer, about us, staff, location map, what we do, etc.
• Make sure you have accommodated the content that is essential for your primary audiences.
• Organize these pages into groups.
• Sometimes it helps to start first by grouping by audience.
• Also try grouping it by subject matter.

Try to keep the site from being more than 3 levels deep. Then aim to organize things at a max of 2 levels deep. Can you take it to one level? Find the balance between organization and the ease with which users can find your content.

Plan your content

• Does a page include photos?
• Other than just a few paragraphs of text, are there other relevant data types to think about? Dates, youtube videos, inventory, links to other pages.
• Special pages to consider with specific logic and data: job postsings, events, press releases, blogs, etc.

Find your content

• Plan on bringing everything to the event that might be edited and incorporated into the final site.
• Any content, images, or copy that isn’t brought to the event ready-to-go and awesome will need to be produced and written before it can be edited and incorporated into the site. Is this where you want your team to be spending their time?
• You might be lucky and have a word-smith on your team. It’s also possible that you’ll end up with programmers writing your homepage copy. Think about that.
• Images. Photography. Big. Beautiful. Personal. Bring them.
• Logos, and brand assets. Vector format, if possible.

Plan on participating

• You should expect to be a major contributor to your team.
• Your contribution will make the work better.
• A joint effort will be a huge motivator for all team members. At 5:00AM, you don’t want any team members feeling like slave labor.  Your skin in the game will prevent that from happening.
• Again, you have unique and special knowledge about your organization that can only make the work more relevant.

A Few Notes About Sleep

• Try and oversleep for at least 2 or three days prior to the event.
• If you think you need sleep, plan on taking a cat nap or two. If you are used to pushing through, do that.

Pace yourself with the expectation of diminishing returns on effort as time goes on. Try to get 80% of the work done in the first 12 hours, 15% of the work in the next 6 hours, and 4.5% of the work in the next 5, and the final .5% of work will be painstakingly constructed with the help of sleep-dep hallucinations and a few remaining slack-jawed, drooling, meat bags that you used to call teammates.

Beware of caffeine and sugar.

• It can help keep you awake, but it doesn’t mean you’re making smart decisions.
• You  will crash at some point.
• Caffeine might get you to 6:30AM. At 6:31 you may become a zombie.
• If you need them, save the stimulants for the last minute, just before you absolutely need them.
• Bananas.
• Step out the door and breath oxygen on occasion.

Pay attention to the happiness of your team members. People will get cranky. Crankiness is infective as it is ineffective. Try to cheer each other up before the whole team’s mood goes sour.

Thus concludes the free advice from Praxis. Jason seemed pretty serious about his endorsement for bananas, and as thanks for sharing his team’s advice we’ll be sure to have plenty.

Before speed-dating began, the nonprofits also heard about free training they’ll get from mixer hosts Benchmark Learning (formerly New Horizons of Minnesota), free branding and digital communications advice they’ll get from LaBreche, and options for free web hosting they’ll get from VISI, including their ReliaCloud option.  They also heard from Brian Peterson, a nonprofit veteran from last year, who returned to tell his experience working with perennial favorites Pollywog Stew to create a new site for a nonprofit he co-founded, Students Today, Leaders Forever; check out their transformation, including before/after shots.

Related posts:

1. Team-building Challenge (time to make the sausage) Right now, there are 177 individuals signed up as volunteers...
2. Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge teams selected Yesterday the Vikings moved to within just one more glorious...
3. Overnight Website Challenge gives people ‘faith & hope that there’s still good in society’ Before: When Todd Hinz, a board member of Friends...

Related posts:

1. Friday Links: This week there are no StarWars links, perhaps a first Our pals Zeus Jones, are featured in Operations as...
2. Friday Links: Star Wars Design Fails & IKEA font kerfuffle IKEA switches to Verdana, much teeth gnashing and garment...
3. Friday Links: Tips for raising a geek girl & can graphic design make you cry? Did you know the late John Hughes started his...