The Internet is a place of constantly shifting content and services. New sites are added every second, and more infrastructure is developed in the blink of an eye. But…

Rarely have we had to deal with the equivalent of a mass extinction of web content. To a great degree, we assume that anything that is placed on the Internet will be there forever (or what we narrow-mindedly view as “forever”). And as such we build trust into services that are deployed: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, Delicious, etc. (just to name a few).

Last week, the well-known design resource site Smashing Magazine made a move that was abrupt and unexpected. Visitors viewing their site on March 22nd were automatically redirected to a landing page with the title “Smashing Magazine Needs Use Your Help Today“. This page urged viewers to purchase a $10 copy of content articles collected in PDF, vaguely indicating that the site and its Smashing Network parent company were possibly maybe in some infinitesimal way on the verge of utter collapse and please, sir, give us some money?

Whatever the internal situation maybe have been, it was unfortunate because Smashing Mag is a good provider of useful and (more importantly) original content for creative professionals – specifically those in my area(s) of expertise. And as suddenly dire as the situation seemed to be, I began wondering what would happen if Smashing Magazine powered down the servers tomorrow and closed up shop forever.

Bookmarks have been a staple of web browsing since… well, forever? While physically possible, it’s highly impractical to store a local copy of all content you find on the web – defeating the purpose of the Internet and information sharing in general. The idea is simple enough: you’ve found something in the tubes you’d like to take note of but don’t want to keep a running spreadsheet somewhere, so just use the browser’s bookmarking options. In recent times, this has migrated out of the browser and moved to services like Delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia (more on them in a moment).

Suppose that Smashing Mag simply ceases to exist. They would almost assuredly try and sell their existing content to cover their outstanding bills, which would then end up making its way into the archives of various other sites around the net. But by-and-large, a great many people who have saved references to articles will be set adrift. I can easily think of ten articles I have bookmarked from their site that I’ve referred to for help or a tutorial in the past week. If SM goes, so go those resources.

This brought back some of the thoughts I had at the time Ma.gnolia went under, for reasons much less sublime than the delicate dance of revenue vs. the bills that have to be paid. Ma.gnolia’s servers simply blew up. Ka-boom. Gone. All those bookmarks and bits of info someone thought were worth keeping? Not there anymore. Some lucky people were able to get partial data recovery, but the disaster wiped out most everyone’s information permanently and effectively ended Ma.gnolia’s service.

We’ve built up trust in a variety of services, services that we go so far as to place intimate information into and to store significant resources and (speaking metaphysically) important parts of our lives. But we tend to forget that these services are largely free and exist from funding because of third-party interest (most likely for your ad revenue), ignoring a sad reality that when the bill collectors (or worse, the database grim reaper) come calling all the userbase-loyalty in the world isn’t necessarily going to save your data – be it created or bookmarked. What happens if Yahoo! Decides that Flickr is too much a drain on their resources? What if Google suddenly scraps Gmail? Unlikely for companies that are so large, but the point is you don’t know because you don’t have direct control over it.

You can make the same arguments for brick-and-mortar providers. What happens if my utility company moves to another region? What if my bank goes under? What if my insurance company stops supporting me? These things happen all the time, and they would happen much more often on the Internet but for the fact that, despite its world-wide nature, there still exist relatively few major services on the web. When they happen in the real world they are potentially life-altering, and the increasing degree to which we store information externally means that the same result could happen on the web.

So what am I getting at? I don’t know – just musing I suppose. Events like this cause me to worry about this wonderful, magical online world where we build and share and ride ponies while petting kittens. It’s fantastic, and the fantasy can make us forget that the only truly safe place for your data is burned onto a disc in a fireproof safe. Just something to ponder.

Six inches. Six inches is all they needed to move over to the left to let me have enough space to make a desperately needed right turn and set me trundling merrily on home toward the leftover chili that was (I’m certain) eagerly awaiting my patronage. I had just finished an hour-long workout at the gym after a gloomy Monday at work, and I just wanted to go home. Chili. Water. Sitting. Six inches.

The occupant – I won’t mention age or gender – sat blissfully unaware of the world outside, concentrating instead on something incredibly interesting on their cellphone. At times like this I try and dissect my anger, to attempt to put reasoning behind my feelings and determine if they are justified or not. I quickly determined in this case that they were, namely because I always make sure the people behind me have room to turn if the road permits it. This got me thinking about why I always make the effort to be aware of my surroundings, accommodate people as best I can, and generally try not to be a total idiot or a jackass.

I think it stems from an incident when I was very young. To be frank, I can’t remember how old I was or where the event took place. However, I distinctly recall being in a very crowded environment (possibly a mall or Wal-Mart) bumbling around in front of people who were trying to get from point A to point B when my dad grabbed me by my shoulders, spun me around, and very loudly and succinctly declared “PAY ATTENTION”.

This always stuck with me, and I think the world would be a better place if more people remembered that direction. I spend a significant portion of my mental capabilities in paying attention to the world around me, and making sure that I help out when I can or at the very least avoid being an obstacle. I try and bring this into all of my activities, whether it’s checking behind me to see if I need to hold the door for someone entering the locker room at the gym, planning, designing, and coding my projects so that people after me will be able to handle them, or (yes) making sure that the person behind me who desperately wants to get home after a tiring day of drudgery has room to turn.

The typical mode of human thought is: I am all. I am the most important thing. Others should be courteous to me. It takes effort to look outside yourself and see if there is something you can do to make life just a bit easier for someone else, which is probably why most people don’t do it. It’s infuriatingly simple to do, especially considering that you don’t have to go out of your way for it – you’re already going to stand at the printer for 20 minutes while your 700 page report prints; why not let the poor chap behind you with five copies go first?

Take a little extra time and mentally remove yourself from the picture in favor of examining your actions from the point of others – specifically, the inconvenience you’re probably causing them. With any luck, you might end up behind someone who ticks the same way you do and you’ll make it home five minutes early.

Umbraco

Umbraco was my initial and most promising choice for evaluation. At first blush it seemed to have good documentation, flexibility, was open source, permissions structure, and (this is particularly important to me) a growing and active community around it. Umbraco boasted several very enticing features, including revisions, a workflow process, custom document type creation, plugin capability, and the ability to easily integrate custom user controls. Perhaps most important for my personal role in the redesign was that Umbraco didn’t store all of its templating, formatting, and CSS in a database (as many CMS solutions do) and instead wrote to physical files on the server. Changes made in the admin would write to the physical files, and changes to the physical files outside of Umbraco would be reflected in its admin interface.

My optimism started to fade after installing and getting my hands dirty with the CMS. Umbraco is extremely flexible… to the point of almost not functioning as a CMS and more as a framework. Standard features such as predefined document types functionality, blogging, and even a search module weren’t included; these would all need to be developed mostly from scratch. There is a boilerplate sample site plugin that can be installed to learn from, but it is confusing at best. It becomes increasingly clear that Umbraco has been written for the dedicated developer (or at least from their viewpoint) and the time hasn’t been taken to ensure easy understanding from a less programmatic viewpoint. The user interface for the admin is very barebones and somewhat confusing, again defeating the purpose of a CMS.

Umbraco also makes extensive use of XSLT to accomplish much of its content and templating output. This was a large part of the confusion in using the system, as some content seemed to be stored in XML files, while other parts are stored in the database. This led me to questions of how a search feature would work in practice and the performance of storing the data in XML versus pulling it from the DB. The documentation, while prolific, is less than helpful and largely devoid of any sort of standard style guide for ease of understanding.

All-in-all, I can’t recommend Umbraco for the end user, which is ultimately what a CMS is built for. If you have the time and skills needed to develop functionality from scratch, Umbraco provides a nice framework to build upon. If you don’t know XSL/XSLT, it is a requirement to learn it for using the system – even for basic things like outputting a navigation list. The permissions capabilities are standard, but nothing to write home about. The community is active, but it still has a long way to go to achieve the standards of usability and pervasiveness of alternative options, such as WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc.

Sitefinity

Sitefinity is the CMS offering of .NET UI giant Telerik. We already use Telerik’s RadControls product line and are relatively familiar with their methodologies. They offer both a live demo version (without having to register!), and a downloadable trial version. After playing with the freebie web demo to determine basic usability and process, I downloaded the trial and installed it locally.

The user interface and workflow for Sitefinity is much more polished than any of the other CMS options I evaluated, with the possible exception of Drupal. It comes with most of the content types and features that are generally used on websites out-of-the-box, including blogs, events, and even an in-admin email newsletter manager. It has the ability to create custom search modules and RSS feeds without needing to touch the controlling code. This is nice because while the Telerik team has taken the pains to create a module API, Sitefinity doesn’t let you see its source code.

The templating process for Sitefinity is somewhat odd, but I think this lies more in my relative unfamiliarity with the way .NET typically structures and defines “theming” and less with their implementation of it. Nonetheless, I’ve yet to fully understand how one creates a template and the references the necessary resources (like CSS and images). I’m certain the capability is there, and I’m in the process of reading through their 50+ page users manual PDF to discover where it makes its lair.

Sitefinity is currently the front-runner for our system of choice. Non-technical personnel will need to use the system, and the permissions/users structure is granular enough to make this easy to setup. While I have reservations for my personal role in the redesign – namely the creation and implementation of templates and the overall frontend functionality – the admin workflow for editing and adding new content is fairly smooth. Should we need additional functionality (and we will) the well-documented API should be able to accommodate anything we want to do. It’s worth noting that most of the included modules and document types seem to have hard-coded output templates that are compiled into the CMS runtimes; it doesn’t appear that you can edit these, so if you want different markup or functionality than the included functionality, the module will need to be rewritten and provision for that capability included. The $899 price tag is steep especially when compared to the prospect of open source alternatives, but the time has obviously been taken to make the user experience pleasant and useful and build in extensibility.

DotNetNuke

I installed DotNetNuke with less than the normal enthusiam I’ve had for evaluating the other options on my list, largely because of a prior experience with it some years back. Still, I banished this from my mind as unfair and did my best to not let it color my opinions. Much to my pleasant surprise, ‘Nuke turned out to be a worthy (if somewhat eccentric) contender.

Reading through the documentation on developing a theme or “skin”, it quickly became apparent that a lot of thought was put into the engine driving the CMS. This unfortunately hasn’t manifested itself on the admin side of things, as the interface and workflow is a bit too abstracted and becomes confusing. Still, comparing features-to-features ‘Nuke has more capability out-of-the-box than Sitefinity does – but not by much. The skinning process makes more sense to me than the implementation provided in Sitefinity, but both are going to require a shift in both my mindset and workflow compared to my typical fare of WordPress themes.

An important item to note is that DotNetNuke doesn’t really have an admin per se. Instead it operates from the standpoint that, if you are logged in and have the proper permissions, the site is the admin. This doesn’t agree with my personal preferences on the sbuject, but I can see it being easy to use for others who don’t have quite the anal-retentiveness and everything-must-be-separate-and-in-its-proper-placeness that I do. ‘Nuke is currently a close second, largely because of its open-source price tag. While not nearly as user-friendly, its abilities match or exceed those of Sitefinity in the realm of extensibility. I believe the final decision will come down to the numbers and the requirements of our content team; it’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have sole responsibility for.

Kentico

I knew this option was almost certainly out of the running due to its $1999 starting price. Still, they had a web demo to try out free of charge. I was immediately greeted with OMG SO MANY OPTIONS THERE ARE BUTTONS AND BOXES EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!! To say Kentico is feature-packed would be a grave understatement – I would liken it to taking a drink from a high pressure fire hose. This CMS can do anything and everything, and if it can’t (because I can’t verify that it can because there are so many buttons and switches and levers) then why does it have all those buttons and switches and levers? The user interface reminds me largely of Plesk, which is to say that it is the promise of functionality wrapped in confusion and baked into the flaky crust of enigma.

Kentico can handle the administration of multiple websites and domains, multiple languages, content, navigation, etc from a single admin. It has extensive controls for SEO (namely URL rewriting). It is confusing as hell to edit content and apply themes/skins/styling. Fear it. Kentico is geared at enterprise level needs and packs a lot of punch. I can’t say that I don’t recommend it, but it definitely isn’t for us because of the price and sheer amount of features (and the learning curve associated with them). You may get the vague feeling that night classes will be needed to use the system, and you probably wouldn’t be wrong in that.

Drupal

If you know anything about Drupal, you might find it odd that I’ve included it in this list. Drupal is nominally a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application, but its development team has taken on the time and headaches needed to make it equally easy to run under IIS and has provided a database abstraction layer to make connecting to a non-supported database as painless as possible. Because of this last item, I thought it would be worth taking the time to evaluate in relation to our needs.

Drupal is nice, it has a lot of capabilities by default and has provision for the creation of custom content types and blogging. The templating capability is easy enough and user interface is relatively simply to understand. I didn’t spend a large amount of time walking through its features because it became quickly apparent that anything it may have had in advantage over Sitefinity or the other options was still overshadowed by the need to write a custom database connector. While not an impossible task, it would take time and testing – an amount of which that would probably come close to the $899 pricetag of Sitefinity when considering the necessary diversion from working on our actual products. Also, it was 5:00 PM on Friday afternoon. Still, it was definitely worth a shot and I would push harder to use this CMS if our infrastructure were less SQL Server-centric.

Some other options that were discarded for various reasons – ranging from infrastructure incompability to install issues to pricing – but that are still worth noting include: AxCMS, Titan CMS, Movable Type (the Enterprise edition contains MSSQL/Oracle connectivity), and Ektron. Like most anything, each of these other options has their own merits and shortcomings. I highly encourage anyone to evaluate these solutions as well if any of the options discussed above fails to meet approval. I welcome comments or experiences that anyone else has had that can better flesh out the pros and cons of the items reviewed on this list.

I take great pains to keep up with news and info related (directly or indirectly) to my particular areas of expertise. During the week, I typically filter out all the links, articles, tutorials, tools, etc that appear in my RSS subscriptions, Twitter feeds, newsletters, and general perusal. At work, this gets translated into emails I send out to my fellow developers in the hopes that they may glean something useful, or at the very least have an interesting read. For myself, these end up in my vast, every-lengthening bookmarks list, which I have been suprisingly slow to add to a service like Delicious.

So, I’ve decided to start making posts of Useful Things, and because I’m all crazy about acronyms and stuff I’m going to call them LUTs. I thought about calling them Selected Lists of Useful Things… but I think we know what that would end up shortened to. Anyone reading these gets the added benefit of the info already being filtered out from all the plankton that drifts through the media ocean each day. And like any journey, it begins with this first step:

List of Useful Things – Week of March 14^th

Resources

Debugging tools for IE

http://samuli.hakoniemi.net/debugging-and-testing-in-internet-explorer-made-easy/

I don’t develop in IE (at least, as a primary). Part of that is a residual disgust with Microsoft from the IE6 regime years, but largely it has to do with the fact that there have never been quality tools or approaches for debugging issues in IE, compared to tools like Firefox and – more recently – Chrome. The tools listed here put a heavy dent in that viewpoint.

jQuery References

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/uncovering-jquerys-hidden-features/

http://addyosmani.com/blog/50-jquery-snippets-for-developers/

You can never have too many lists of snippets or brief how-tos on hand. These links provide a fairly extensive, if arbitrary, list ranging from simple items to things I barely know anything about. Especially useful is the concise explanation of event namespacing and what that means for rolling your own plugin.

User Experience

http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/essential-controls-for-web-applications/

A well-developed list of UI controls for use in, well… anything. Screenshots and examples included! A good, quick-reference list for inspiration on your next UI project or redesign.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?156

PDFs and pages of process diagrams relating to design, development, UI, and UX.

http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2010/02/26/table-ui-patterns.aspx

The title says it all: “Ultimate guide to table UI patterns”

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/11/forms-on-mobile-devices-modern-solutions/

Working on an iPhone app, or Droid doodle? Some examples of input forms on mobile devices/OS’s.

Articles

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/25/designing-user-interfaces-for-business-web-applications/

Containing some reference items but largely dealing with the theory behind designing for business applications versus traditional websites, a well-written article that lays out the processes involved and some best-practices for creating the levers and switches users will flip to run a web app.

http://vimeo.com/9641036

A fantastic video visualization of data pertaining to web usage, social networking, communications usage, etc, etc. Superb visual motif and a fun little soundtrack:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/9641036[/vimeo]

Tools

http://gomockingbird.com/

A completely free, easy-to-use, web-based wireframing app. Exports to PDF or PNG formats. Create an account, save your work, share it with other people. Safari, Firefox, and Chrome only.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me (even vaguely) that my life has changed substantially within the last year or so. I had never considered myself unhappy; I’ve been fortunate enough to have fantastic friends throughout the years, a supportive and loving (if somewhat eccentric) family, the blessing of a keen intellect, a stable upbringing, financial common sense, etc. etc. The list continues on to the point that I start to become vapid and lose the humility I strive so carefully to cultivate.

That being said, I was unhappy… whether I knew it or not. I spent most of my college years in a relationship that everyone but myself knew was going nowhere. There were fights, there were good times, there was ambivalence – the details are unimportant. I knew what an ideal relationship should be, and this wasn’t it. I felt like a hopeless romantic, and was teetering on the point of coming to terms with a reality in which love is just another imperfect facet of a flawed existence.

I’m rambling here. I want to describe my wedding day.

Fast forward to 2008. Relationship has been on the rocks and is finally over. I’m working a job I see going nowhere but can’t leave because I absolutely love the family of friends I’ve developed there. One in particular. Brenda and I had worked together for roughly two years, becoming very close friends. Best friends. More than friends. Everyone but us knew we were destined to be together in the type of relationship that makes other people’s teeth rot from the cuteness – the same people who, of course, knew my previous relationship was heading to the landfill.

The series of events that led to the day I am laboriously attempting to even try to describe are legion – saved some day for our children and grandchildren. On September 1^st, 2008 at roughly 12:15ish AM I proposed to Brenda after a wonderful party with all of our friends at the townhouse I lived in at the time. A little over a year later, on October 17^th, 2009… we were married. Let me describe that day:

Like most important events in our all too brief lives, our wedding day arrived at once much too quickly and after what seemed an eternity of planning. Flowers had been ordered, food prepared, expensive and uncomfortable garments leased for ridiculous prices, friends and family briefed, cameras readied, cakes baked, rehearsal dinners consumed, and money spent, money spent, money spent. We were frugal, but also keenly aware that we only intended to do this once. It wasn’t going to be big, it wasn’t going to be lavish, but it was going to be ours.

The day started oddly. I had spent the night in the guest bedroom because of the strange idea of waking up next to my imminent wife-to-be and languidly saying “Good morning, dear… shall we get married today?” A good friend of ours who would be an usher had stayed the evening on the couch after he and I had consumed a nontrivial amount of wine (beer in his case), recalling old times, weird co-workers, and general philosophy. I awoke to the sound of Brenda knocking on the door, telling me she loved me, and that she would see me in a little while.

Our friend, Eric, went off to run some pre-event errands while I bathed and groomed hurriedly in an attempt to make to time get my car washed so I could pick Brenda up in it at the end of the day. I went to Auto Magic where the salesman on duty tried to sell me the full package. I waved him off with a grin and said “I’m in a bit of a hurry… getting married today. She won’t care what the inside looks like. Probably won’t care what the outside looks like either.” I pulled on through and spent the next 30 minutes contemplating the buying decisions of the owners of the cars that rolled through the wash through the large windows inside, out of the cold. The day was overcast and windy, but not insurmountably so. I thought about the past, the road – sometimes rocky – that Brenda and I had traveled and reflected on how lucky I felt to be standing here, fidgeting while I waited for my car to be made presentable for the most important day of my life.

I drove to the church, which had been the subject of much discussion in the planning phase. It was not our home church but one that we held only loose associations with, largely to do with their college student ministry and our involvement therein. Entering in through the main doors I stared up into the space of the atrium and, much like the night we made the decision to have our wedding here, banished all thought of this day of days being held anywhere else. The church proper was beautiful, a modern testament to the love of people for God and his blessings in return. And what the reception area had in Gothic architectural appeal, the sanctuary matched in the classical wonder of its stained glass, stone, and wood facades.

Much of the next few hours until immediately before the ceremony is a blur. Brenda and her entourage were getting ready in the bridal suite located below the sanctuary, while I spent a brief period of time pouring myself into a tux and then relaxing in the downstairs lounge. Relatives came and went, jokes were made in the vein of “It’s not too late to back out now.. ha ha!”, stories were shared, and we generally attempted to keep the nerves and boredom from consuming us. There was ping pong. Some pictures were taken. And then the time came. I and four of my closest friends were standing behind the side door to the sanctuary, ears straining to hear if the processional tune had been struck up. Brian, our minister, looked around to us and said “Here we go.”

I only remember clearly two items after that. The first was Brenda, walking down the isle on the arm of our friend Kyle… grinning at me. She had purposefully kept her dress a secret, and the amazing beauty of it – of her – was well worth the wait. White strapless, with burgundy floral workings up the bodice, completed with the perfectly arranged bouquet of orange calla lilies. Second, I remember our kiss. It wasn’t unique or even particularly memorable in itself, but I remember understanding that this marks the beginning of what will hopefully be a very, very long journey together.

And then we’re running down the spiral stairs to the bridal suite, stopping to stare at each other for a moment, kiss, hug, breathe… and now back up. Pictures must be taken! The government document that allows us to get married (I’m still angry about that whole pretense) must be signed! Hugs must be given! Congratulations received! We cut the pictures short because we just didn’t care anymore; we wanted to see our friends, talk with the family, eat our freaking cake we paid for.

The cake was fantastic. So was the food – Qdoba catered in. I don’t remember much of it in detail except a profound irony that we had paid for all of this food and that I really wasn’t hungry at all, and that we wouldn’t be able to eat the leftovers because we would be in Chicago on our honeymoon. A bouquet was thrown at some people, and I flung a garter belt at some suspiciously eager male peers – a product of the thankfully bygone practice of needing proof that the marriage has been consummated.

We talked. People ate. People left. Our parents gathered up the ridiculous amount of gifts we had received, to be dropped by our house at a later time. I pulled the gleaming Mustang around, we got in the car, and left. I remember holding hands on the way home. We always do that when we drive, but I took particular note of it now. We laughed at the absurdity of the frenetic activity of the day, all so we could come home to a house we already lived in and prove to the world what we already had long known in our own hearts. I’ve forgotten a lot of the little details, but the end result is the same. I had married my best friend that day.

So, some months back we bought a house. As you may imagine, such a decision came at the end of a lot of debate and discussion… and an even longer searching period.

Brenda and I had been engaged for six months when we began discussing our impending apartment situation. By sheer luck our leases would be coming up at the same time at the end of July. The decision needed to be made as to if we would find an apartment together or plunge headlong into the search for our first home. Some of the defining factors in our debate were:

• We needed at least a three bedroom apartment, because we couldn’t fit all of our crap into anything smaller.

• A three bedroom apartment in our area would range anywhere from $850 – $1200 a month.

• Traditional 30 year loan rates were bouncing around between 3.5% – 5%.

• We had a sizable bit of savings to put down as a payment, thus significantly lessening our potential loan.

• Given the loan rates and money available to put down, a monthly house payment would range from $700 - $950.

We made the decision to buy a house. Or at least to look for one. And we picked a helluva time to do it. As history will reflect, the housing market at this time was (and still largely is) a complete buyer’s market. Foreclosures, short sales, and all-around good deals abounded. This proved to be a double-edged sword, however.

It provided a huge number of possibilities, but at the same time became a daunting search tasks. As we sat down with our realtor to browse through the listings that matched our criteria, we were bewildered to find over 300 potential homes. And the hunt was on.

We went “shopping” two or three times a week for a month and a half, spending part of our time filtering through the search results and physically visiting those houses we felt were most promising. We wanted a large kitchen, as we love to cook. We wanted a big back yard with lots of space, because we love to garden and grow things. Three bedrooms, two baths, a garage for two cars. Those were our goals.

The best part of the entire experience (in my opinion) was getting to go through these different homes and make inferences about the people who lived there, currently or in the past. You quickly start to pick up on little quirks and modifications, shortcomings and repairs that define the house as being more than just a collection of materials to keep the rain and cold out. People inhabited these places, and parts of their personalities and behaviors color the surroundings. Some were fools, having a foreclosed house that still contained the 60-inch plasma TVs, satellite dishes, and expensive furniture that were more important than keeping their home. Some were quaint, expressing unimpressive but satisfied existences. Some were simply… odd, containing bathrooms barely large enough to stand in, stumps in the middle of their concrete patios, or (in one case) a set of train tracks running through the back yard.

Ironically, when we finally found what would shortly become our first home, it only partially matched the “must-have” requirements we had set forth. Its kitchen was not as large as what we had wanted. Its backyard had little useable space, trading open area for a beautifully constructed and finished deck. Its three bedrooms were noticeably smaller than what other houses had boasted. No single facet of it was impressive overmuch.

But there was something about it, standing in the living room with the sunlight shining through the unique five window arrangement. There was a peace about the place that was welcoming. It was not overlarge but had open space which felt relaxing. For reasons I still cannot accurately describe, this house removed all thoughts of living anywhere else. This would be our home.

In summary, here are some of the important things we learned:

• Much like love, when you find the house for you… you’ll know it. Having some prerequisites helps narrow down the pool, but once you walk into the living room: you’ll know.

• Pay attention to the details. Things that seem minor (like a sticky door) aren’t insurmountable by any means, but they are things you will have to deal with at some point. Just make note.

• Enjoy the house hunt! You most likely won’t get to do it again for a long time (if ever) and it provides you with the rare entertainment factor of glimpsing into the private lives of random people.

• Find a good realtor, preferably someone you can find personal recommendations for or that you know personally.

• In general, look at all the angles, weigh your options, and make the decision that’s best for you.

As I sit here on the eve of February, it occurs to me that I haven’t written a post or any sort of update for this site since… er… the end of September. I have not been dead. I am, in fact, quite alive and have been enjoying life to its fullest. Enough so that any thought of slowing down and cataloging the experiences has been the furthest things from my mind. In retrospect, I believe this will have worked out to my advantage as the lens of time will allow me to better distill and describe the events of the recent past. Things have changed so dramatically for me since mid-July that I can barely believe where I am now, while at the same time wondering how I ever survived any other way.

A lot has happened in the last six months or so, and I haven’t documented hardly any of it. Things have wound significantly after the first of the year, and I now have the time (and inclination) to reflect on all that has gone on. Getting married, the honeymoon, buying a home, owning a home, job changes, websites, projects, goals, friends, parties, families… the list goes on.

I’m going to spend the next few weeks taking the time to write down these events here, on this site. The purpose of this site has changed greatly over time. It is, in many ways, a reflection of how I have changed over time, which I find perfectly fitting and right. It started as a way to get a job and has become over time a journal of thoughts. Stay tuned for more.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB for short) is a ginormous design and advertising firm based out of multiple cities. Their impressive client list includes powerhouse names such as Microsoft, Burger King, Old Navy, Best Buy, Coke Zero, etc. These are not amateur people. However, even the pros can sometimes foul up… and the higher you are the harder you can fall.

CPB has been the subject of much debate in the design community as of late because of their questionable practice of turning to crowdsourcing for some of their client projects. There are many issues with this, not the least of which is the comparison of minimal costs that CPB spends on crowdsourcing versus the ludicrous sums they are paid for their “work”. Crowdsourcing (or “spec work”) has been under fire for some time in the design community, many professionals feeling that such practices take unfair advantage of designers with potential talent who in the end are paid little for their skills except in the debatable fee of prestige.

The dam broke when news hit that a Brammo Electric Motorcycles had contracted CPB to redesign their logo as part of a branding project with the titanic firm. CPB turned again to its crowdsourcing practices, placing the job as a specwork bid on CrowdSpring, pricing it at a $1000 fee for the logo chosen. $1000. One Thousand Dollars. CPB’s fee to Brammo was probably easily 7-10 times that amount, plus the ability to add yet another successful brand to their repertoire. The news quickly made it’s wade into the Twitterverse, whereupon a flurry of angry messages were tossed about. Many were simple statements, many contained a #cpb hashtag, and many were @replies to CPB’s Twitter account itself.

The latter action mentioned here – the @replies to the CPB account – are the most important because the CPB website homepage devotes a good portion to the feedback the CPB Twitter account receives. For example:

So, upon the wave of angry sentiments via Twitter, CPB’s feed on their homepage was covered in a deluge of comments such as:

• “Crispin Porter is ‘crowdsourcing’ an identity job on spec site”
• “Crispin Porter + Bogusky has no integrity for design [link to article]“
• “Crispin Porter + Bogusky has no respect for design or its clients”
• etc, etc, etc

Ouch. Social media is a great thing when it works to your advantage but it is a fickle, fickle beast. CPB probably got what they deserved in this instance, but it serves as a valuable lesson to anyone using such tools: be careful. Transparency is generally valued in a business, but sometimes having the ability to control how press about you is distributed on your own site has its advantages.

Note: the above screenshots are no longer current as CPB has launched a new version of their site. However, they still devote a prominent portion of their homepage to a Twitter feed of responses and updates.

For my first foray into game reviewing (“professionally” at least), I decided to go to a nice upstart source for indie gaming goodness: the Greenhouse game store. Greenhouse is the brainchild of Penny Arcade authors Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins in conjunction with their partnered game developer, Hothead Games. Greenhouse has becoming a nice front for legitimate indie game development, and I thought it would be appropriate that I chose my first game from its pixel-based catalog.

And Yet It Moves (AYIM from here on out) is an interesting take on the traditional platform adventure/exploration game. The game is developed by Broken Rules, which originally created the game for use on the Wii; since I don’t own one of those (yet) I opted for the PC version. I highly recommend watching the teaser trailer as it will give you a nice feel for the game, and showcases much more of the environments that were available in the demo. The installation and startup interface look nicely polished, which is always a good thing to see as your initial introduction. It doesn’t require any sort of high-end graphic capabilities and is more akin to the PopCap genre of puzzle games in scope. In fact, while the point of the game seems to be exploration, it is done in a manner that involves the solving of puzzles of a directional and topographical nature. Of note is the general slowness of the cursor tracking in the game menus, something I sought to remedy via the control settings and found there was no ability for adjustment.

The puzzle factor of the game is perhaps its most interesting attribute, largely because of the play controls involved in solving the navigation roadblocks presented. The game is entirely keyboard based, having no use of the mouse involved for actual gameplay. Keyboard navigation consists of basic left and right movement with a standard jump action via the A, D, and W keys respectively. But the real novelty comes from the use of the left and right arrows keys to tilt the game axis 90 degrees clockwise or counter clockwise. This is the crux of the game and how the end goal of each level is achieved; obstacles, slopes, pits, etc are placed in your way and you must use the axial movement to change which direction is down. The majority of the demo was spent in freefall using this method for navigation, but interesting results can be attained when executing an axis rotation mid-jump.

Apart from its unique control setup, AYIM is defined by its visual style. The environments consist of platform 3D layers all skinned in a torn or crumpled paper motif, and your character/avatar resembles a notebook sketch brought to life. The animations are relatively smooth, but simple. The visual design is complimented by an eerie soundtrack of low-key music. There are no sound effects apart from the “whooshing” noise that is made when your character meets his demise.

The game is not a sandbox that you are free to explore; it has its limits and dangers. Your character’s death is typically achieved by attaining a critical velocity, upon which your body is shattered into its component pieces. My main complaint about the gameplay is that this magic velocity seems to be too quickly and easily attained, especially while trying to cope with the sudden rotational shifts required. You may also confront doom by falling into one of the “black zones” that border certain sections of the  level map, acting as an “Out of Bounds” device. The game allows for checkpoints that save your progression in each level, but in some cases these points are located a good distance from each other and separated by some complex topographical trials. This makes the game more challenging, but in a manner that hearkens back to the platform arcade games of old. Memory, muscle, and movement repetition are the tools to win the day in many situations, and rarely was I ever at a loss for discerning which direction I was supposed to head.

Overall, I’m left a bit ambivalent as to enjoyment received from the game. It certainly drew me by means of the puzzle factor, but I found myself asking “What is the point?” There is no antagonist, your character is allowed unlimited lives and attempts for each level, and each level basically consists of rotating yourself from point A to point B. I think my goal confusion was further enhanced by the mildly dark mood that the game portrays, a lonely paper figure scrambling his way across landscapes of muted colors and creaking noises. The environment could be described as sublime, but without any sort of inferred underlining meaning.

AYIM does have a multiplayer aspect in the form of web-based scoreboards. There’s no real incentive for submitting your scores and times other than having your name potentially float to the top of the list. In the same vein you may compete in a time trial against a fellow player, either via your local network or over the web. Judging from a quick glance at the scoreboards and user accounts, the game has garnered a fair following in this aspect.

Overall Rating: B

Pros

• Unique directional rotation gameplay
• Easy learning curve
• Lovely hand-drawn and torn paper environments

Cons

• Sluggish menu cursor movement
• Death is easily achieved
• “Multiplayer” feels tacked-on, but this isn’t the games main focus

I’ve been struggling recently with several things regarding my career / web presence over the past months. I’ve done a lot of study on finding a niche and have performed a lot of introspection regarding what I would like to do with my time. I have concluded the following:

• I dislike writing in general. I only like to write about things that I feel passionate for and have in-depth experience and knowledge of.
• Most of the things that I am passionate about and have experience in have already been written about thousands of times over.
• I dislike most of the people in my industry. I think many of them are very pretentious and show this in their commentaries and writings. An exception to this is Karj.
• If I do not contribute something to the web, then I will feel like a failure. It needs to be something personal, something mine. I believe it is important to the purpose of the web (and for my own sanity) that I add to it.
• Since I dislike writing and much of what I am good at has been covered over and over, I become mired in apathy toward producing any sort of content.

So… here I am again. I’ve decided to stab out in a direction that is entertaining for me, encompasses one of my life passions, and something that I feel I can place a personal mark on. I’m going to test drive and review indie games.

For those of you unacquainted with what an “indie” game is… it basically means that it isn’t produced by one of the mainstream conglomerates, like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sega, Nintendo, etc. You can liken it to indie movie production or the indie music scene, the story is the same: the little guys making their own way by kicking ass and taking names. The indie game sphere has exploded in just the last few years and there are tons of solo gaming projects being undertaken. Some are in it for the money, some are pure experimentation, many are written in their parents’ basement. These are my people, and I think I can give some objective and useful reviews.

So, for starters I’m going to try and install/download/play online one indie game every week or so (caveat: or so) and write the reviews on this site. If all goes well, I may end up migrating to a dedicated domain.

Feels good to have a plan.