Internet from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.

Columbus is a leader in the Midwest. The city can boast a culture of growth and business know-how where people, ideas and capital are coming together. The Chamber is and should be the expression of Columbus’ economic hub. dynamIt is a member, first and foremost, because of the opportunities afforded to participate in the local economy and thinking. In a business era of interdependencies and quickly-dying vertical solutions (regardless of industry), businesses should commit to creating an environment of opportunities for all economic players. dynamIt truly believes that if this city and economy succeed, we will too. Through membership, we also benefit from the programming, events, and connections which the Chamber facilitates.

In case you missed it, dynamIt was also featured recently in two university publications - Xavier Magazine, and the Miami University Farmer School of Business.

I represented dynamIt at the event by giving a talk titled, “WordPress in the Corporate World.” My talk was the presentation of a case study in which we implemented WordPress for Fortune 500 company McGraw-Hill who has a large presence here in Columbus.

Back in January 2009, we, along with partner Sync Creative, launched a microsite for the Glencoe division of McGraw-Hill. Sync brought us to the table to provide web strategy and web development of the site. We recommended and implemented WordPress in order to meet their project goals. The project has had overwhelmingly positive results meeting all success criteria. This same site also earned recognition from the New York Times in March.

Click here to download the complete case study and read more (pdf).

All-in-all, really happy with what I got out of WordCamp and excited by how we can continue to leverage WordPress in the future.

If you look closely around the web you will rarely see tabs that overlap each other. Usually, each tab is in its own self-contained box. The reason for this is that if two tabs overlap then turning one of those to its activate state requires the swapping of multiple graphics. This makes using sprites much more difficult and less effective (and if you’re still using JavaScript for image rollovers, well, that gets even messier).

So, I am working on the UI for the tabs seen to the right. You’ll notice that not only do they overlap, but each has a drop shadow that covers all the tabs and only those tabs that are “underneath” it. It is literally like we have four tabbed sheets of paper here that we want to be able to stack in any order. In my opinion, this is a pretty silky graphic effect, check it out, the PG. 2 tabs is all the way on the bottom, followed by PG. 1, then PG. 3, with PG. 4 on top.

My solution is to use absolute positioning along with transparent PNGs. Yes, transparent PNGs mean bad news for IE 6, but the solution is otherwise super-easy to work.

Simply cut out each individual tab and keep its alpha-channel transparency by saving as a PNG. Then, absolutely position each tab in its correct place on the page

Now here is the trick. If the server generates the active tab, whichever tab appears last in the HTML code will be on top based on the natural stacking order (i.e. no need to fool with z-index).

If the client-side can alter the active tab, messing with z-index is really not that difficult. I haven’t tried it, but something like the following should work thanks to jQuery.

$(’.tab’).click( function() { $(this).siblings().css(’z-index’, 1).end().css(’z-index’, 2); } );

Oh yeah, if you do need rollovers this method is totally compatible with your traditional CSS sprite.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/education/22textbook.html?_r=1

I turned to the Document Object Model (DOM) class built into PHP, which I had not yet used. The documentation sucks, but it is actually a really powerful class. It is, however, lacking one vital function. The ability to get and set the HTML/XML contents of an individual node, that is, the equivalent of the innerHTML property of JavaScript DOM.

I googled for a solution but came up empty. So, I had to invent the solution myself, and after quite some time of tinkering around here’s what I’ve got:

function innerHTML(&$dom, &$node, $html = false) {

     ## if html parameter not specified, return the current contents of $node
     if($html === false) {

          $doc = new DOMDocument();
          foreach ($node->childNodes as $child)
          $doc->appendChild($doc->importNode($child, true));

           return $doc->saveHTML();

      } else {

           ## get rid of all current children
           foreach ($node->childNodes as $child)
               $node->removeChild($child);

          ## if html is empty, we are done.
          if($html == '') return;

          ## load up $html as DOM fragment, append it to our now-empty $node
          $f = $dom->createDocumentFragment();
          $f->appendXML($html);
          $node->appendChild( $f );
     }

}

Not sure if this is the most efficient solution, but from what I’ve seen so far, it works.

You might have an answer to this question. I hope so, at least. But does that answer directly address the bottom line? How has your website increased the value of your business in the last month? The last six? How does that compare to last year? Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living” - I’ll bastardize that comment for my own purposes and claim that the unexamined site is not worth owning. Not quite as eloquent, but it gets the point across.

Caveat: don’t just pay lip service to metrics and tell me how many visitors you’ve seen in the last month. That’s a factor, but not quite so important. Instead, tell me what you’re doing with those numbers - what they’re seeking - why are they looking for it - and how can we profit from it?

A website is imbued with the powerful ability to provide to the owner a whole helluva lot of information about site usage. Who’s visiting - when - even why and how. It tells you a lot about the interests and profile of your visitors. It’s whispering secrets regarding the way your business should move.

Are you listening?

Taking a page out of Leah Culver’s playbook, I did just that. It is not quite as efficient since I am using base 36 instead of base 56 as Leah suggests. Since I wanted to whip this up quickly (only took me about 30 minutes to get it off the ground), I used PHP’s built-in base_convert function which only accommodates bases between 2 and 36.

Anyway, you can now shorten URLs on us by visiting http://dynamit.us/url.

I am working on some basic statistics for the usage. Any thoughts on what would be cool to track?

It usually goes something like this: you write up your test cases to include actions that should work and some that should fail. You do black box testing and you do white box testing. Then, rinse and repeat.

Eventually you get to a point where you feel comfortable launching, but it does not stop there. Because this is web, we are not building software to be implemented in one company or institution or even across a single industry. Rather, when we decide it is time to launch a site, we instantly open ourselves up to a world of many different people with many different skill and experience levels.

Herein lies the difficulty. All of us internally, as well as the client, have a great understanding of the system and how it should be used, even if we have an opportunity to have some outsiders test the app, there is no way to predict how each individual will use it. Simply put, it is an incredibly difficult task to consider all the ways in which a user can possibly use each function of a web application.

Recently we launched an online store for a client. The client came back with one of their customers reporting that they got an error message when trying to checkout. After a good while attempting to reproduce this problem (and failing to do so), I realized that the user was using the site in a way that had originally never crossed my mind. Worst of all, the user’s actions were very logical. The site was designed so that there was no way to get to the final checkout stage unless you had items in your cart and you had entered all of your billing and shipping data. But once this was done, you were taken to a page that displayed your cart and a form to enter a payment method and checkout. I surmised that the user arrived here, decided they were not yet ready to purchase and bookmarked this page to return later. Like I said, a very logical action. However, upon return their session-based shopping cart and user data was gone, resulting in an error message.

Just one example of how quality assurance in web means being prepared for every user.

Note: I just wrote this article without mentioning the fact that we also must deal with things such as screen resolution, operating system, web browser, browser settings, plugins installed, etc. Yes, there are still people out there using Windows 98 and IE6 with cookies disabled and flash not installed. And, we’ve got to be ready for it.