Planet Argon Blog

The lack of

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:00 -0700

In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.
Kirk McDonald from Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won't Hire You

Admittedly, I don't know who has a college degree in computer science on our team. I don't.

Modern Web Development Workshop

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:20:00 -0700

Yesterday, we hosted the first Modern Web Development workshop here in Portland, Oregon. Jack and Brian took attendees on a tour of Bootstrap, Sass, Git, and Jekyll.

I snuck in and took a few photos…

Argon Trail

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:30:00 -0700

On April 28th, 2013… we rented a bus to take nearly 50 Ruby on Rails developers who traveled to Portland for RailsConf 2013 on a hike. Here is a group shot of nearly everyone.

We hope you had as much of a blast as we did!

Here are a bunch of photos I took…

The Best Parts of An Event Apart Seattle 2013

jack@planetargon.com (Jack Bouba) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:19:00 -0700

Last week, Brian and I sat with our peers in rapt attention at the Seattle occurrence of An Event Apart, the inspiring one-track web conference started by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer in 2005. Known as “the design conference for people who make websites,” AEA is a particularly acclaimed web conference for good reason. Zeldman and Meyer, visionaries famous for helping shape the web as we know it, gather a dozen of the web’s most influential creators and gifted presenters to share their thoughts, inquiries, and discoveries with the several hundred fortunate attendees.

Since you were too busy vacuuming and/or getting your tires rotated to attend, I’ve summarized the best parts. Enjoy!

Planet Argon Gets an Intern!

corinne@planetargon.com (Corinne Kunze) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:55:00 -0700

Hey! My name is Corinne and I’m excited to introduce myself as Planet Argon’s first intern! I’m currently a student studying art, graphic and web design at Portland State University. I was lucky enough to land an intern position here at Planet Argon.

A large part of my education has been from studying resources on the web. And by “studying” I mean for four or five months I locked myself in my apartment and tried to learn as much as I could about web design and development.

So, as you can imagine, after a while this got pretty lonely. The amount of information out there was daunting. I decided to put my new skills to use and launched a portfolio site in hopes I’d be able to land an internship where I could learn around professionals.

Can I Use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8?

brian@planetargon.com (Brian Middleton) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:59:00 -0700

Can I Use?

Here is a little knowledge nugget that Jack and I picked up during our time at An Event Apart: Seattle (more on that to come). We learned about this handy little site called caniuse.com that was created by Alexis Deveria. The site lets you look up HTML5, CSS, JS API, SVG, etc. elements to see what their support is across browsers. Then you can assess.. Can I use that?

We are freshly back from the conference and I have already started using and benefiting from it. Give it a look and find out what you can use. (Turns out you can use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8!)

Did Google kill RSS?

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:40:00 -0700

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.
Aldo Cortesi from Google, destroyer of ecosystems

My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?

UX and Front End Performance

carlos@planetargon.com (Carlos Rodriguez) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:29:00 -0700

Improving UX through Front End Performance

Good article that ties user experience to front end performance.

What is your compass metric?

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:40:00 -0800

Pick your compass metric

My old early-Rails adopter friend, Tobias, of Shopify shares how they the share their reporting metrics with the organization.

Inviting you to attend our first Modern Web Development Workshop

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:30:00 -0800

We’re pleased to announce the first scheduled date for our Modern Web Development Workshop, which will take place on Monday, May 6th, 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

Planet Argon Shake

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:00:00 -0800

A remix of our Danse Gooshers video from 2009.

Use Google Analytics and Spreadsheets to chart Page Load Time, Bounce and Exit Rates

jack@planetargon.com (Jack Bouba) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:48:00 -0800

We recently spoke with one of our clients about improving their site performance; specifically, we chatted about the relationship between page load time and user satisfaction. I found a number of articles relating page load speed to bounce rate, but there’s no study as convincing as an analysis of a client’s own statistics. With the help of Annie, our very own analytics expert, I was able to fumble my way through the creation of a helpful chart plotting load time versus exit and bounce rates using Google Analytics and Google Spreadsheets.

Couchbase Dev Day PDX

neil@planetargon.com (Neil Mahoney) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:33:00 -0800

Last week several argonauts made our way to Couchbase Dev Day PDX, where members of the Couchbase development team Jasdeep, Tugduall and John provided us with a walkthrough of the new features of Couchbase Server 2.0, along with tips and use cases for squeezing performance from data-centric apps. They gave us a rundown of their quickly evolving NoSql technologies and, since then, we've been mulling over how best to leverage Couchbase here at Planet Argon.

Social Media Marketing about to bust?

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:40:00 -0800

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the social media marketing bubble will burst soon enough.
Dave Allen from Social media marketing affinity fraud

What do you think?

The 2012 Year in Review

jack@planetargon.com (Jack Bouba) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:44:00 -0800

Every year, Planet Argon releases a retrospective compiling the past year’s events; this includes business accomplishments like app launches, and personal milestones like marriage and travels. A couple months ago, I, Jack Bouba, was tasked with getting the ball rolling for the 2012 Year in Review. I felt this was right up my alley because (1) I love being in charge and (2) I’ve been rolling balls since childhood.

Flash Message Conductor Now Rails 3 Compatible

carlos@planetargon.com (Carlos Rodriguez) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:12:00 -0800

As 2012 was winding down and the holiday season was winding up, I took time to work on some of our internal projects.

While updating some applications to Rails 3, I noticed that our gem, Flash Message Conductor, was not still Rails 3 ready.

Instead of replacing all of the syntactic sugar that Flash Message Conductor gives us to the Rails defaults in our applications, I decided to update the gem to use Rails 3.

I'm pleased to announce that Flash Message Conductor 2.0 is now available for download and it's compatible with all versions of Rails 3 (3.0, 3.1, and 3.2).

Still using Rails 2? Don't worry, you can still using version 1.x of the gem in your projects.

Helping the Hollywood Theatre

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:30:00 -0800

A "Marquee Day" For The Hollywood Theatre!

We helped out one of our fellow local businesses raise the funds to get a new marquee. We’re big fans of this historic Portland landmark and glad that we could do something to help shape the neighborhood for (we hope) many decades to come.

What are your users searching for?

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:08:00 -0800

Great video to highlight how important it is to monitor how your users are searching for your products. Are there alternate spellings, abbreviations, and/or pop-culture slang that they might be searching for that you’re search indexes aren’t accounting for?

In many of our e-commerce projects, we’ve worked on a handful of solutions to address this. For example, a product like “LA Vacation” could be found under a number of possible searches:

Los Angeles
L.A.
SoCal
City of Angels

The great thing with most search index tools is that you can shove a lot of additional keywords without having to expose this to your users in some archaic list on the site.

Painting Planet Argon, part 10

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Carl Anderson.

Painting Planet Argon, part 9

robby@planetargon.com (Robby Russell) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Jack Bouba.