Sonnet Media

For Working Authors: A Website with A Secret

2009-03-03T17:18:20Z

If you’re an author, you know that there are times for writing and there are times for getting out to promote your writing. Those times don’t always coincide. What happens when your readers go to find you on the Web when you’re working on the next book?

There’s nothing worse than a Web page with nothing but whitespace; no one likes to waste their precious click only to find “No events here, check back later.” Bad.

Dealing with a lot of authors we’ve figured out some ways to manage this. First, we create events sections to automatically show future events only. You don’t have to go back in and clean up old events so you don’t have to worry about your Web page showing that you last gave a reading when the Berlin Wall was still standing.

For those with a lot of events we do display past events when there are none in the future, but these are shown as an orderly archive. That helps by showing activity and setting up expectations for something to come. For some we combine news and events so when events disappear there’s news on the page.

But what if you’re spending most of your time writing right now? Dallas Hudgens is a writer with two novels to his credit. He had a blog once but really wanted to spend his time writing fiction. We created a site for him to showcase his books and the great reviews they received and even though he’s not out doing events right now, we wanted the site prepared, so we created places for news, events and other writing.

Fine, but what to do with those sections when they’re not being used? We hid them!

We told the code to say “if there are no future events hide the events page and the menu item leading to it.” If you’re technically inclined you know that this could cause problems with search engines, but we managed that by telling the code to say “if there’s no content on this page then tell the search engines that this page doesn’t exist.”

When there are events or news, they show up (in Dallas’s case both in the menu and in the about section) and you don’t have to do anything.

Click on the image above to see a screenshot of the front page of Dallas’s site if he currently had events and then visit his site to see what it looks like now. This may not be the solution for everyone, but we feel it works here. For every author we consider their individual situation and build the site based on a strategy for them. We also work closely with publicists when appropriate to make sure that the site fits with their strategy too.

Got ideas for the perfect author Website? Share them because we’re continually working to build sites that help your audience find you and help you not to worry about your Website.

Skylight Pictures “State of Fear” project subject of Center for Social Media Report

2009-02-13T19:25:16Z

The Center for Social Media recently published a report on how documentary filmmakers are using new tools to reach out to the public on the causes their films address. The report by Barbara Abrash, “Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement,” lauds the creators of State of Fear among others, for how they’ve used innovative technologies to engage their audience.

Skylight’s excellent film about Perú‘s healing after years of devastation by terrorists, both the Shining Path and the state-supported terrorism on the part of the Fujimori government, is subtitled “The Truth about Terrorism.” The film has struck a nerve with audiences all around the world (it was broadcast in over 150 countries), but perhaps no where as strongly as with Peruvians themselves.

While Skylight fully engages the world with social media and things like good old face to face outreach meetings (incredible to be a part of), the EDMQuechua (Estado de Miedo) project brought State of Fear to the Peruvian interior where the Quechua language dominates. Paco de Onís, Skylight’s producer, sent out a bunch of easy to use Flip video cameras to human rights workers in Perú and had them film testimonials at screenings.

For our part of the project, Sonnet Media built a micro-Website to locate screening information on Google maps, pull in news feeds from the trial of Fujimori (which got underway about the same time), photos from screenings and most importantly video and written testimony from those at the screenings. Technically speaking, we created a simple form for users to submit their videos or commentary, all of which became part of our database for use on the site.

It’s a great pleasure to work with a group of people who not only change the world, but also who embrace new means to engage their audience, putting social media to great use. In fact, embrace puts it lightly; Paco drives the use of social media and Skylight Pictures as a whole pushes every tool at their disposal to make their message heard. We’ve been consulting on their latest audience engagement project, IJCentral, and will have more to report on that soon.

Offline Access for Gmail is Finally Here

2009-01-29T14:15:33Z

Finally, the online and offline worlds take a big leap toward convergence with Google’s gmail going offline. It works through a program called Google Gears that stores your data on your browser. I’ve been using Google Gears for offline access my “Remember The Milk” online to-do list app`for a while now and it works seamlessly. I also use a lot of Gmail “Labs” features – beta releases of features that may be included in the standard version at some point – and have had nary a problem.

This is an excerpt, click here to read more »

Sonnet Media Launches Book Site for David Grann’s “The Lost City of Z”

2009-01-23T14:06:49Z

All of our projects are fun, some more than others. The Website for the book The Lost City of Z was a lot of fun, partly because David Grann, writer for the venerable New Yorker Magazine, was great to work with. A self-confessed luddite, he quickly became an enthusiastic participant in his site, jumping in to add and revise copy, and always with valuable input. Here’s what he said…

“Bud Parr and Sonnet Media did something truly amazing with the website for The Lost City of Z. They not only made the site into a place where one can easily access information about the book but they also made it as visually arresting and alluring as the heart of the jungle.”

The book, which traces the disappearance of intrepid Amazonian explorer Percy Fawcett, is fantastic, by the way. It will be released on February 24th and is already being made into a film by Brad Pitt.

For David’s site we used the Expression Engine content management system, as we do on all of our sites, and created a Flash slide show to introduce the book on the home page, an image gallery, media page, and a calendar and news page.

Sonnet Media Launches Film Site, The Greatest Silence, for Jackson Films

2008-12-23T16:08:39Z

We are very happy when we help bring great films to a new audience through the Web and working on The Greatest Silence, which won a Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, was a rewarding experience. Lisa Jackson’s film about the heinous crimes being committed against women in the Congo is an important work and hopefully through the Website Lisa’s team will enable more outreach and get the word out.

Lisa says: “Yeah Bud - you have done such an amazing job transforming our paleolithic site and turning it into something new, powerful, connecting and affecting. Thank you so much compadre.”

For this project we did a complete redesign of an existing site and incorporated a blog, screening calendar, outreach pages, Flash-based slide shows and trailer, all in an easily to update content management system.

Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Google Yourself!

2008-11-24T14:41:00Z

The word google has been used as a verb for a decade now and since it became an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 it has been part of our daily lexicon. Anyone who lives their life online has googled (the company insists on the lowercase and that one when referring to the company that we use the uppercase) themselves and for good reason: it’s part of the conversation.

This is an excerpt, click here to read more »

Congratulations James Cañón

2008-11-21T04:36:00Z

James Cañón, who recently moved to one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, was awarded one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes for his novel Tales from the Town of Widows. From his blog:

The 2008 French Prizes for Best First Novels were announced in Paris on Tuesday, November 18th. Le Prix du Premier Roman Etranger (Best First Foreign Novel Prize) went to Dans la Ville des Veuves Intrépides (Tales from the Town of Widows) by Colombian author James Cañón.

Congratulations James!

Carrie Kania Profiled

2008-11-20T04:59:00Z

Carrie Kania (Olive Reader blog), publisher of Harper Perennial, is profiled in The New York Observer. Carrie says about her job in the article:

“Basically, they said we need somebody to come in and really look at the backlist,” Ms. Kania said. “To look at what we’re doing with Aldous Huxley, and Sylvia Plath, and—you know, the backlist is just gold. It’s a beautiful backlist. I mean, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 100 Years of Solitude. You know? I mean, my God. The fact that I get to put a new cover on The Bell Jar? That’s crazy!”

Forget Memorable Passwords

2008-09-19T16:52:00Z

As we live more of our lives online it’s easy to get lost in all the passwords we’re forced to carry in our heads and it’s tempting to settle on something memorable that we can use for a lot of sites/accounts. But the following should come as a real warning:

“Yesterday, it was reported that wannabe VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked by a perpetrator wishing to find incriminating information in her emails. It was not done using some strange computer security vulnerability. It was not done by guessing her password. It was done just inthe same way as Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was hacked some time ago: by guessing the answer to the respective owner’s security questions. For Paris Hilton, it was the name of her dog. For Sarah Palin, it was her zip code, date of birth, ad where she met her husband.

How hard is it to learn somebody’s zip code? Not that hard.Try the whitepages. Date of birth? Easy for a public figure – try Google. This will take you less than a minute each. Now, we know that Sarah Palin and her husband were high school sweethearts. The answer to this question turned out to be “Wasilla High School”. All in all, it took the reported hacker less than 45 minutes to break into the account. In fact, using your pet’s name appears more security conscious than using zip code, date of birth and where you met your spouse.”

- IT World

This goes for personal as well as professional accounts. We suggest using long, non-word passwords, which may even include characters like ^#& and odd, perhaps even incorrect answers to security questions. These of course are not memorable, but there are many programs out there that will store them for you and your Web browser does too; Firefox is particularly good with handling passwords, although I’d suggest keeping them in another secure program as well (if you want suggestions for password storage programs, just drop me a line and be sure to mention if you’re on a mac or pc). Also think about changing your most important passwords from time to time. Organizations should have a formal protocol for this.

There is hope for our increasingly overloaded info-age life. Standards are being created to both increase security and make access easier. Some of those are very high-tech, but one standard, OpenID seems to be catching on widely. OpenID, according to Wikipedia is a a service that “allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.” I’ve been using it for a year or so at least and like the layer of security and relative simplicity, but it takes adoption by myriad Web applications and Web sites to be useful and we’re not there yet. Some of the services that use OpenID are Blogger, a free blogging service (owned by Google) and Basecamp, a project management system.

Press for Jelly Press

2008-05-09T18:46:00Z

The New Jersey Star Ledger has a terrific profile of our clients Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring whose blog JellyPress.com we just launched.

Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring were profiled in the Star Ledger and at Philly.com. The site we built for them, Jellypress.com is even mentioned. Here’s an excerpt from NJ.com:

“Cooking is a bright spot in our shared history. Nourishing one another and making sustenance—these are good things to pass on if you can,” noted Laura Schenone, 46, of Montclair, author of the newly released “The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family” (Norton, 2008) as well as “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances” (Norton, 2003).

With Nancy Gail Ring, 51, of West Orange, an artist and writer, Schenone has created Jellypress.com, an illustrated culinary blog that features “Antique Recipe Road Show,” which solicits questions about old recipes, and “Not To Be Forgotten,” which adapts an old recipe to contemporary life. “My hope is that it will get people interested in thinking about how food connects us from past to present,” explained Schenone. “There seem to be more people looking to the past for sustenance,” noted Ring.

A former pastry chef and author of “Walking on Walnuts” (Bantam, 1996), a culinary memoir that chronicled her experiences in Manhattan restaurants, Ring learned to make the mandelbrot, rugelach, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel of her Eastern European ancestors from her mother and grandmothers. “I still feel like my grandmothers are in the room with me when I’m baking,” she said.

Some Useful Stats for Thinking About Your Website

2008-05-06T14:35:01Z

I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.

As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:

Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.

(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

My comments:

(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.

(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.

(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.

Min Jin Lee is So in Vogue

2008-04-01T14:52:01Z

Our client Min Jin Lee reports this on her blog: The U.S. paperback of Free Food for Millionaires will be released on April 9th. It has a new cover designed by the talented art director Anne Twomey of Grand Central, and copies should be at bookstores near you presently. There’s a new essay in VOGUE this month (April 2008) titled “Weighing In” in its Up Front column.

Best of Both Worlds: Offline Access for Online Applications

2008-04-01T02:20:00Z

Google reports today that they are rolling out offline access for their Google Docs application and that will be just the first as they utilize their Open Source browser extension Google Gears to download and upload data from your hard drive to the Web in the background. This will allow you to use Google docs (and in the future other apps, I’ve already seen it in use on a nifty to-do app called Remember the Milk) whether or not you’re near an internet connection.

According to Macworld “Google has lofty aspirations that Apps – with Docs in tow – will extend its reach into medium-size and large companies, and to that end has been boosting its security and administration features, particularly in its fee-based Premier version.”

This is good news because I believe one of the major hurtles Web-based applications have to overcome is availability (at least until every corner of the earth has Wi-fi or its next iteration). Although the aggressively functional Zoho suite of online apps offers offline access, it’s Google’s success that will drive the industry toward Web apps. As offline access becomes a typical feature, adoption of online apps will widen and developers will be able to create better and more varied applications.

The key to Web-based applications is not just the convenience of never having to synch devices or being able to collaborate with teams (or coordinate with family), but the ease with which data can be used from one app to enhance another – say for instance, you could pull financial data in from an accounting app and manipulate it in a spreadsheet app, without downloading or synchronizing. It remains to be seen exactly how the new functionality will handle this “mashed up” data, but as with all of this technology, it’s a work in progress.

The New Fast Way To Find Out What’s Going On

2008-03-26T02:26:00Z

If you’re new to the concept of RSS, then this might be the fastest way to figure it out…

Tales from the Town of Widows Awards Finalist

2008-03-19T14:18:00Z

Our client James Cañón’s Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men, has been selected as a finalist for both the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award. The winners will be announced on April 28th and May 29th respectively.