peat dot org

The Wife is leaving her job to start a career in consulting, and my projects are heating up, which means The Office will be a little too crowded.

Thankfully, the kind folks at lessDistracted have offered me some space to set up shop. There should be good times ahead, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tables Turned, Urban Honking, and a fine selection of creative developers.

In the meantime, my thoughts on e-commerce and supply chains are coalescing into something interesting; I’ve fallen in love with FreeBSD again; and I’ve ordered more RAM for Ghidorah.

Good times ahead.

All of my Macs since 2000 have been named after Godzilla monsters:

• Godzilla, the 400MHz G4 PowerMac
• Mothra, the 600MHz G3 iBook
• Ebirah, the 800MHz G4 iBook

.. and now Ghidorah, the 1.83GHz MacBook.

My first impressions are quite favorable. The keyboard has exellent action, it’s quite fast, it’s very quiet, and the screen is superb. I was a little worried about the “glossy” finish at first, but it’s a non-issue.

I’ve named it Ghidorah, because it’s the first iBook to offically support multi-head displays. And it kicks ass and apparently breathes fire if you’re running CPU intensive programs.

I have officially resigned from my position as the Project Director at PLANET ARGON. It’s an amicable split—we had a really good time in the five months we worked together, but our paths are diverging and it’s time for me to move on.

To what? Well, I have a few things in mind. There’s a point where my interests in business, the Internet, and manufacturing collide, so I’m doing a little exploration. I’ve also picked up contracts with past clients, and uncovered some promising leads to keep me happy in the meantime.

That said, I’m available on a part time basis as an analyst or consultant for your web projects. I have quite a bit of experience helping people turn good ideas into great applications, and I’m particularly interested in helping businesses make the most of the web.

Send me an e-mail, and lets see what we can cook up.

The future looks good, and the weather’s nice. I’m off to play some frisbee.

Last night I attended a great presentation by Pop Art at the DevGroup NW monthly meeting. They have a very challenging project—building 30 custom sites in 30 weeks for SelecTrucks, the used truck arm of Freightliner.

They patterned their approach around the CSS Zen Garden concept:

• Build a common XHTML template that gets syndicated to all of the different dealer sites. No tables in the markup!
• Provide a completely customized design for each site, based entirely on CSS.

Here’s a couple examples that demonstrate how flexible this can be:

• SelecTruck of Memphis
• SelecTruck of Massachussets
• SelecTruck of Chicago
• SelecTruck of Louisville

Pretty darned wow.

Justin Garrity, Kelly White, Ryan Parr, and Dave Selden of Pop Art were on hand to talk about how the sites came together. Although Ben Fogarty wasn’t present, his designs certainly were.

Here’s a brief summary of the highlights ..

Design

Because of the extremely tight deadlines, the designers could only spend about 25 hours per site. They had to drop all of their heavy processes for sussing information out of clients, and instead depended entirely on an initial interview and a “half way” comp.

The initial interview had a process that really impressed me. They called it “word verses word.” Basically speaking, it was presenting the client with two contrasting words and having them pick one:

• Modern v. Traditional
• Bold v. Classic
• Block v. Curvy

You get the idea. This is something I’ll definitely be incorporating into my client discussions in the future.

Tech

The sites are all served from a DotNetNuke backend. The front end templating system was modified to produce clean XHTML templates, and they use browser sniffing to send stylesheets tailored specifically to the major platforms (IE 5.5/6, FireFox/Mozilla, Safari).

All of the graphics are alpha PNGs, and the designs make heavy use of layering to achieve the desired effects. They saved a huge amount of work by using CSS based layouts with “unsliced” graphics instead of tables and cut up image nightmares.

Much of the typography is done through the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR. sIFR replaces custom graphics as a way to display fonts outside the standard (and rather boring) core of web friendly fonts.

The mechanism is quite interesting: it examines an element in a page, loads a Flash file and scales it to fit inside of that element, and then inserts and scales the original text inside the element to fit the new Flash area. Simply put, you can maintain clean XHTML markup and a single Flash template, and sIFR does the rest.

Pretty darned awesome.

Pop Art has done an incredible job with such a complex project. They have some amazingly talented people on staff, and a good set of tools. Kudos!

As a side note, my cousin works at Freightliner and was able to give me a tour of the manufacturing floor at their Portland facility. It’s straight-up amazing to see these 100% custom trucks get assembled, painted, and accessorized ..

Update: Ryan’s posted a link to PopArt’s official page for the SelecTrucks project.

Hot off the presses: corkd.com .. yet another wine review site, but with an eye for tasteful design, and (thus far) well written reviews.

On a related note, I’d like to plug the Hollywood Wine and Espresso Bar in the Hollywood neighborhood in Portland. To enumerate upon it’s excellence:

1. Good prices (the tastings are a particularly good deal!)
2. Delicious paninis, salads, and other small plates
3. Friendly, non-snooty, geek friendly service
4. Free wifi

For kicks I wanted to see what LeapFish has to say about the value of peat.org:

It has been determined based on search results that this name may be extensively valuable beyond the scope of the LeapFish.com domain analysis tool. It is recommended that you seek the services of a complete domain appraisal company rather than rely on this estimate. Thank You.

Estimated Base Value: $630.00

Estimated Actual Value: $66,150.00

Shoot. And I thought the best part about this domain was getting to read a lot of PETA e-mail.

Here’s something I keep seeing when digging around on the ‘net and in books, and would like some perspective on:

PERT. The Program Evaluation and Review Technique.

Some people say it’s a relic of the Cold War; some people say it’s a good way to quantify how quickly individual milestones in a project can be completed.

What say you?

Have I mentioned I love 3×5 index cards? They are quite possibly one of the finest inventions ever, for several reasons:

• Cheap
• Portable
• Recyclable
• Small

The first three are obvious, but the last one is the lynchpin. Small is good because it enforces a reasonable constraint on the amount of information it contains. Small is good because you can fit a whole bunch on a desk, and you can move them around easily. Small is good because it’s “less,” and as the fine folks at 37 Signals like to say … Less is more.

What does this have to do with Project Borat? Well, index cards are really terrifically superbly great for collecting user stories. They’re not nearly as intimidating as filling out an official looking forms, and the interface is a heck of a lot more intuitive than any project management software I’ve ever seen. They encourage ideas, and when it comes time to cull the herd, they’re satisfying to rip up and chuck in the recycle bin.

The process of generating user stories with index cards is about as simple as it gets:

1. Write down a goal on the front of the card. Something like “Person signs up for the site.”
2. On the back of the card, jot down some notes about the process. “Requires opt-in confirmation of e-mail address, unique username”
3. Cluster cards in some logically satisfying manner on the table. I suggest by functionality. For example, “User invites a friend to join the site” and “User removes a friend from friends list” both seem to fit into friend management.

When you think you have good coverage, take each cluster of cards and rubber band them together. If you have a lot of stacks and a lot of cards, feel free to put a top card on the stack to identify the general functionality.

In the case of Project Borat, it took about 1.5 hours to generate ~65 use cases in 12 groups. This isn’t complete coverage, it’s just for the business specific features of the site. Other things (like administrative user management) aren’t as sexy, and are relatively straight forward to implement without much guidance.

If you read my last installment, you’re probably thinking “where does the butcher paper fit into this?” It hasn’t, but it will—I just thought it would be good to break things down a bit more. The next step is selecting a core set of use cases that really define what the application is about … and then we hit the butcher paper.

For your enjoyment, I present Project Borat¹, a top secret development project here at PLANET ARGON. What is it? I can’t tell you. Who’s the client? I can’t say. What does it do? Sorry. When will we see it? Nope.

How are you building it? Ahh .. yes. That’s something I can (and will) enthusiastically talk about in the months to come.

A little background: Project Borat is a pretty big project with high expectations, a fairly tight delivery schedule, an open ended feature set, and flexible priorities. The Client has extensive startup experience, expertise in the target market, and some rather good ideas.

All told, it’s a situation remarkably well suited for discussing agile practices and The PLANET ARGON Way.

So, first things first: requirements gathering and prototyping. We need to understand what The Client wants to accomplish, and deliver some mockups demonstrating how it can be done. This is going to take several days spread over the course of two weeks.

Yesterday we kicked things off with a healthy whiteboard session, identifying most of the significant components and their interactions. The result was mostly lists with a few interface doodles to demonstrate how information could be represented. We took pictures of the whiteboard as it filled up, and the relevant information was transcribed into about a thousand words for discussion on Basecamp.

While it was evident The Client had done considerable brainstorming and exploration on their own, a couple of significant and unique new features came to light. Take experts in unrelated fields, give them a common goal and a little time .. and innovation happens.

Good stuff.

Next up: Indexing Project Borat

¹ You may be asking yourself ”… Borat?” Borat is short for Borat Sagdiyev—a (fictional) Kazakh journalist who appears from time to time on Da Ali G Show. This project has nothing to do with the fine country of Kazakhstan, British television, or fake journalism.