Redesigned BrandLogic.com Launches

We've spent quite sometime recently getting BrandLogic.com ported over to our BrandEnsemble product.  It's pretty exciting to actually have our website using our product.  Before we did it in JSP because it was a great selling feature for some companies that we were multi talented (which we are by the way). 

I think though that we were never really proud of our site before.  But now, I think this is the best version of our website, and we are really proud of going live with it.

It runs on ASP.NET 1.1 and SQL Server 2000.  It runs on our BrandLogic BrandEnsemble Content Management System. 

Here are some screen shots of the site (click to enlarge).

  

And some of our admin tools which our CEO states are "the best admin tools I have ever seen."

     

These shots show how our pages can be edited inline so you get a feel for what the page will look like before you're ready to publish, version control history of a page with the ability to revert a page back to a previous version and how a typical view of a group (our terminology of a directory) looks within the system.

BrandEnsemble has been used in many of our clients sites as well:

• St. John's University (Case study)
• Red Storm Sports (St. John's Athletics Web site)
• Image Manager (Case study)
  
• CareerSpace (Case study)
• Rockwell Collins (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Bausch & Lomb (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Texaco (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Wyeth (Intranet Brand Identity site)

Of course BrandEnsemble is only a piece of the overall branding puzzle that BrandLogic services offer to clients.  BrandEnsemble is what I am close to as I have contributed to it's development over these past eight years.

Here are some of BrandLogics other services we offer:

• Brand Strategy/Research
• Brand Design
• Brand Implementation
• Brand Management

And who we did it for.

Feel free to contact BrandLogic for your branding needs (tell them that Damn Ralph sent you).

I am a FAILURE!!!!

This was overheard at my house:

"Mommy? How do you spell disney for disney.com?", asks the middle child.

"It's in the favorites."

"Your favorites?"

"Yes, click off of that and click the E one, the regular internet."

A little piece inside of me died.

What does the future hold?

Where is the future heading with web programming/technologies?  I have considered myself Microsoft programmer since I graduated college.  I learned Classic ASP on the job, eventually I learned ASP.NET with VB.NET first then realized the power of C#.  I love C# I really do.  It makes programming a complex web site simple and straight forward.

We at BrandLogic would of never been able to program a complete CMS system for St. John's University in 3 weeks if it had not been for the robust framework that .NET offers.  Hell I am still to this day maintaining that code.

We've taken that code base and improved upon it and created the BrandEnsemble suite out of it.  Many clients are enjoying the benefits of the ease of programming C# provided us to be able to make a robust versioned CMS system.

So why do I feel uneasy?  Why do I feel like I am going down the wrong path?

It might be because ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2005 doesn't excite me like VS.NET 2003 did.  It doesn't excite me like the promise of what Ruby on Rails can provide.

But I think the most important part is it doesn't wow me in the wallet.  As a freelance web developer paying $1000 for a copy of Visual Studio.NET is a huge chunk of my annual freelance salary.  So upgrading to the next release isn't on the top of my lists of things to do right away.  Plus there is the cost of SQL Server, Windows, etc. etc. Basically I need a MSDN subscription.  What are they up to now?  $3000?  I stopped caring, I guess, the last time I looked at the new MSDN offerings and I thought I needed a lawyer to explain it to me.

So that brings me back to my original question: Where is the future?  Lately, I have been seriously thinking that the future, as is the present, is in open source software and the technologies that support it, programming languages like PHP and Ruby on Rails (there is a reason why they are so popular now).  If you own a PC (and if you don't save a paycheck and go out and get a barebones computer) everything else is free, free as in beer. 

So you got an idea for a cool web site? Get a computer, download a linux distro for your operating system, install the packages you need, get programming IDE's for PHP or Ruby free off of sites like SourceForge.  Get a Enterprise level database like MySql or Postgres free again by downloading it off the internet.  Download TheGimp for image processing.  Bam! You're up and running on the simple cost of the hardware.  And best of all your legal too!  Plus there is a community of starving programmer that are on the web willing to help you out.

But PHP is Old

Yeah, PHP has been around a long long time, but it's robust and again it's free.  And as I've highlighted before, Chris Prillio nailed it on the head once when he was stating the reasons why he was using PHP on his CMS Publishing project: PHP is prevailant on most if not all hosts that are out there right now.  So make a PHP site and chances are the majority of webmasters can install your software on their site.   Try to do that with an ASP.NET site with a SQL Server 2000 backend.

If you look around Silicon Valley now most Web 2.0 companies are using LAMP  (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) partly due to the low cost in a market where the revenue stream is still up in the air for most.  But they need the appeal of the masses to get the word out.

Scoble said something tonight that got me to write this post tonight, even though I been thinking it for the past couple of weeks.  He said, "LAMP is sure getting traction — I’ve stopped asking entrepreneurs what infrastructure they are using since the answer was so consistently LAMP."

A couple of days ago I saw a sponsor on TechCrunch post job listings for web developers/designers and it got me thinking if I all of a sudden found myself out in the mix again fighting for a job, I think my resume would fall to the bottom of the pile for most places that I think I would find fun to work at (although I have a family, which means the fun places are too risky for me).  My resume is very impressive I think.  My strengths are meeting the needs of our clients in a productive and efficient manner, providing the best customer service and experience with our clients, maintaining a long lasting and trusting relationship with our clients (in the 8 years I've worked at BrandLogic I can probably count the number of clients I've worked with on my one hand, not because we don't get clients but because I help maintain the longest lasting clients.  Which I think is a testiment of the quality of service I as well as the rest of the team provide.)  And last but not least are my Microsoft skills.  Which in my opinion is a technology that is becoming more and more obsolete.

I guess I'll add a new resolution to the New Year.  Learn Web 2.0 technologies!

Don't be offended now but he plays with himself

This is just pure genius...I laughed the whole way through it.


(RSS Readers: click through to watch video)

My Laptop is now up and running and FULLY charged

The power brick I ordered off eBay came in today and when I plugged it in my laptop started charging. 

Nice!

My Laptop is out of Commision

So Saturday I am on my laptop and it's plugged in and all of a sudden it goes into Hibernate mode.  Turns out the battery died.  But I was plugged in.  I double checked the connections and yes they were all plugged in.  I tried another plug.  Nothing.

I assume (i.e. hope) that the power brick is bad.  I look up online how much it is from HP. $79.99.  I can't get a universal cause my laptop needs 120W where most universals are only 90W.

So I resign to ordering it off HP.com.

Then Larry asks me if I checked eBay.  No!  Sure enough I can get them off eBay for $32.  Larry places the order for me since I don't have money in my paypal account.  Now I just pray that this will fix my problem.

I think it will there is a little green light on the brick usually when it's plugged in and it's not on anymore.

Of course today is MLK day and no postal runs today.  So tack on another day of waiting. :(

I'll keep you updated when it comes in.

By the way I had to get my old clunky desktop up-to-date that my kids use.   Talk about a mess.  242 spyware items found.  Pop-ups flying open all the time.  After running a scan, cleaning everything off and updating my open source software I was back on track. 

That's the beauty of open source software and GMail is that I can basically get set up on another computer pretty easily.

Rush-Henrietta's Sherman Elementary Talks with ISS Crew

On January 8th Rush-Henrietta's Sherman Elementary contacted the ISS at 9:35 am with a HAM radio operated by the Amatuer Radio club at RIT and was able to talk for 9 minutes, the window when the Space Station was directly overhead.

I came into work that morning and tuned into NASATV thinking it would be broadcast live but found they were replaying chat's with other school's from previous days.

Today I found that RIT's University News posted a recorded version on their Podcast.  I found it very interesting.

You can listen to it here

MacWorld Keynote HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT for me

Sorry but I knew going into it that a iPhone no matter how awesome just wouldn't be up my ally.  I was watching for the sole intent of awaiting the news of a new iPod Video that played widescreen.

I feel that we are step closer as the iPhone plays video widescreen.  But the drawbacks are it's integrated with the phone, it only has 8GB tops for storage space and it's $500 starting price with two year contract with Cingular (an AT&T company whom which I'll never do business again).

I'll admit though the phone features are nice...but I am not interested.  In Rochester, NY we are not that dependant on mobile technologies.  I don't depend on a mobile phone 98% of the time.  I live by e-mail and IM and I am always close to it.

For me the thrill of having a Widescreen iPod video was intense.  After getting a Shuffle for Christmas I was getting even more excited to get a full iPod so I can watch my video podcasts and shows.  MacRumorsLive.com totally set me up for a depressing day by literally saying in one line "Widescreen iPod".  I flipped out.  Then I learned later that it was integrated into the phone.  Total let down.

Paul Thurrot bashed Apple for not even mentioning the Macs or Leopard. He said "Why not call it iPodWorld?"

I agree Paul especially with no new iPod announcement, heh. 

But what is with the totally irrelavent Microsoft digs.  One being a three year old quote from Paul Alchine about how he would buy a mac...but failed to stated the context it was in.  It was an e-mail to Steve Balmer and Bill Gates about how they needed to go in a new direction in Vista because they weren't being innovative enough.  They listened and started rebuilding Vista from the ground up.

Also, what was the deal with the graphic of how the sales of Zune were doing?  Just to rub it in.  Then I wonder were Apple fanboys get the pretentious attitudes from.  They have a great role model.

On a final note Apple annouced Apple TV, basically a dumb terminal to your iTunes collection so that you can STREAM it to your TV.  $299. Eh...uninspired...I'll get an Xbox 360 that similarly does all that and is coming out with IPTV.

My Opinions of CES Keynote 2007

Just finished watching the CES keynote...this was what was covered.

• Couple of cool Vista features shown.
• Animated Desktops...so instead of pictures for a desktop you can have movies.
• Version control of files just like Time Machine
• Play XBox Live games on Vista
• IPTV to be integrated into Xbox (Holiday's 2007) - the guy that showed it did a terrible job explaining anything about it.
• They showed Windows Home Server but blackout the broadcast for it for some reason.
• Partnership with Ford to integrate Microsoft Auto to sync with your phone, media device including iPods to seemlessly work in your Ford car (12 models this year)

My overall impressions of the keynote was eh...I was excited to see and hear about IPTV but like I said they did a terrible job explaining anything about it and there are more questions now then before the start of the keynote.

The Vista features were cool but nothing to get me to go out and buy Vista...I'll stick with XP for a while.

The funniest quote was from some guy claiming that Zune was the number 2 portable music player...I almost lost it. I just read an article this weekend that said they weren't in the top 10.

There was a Halo 3 Cinematic that looked awesome and I think that will be the driving force for me to purchase a 360 this summer. But that's only if the Widescreen iPod doesn't cost a second mortgage when announced on Tuesday.

Lastly, they showed off an HP TouchSmart PC which looks awesome.  HP is coming out with some nice looking products.  Which in my opinion look better then Apple's designs.

Related Links

Paul Thurotts Behind the scenes review

End of Week 1: Resolutions Update

Well here we are at the end of week one of my resolutions that I set for myself.  Just wanted to update where I am at, how I am doing to keep me honest.

I have heard from you that you thought that putting my resolutions on my blog was a great idea.  Even though my personal finances might be scary to talk about openly, I agree. But I feel if I don't publish how I am doing I might get lazy and stop doing it.  So blogging about will keep me motivated to push forward.

Lets start with my Personal Finance Goals:

My wife and I sat down today and planned out our bills and budget for the next paycheck.  It's tight but my wife was able to work out a temporary reduced payment to the mortgage company so that will help out.  Again this is a first step and as I kept telling my wife this is just a plan...things might not happen the way we plan but we should be able to adjust easily to things as we move forward and refine out budget for next payday.

We have a couple of issues to work out though. One being figuring out why we don't get paid on the weekends when payday falls on a weekend or holiday.  Our account was majorly screwed up on Christmas because my pay didn't come in until the 27th.  Every other year it's in the account on the 23rd.  We already talked to the bank and they say there must be a problem with our payment processing center.  So I need to follow up on that.

As for the emergency fund goal of $1000, I found I have $140 in an account I haven't been watching very closely so that is becoming our new emergency fund account.  Bonus is that I found it pays off a good interest every month and quarter.  I have this feeling though we might need to touch that money this pay period so not all good news but at least we have a little something to fall back on if needed.

As for figuring out my debt, I feel at this time we should focus on getting our bills paid on time and get a solid and sound budget under us before we start allocating money to debt.  Also I've read that you need to set up an emergency account first before really starting to tackle debt. So that's the plan.

Now let's get updated on my personal goals:

As for my losing weight resolution I've been trying to watch my portions when I eat and I think I've been doing a decent job.  Plus I've limited my eating to just during meals and have cut out the snacks as much as possible.  The hard times for me is late at night when it's been 6-8 hours after dinner and you get the hunger pains.  That's when will power is nonexistent and we make the fourth meal (as Taco Bell calls it).  I know for a fact that that is the meal that does the damage and is the meal that I need to cut.

But this afternoon I took a walk around the blocks (see graphic to the right).  I loaded up the iPod Shuffle with podcasts and waited till the rain squall went by and then took my walk.  I walked 2.53 miles according to Google Earth and I was gone for about 45 minutes so I averaged about 2MPH. 

It's funny when you're listening to the iPod you can walk so much further and longer then if you were just walking cause you have something occupying your mind with something.

Either way I came home all sweaty and jumped in the shower and felt good about my workout I had.  I'll try and do another walk tomorrow but probably not as far.

I'll still need to figure out my starting weight though so I can track it.  I'll try and find a way to do that tonight.

As for getting my family organized we are working on it.  Alot of progress will be made after the personal finance goals are met and we can budget in some organizational tools, like a filing cabinet for me and one for Hope.  Eventually I'd like to get a safe but I think that a long term goal at this point.

And finally, my last goal was to blog more.  And I feel that I have made some great progress this week with some quality posts.  I hope you are enjoying them.

Sending HTML E-Mails

I spent most of this week figuring out how to send out a HTML e-mail for our company.  I started thinking I could just craft a HTML page and then send it out.  Well that's not the case at all.  GMail was a huge pain in the butt.  It was striping tags left and right.

I found this page from One NorthWest with the do's and don'ts of HTML E-mail and CSS.

The Don'ts

1. Do not rely on external (<link rel="stylesheet">) or embedded style sheets (those contained within the <style> tag above the <body> tag). This is the most important thing to avoid. Many email services cut everything above the body tag and disable external style sheets.
2. Don't use javascript in an email newsletter. Ever. There's no better way to have your newsletter marked as spam.
3. Don't use the <body> or <html> tag. Most email services will ignore them. You can try putting your whole newsletter inside a <div> and apply inline styles to it. Results may vary.

The Do's

1. Use tables. Lots of them. You're welcome to try <div> tags for positioning and layout, but my research shows that tables are more consistently supported. C'mon now. Get over your table-phobia.

2. Use inline styles liberally in tables. In fact, you'll find you can get the best millage out of inline styles in <td> tags. That way you are setting up little style regions within each table. Think of these inline styles as miniture style sheets. This allows non-technical users to swap content in and out of pre-formatted cells in a modular fashion.
   

3. Define the background color in a td cell or table tag with bgcolor=, not the CSS style. This works in all email services I tested.

4. Test your newsletter by sending to yourself or colleagues. This will give you the chance to catch any problems before your whole subscriber list does!

Images

1. Define background images using background= instead of the inline background-image call. Gmail, among others, will ignore any url() attribute in an inline style. Keep in mind, though that if the background image is ignored, the default color is going to be white. Sooooo your white on black text will disappear! Don't do it! Stick with text colors that are visible against a white background.
   

2. Don’t use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and others turn images off until allowed by the user. If your entire newsletter is graphical, all your recipients are going to see is a lot of broken images.

3. Use alt text for all images.
   

4. Declare BOTH height AND width parameters for images. Poor old Outlook Web Access especially needs this for your table layout to display properly.

I just got caught up on my RSS feeds

Took me most of the day, quite literally.  I started about midnight last night and spent a good 2 hours just reading items in Google Reader.  Read through some posts during work today and then spent a good portion this evening going through the rest tonight.

I put the interesting to me posts in my Google Shared Feeds.

I gave up on TechMeme...unsubscribed.  They just have to many posts per day to make it worth my while to read.  I found to that most of it was stuff I already read in Scoble's blog or Tech Crunch or some other blog I have.

Some blogs where just so jammed packed by the time I got back to before Christmas in the feed I hit Mark all as read...I think I did that with Scoble, TechCrunch and Lifehacker.

I got caught up on my Podcasts last week as I was sporting the new iPod Shuffle. 

So hopefully I can keep on top of these things everyday because the worst thing to see is in Google Reader...All Items (100+)

Secure your sites while surfing on the public wifi

Lifehacker had an interesting article about how easy it is to packet sniff in open WiFi hotspots with a free Mac application.  One way to secure your surfing is to use https when you are viewing sites, if it's available.  Certain sites like web e-mail should only be viewed with https when using a wireless hotspot.

I found that GMail is accessible via https. Google Reader and Google Calendar are also accessible although none of the web applications that are linked at the top of GMail go to https so you have to actually type the address back in.

I set up my FireFox bookmarks to go to my Google Apps with https so that way I don't have to think about.

But then I tried for giggles what would happen if I typed in https://www.damnralph.com, you get a completely different site.  I think it's because I am on a shared hosting environment and that maybe the only site that has a secure site on our IP.  Anyone have an explaination as to why/how that would happen?

Related Links

What wifi sniffers can find out about you

My New Years Resolutions

I'll make some resolutions,  I am really going to try and stick to them too.  I'll even keep you all posted on how I am doing.

Here they are in no particular order:

Personal Finance Goals

1. Figure out my debt.
2. Work towards reducing my debt.
3. Pay off my car.
4. Start a savings account and put $1000 in there for emerency funds (this is a phased goal but for now $1000 is hard enough to do)
5. Pay all bills on time.
6. Plan a budget and maintain it.

Personal Goals

1. Lose weight (the last I weighed myself I was getting close to 230 lbs) Goal 200lbs.
2. Keep myself and my family organized (this sounds easier then it is, with five people living under the same roof this is extremely difficult)
3. Blog more, I lead an interesting life (sometimes ;) there has to be somethings that others might find interesting.
   

I've been working today on trying to get myself more organized so I can start tackling the above list.

Sushi Nirvana

I started getting excited about making my own sushi as soon as I started reading Sushi Day, a blog specifically written on how to make your own sushi.  I have been a Sushi eating addict for years.  I asked for a sushi making kit for Christmas and was surprised to receive three...each of which was unique and was worth keeping each one.

So over this past week I perfected making sushi...I think we spent about $50 on ingredients for the week...$50 is about a typical price for one meal at the restaurants and to be able to eat a weeks worth of meals for two at that price was great.

It took us a while to get the rice perfect...I tried twice making it in the pot and finally broke down and we hunted for all the parts to the rice cooker we got two years earlier.  The first time we made it in the rice cooker it was rice nirvana.

Also the first couple of times I tried it I tried to do it on my own from what I read and such.  It came out close to perfect, extremely delicious but yet still not right.  In one of my kits from my mom had a DVD Simply Sushi with Steven Pallett.  It was a short video but the things I learned in the video were priceless...simple tricks like dipping your knife into the bowl of water you use for your hands and letting the bead of water run down the blade of your knife before cutting into your roll was really helpful in making the sushi cut without sticking to your knife and falling apart on you.

We've made our first sushi for friends and they loved it.  

When I go to the store for ingredients we usually get a fillet of salmon without the skin, crab sticks, and shrimp that my wife fries up for some tempura styled shrimp rolls.  We also get wasabi mayo, avocado, cucumber and sesame seeds to sprinkle onto the rice.  

I like to make the inside-out maki rolls on a half sheet of nori.  I have found making hand rolls (coned-shaped maki) extremely fun to make and I like to make one of those to add to the visual presentation of my sushi, which I find to be just as fun as making it (although my wife just whips the rolls together as fast as possible as she says the fun part is eating the rolls and nothing else).

I also like Salmon Nigiri and have found that to be an excellant way of using the rest of the rice you have left when you don't have enough rice left for a roll.  Even though it looks so easy to make there is a technique that is needed to make it look perfect.

I find making sushi is like drinking it's fun but it's not as fun unless you are making it with someone else.  I can't wait to have a sushi party sometime soon.  Maybe for the SuperBowl I can make some.

Best of Damn Ralph in 2006

I was looking through what I posted this past year and I wanted to highlight my favorite posts and the posts that seemed to bring in the most traffic.

My Favorite Posts

1. I got the call this morning... - This post was about my grandmother and her tense visit to intensive care and my trip down to visit her.  Afterwards we found out that she had a reaction to the radiation she was getting for cancer.  After she recovered from the ICU visit she spent a month or so recovering at home and then the surgery to remove the cancer.  She is one tough woman as is my parents cause they dealt with it all.  My mom left her job and stayed there for five months and my dad fended for himself during that time.
2. Car Explodes in front of my House - Man every time I mowed the lawn this year I was reminded of the car fire due to the patch of burnt grass.  I am still amazed at how fast the guy got out of the car and only came out of the incident with a couple of burns to his neck and hands.
   
3. Nick Tahous Crew have a little fun with me - this one always makes me laugh every time I see it.  We used to go to Nick Tahous weekly for plates and one of my coworkers wrote Damn Ralph on the slip for my order they just transfered it over to the plate it was funny to see.
   

Most Traffic

1. How to run Ubuntu and Kbuntu in VMware Player - This post on how to make Ubuntu play in the free VMWare Player is always number one in traffic daily.  This brings a ton of traffic into the site daily.
2. Rochester Basketball Player scores 20 points in final 4 minutes...he's also Autistic - The feel good story of 2006.  J-Mac graced us with an outstanding story of dedication and miraculous things happened for the kid sending him into national attention.  He is now in talks for making his story into a movie and the President even visited him on one of his trips to Rochester this year.
3. Who really browses on their cell phone anyways? - I replied to a Robert Scoble post about the future of mobile internet browsing and how I didn't think that was the future as it's very hard to navigate.  Four days into my blog and I got a link from Scoble's blog...I am still getting links through to this day.  He must get some amazing traffic on his site.

Year in review

I still find it difficult to post to my blog.  I want my blog to be more technical and personal then just a link blog of sorts.  I want to be able to add to something then just posting because I found something interesting.  Cause my sources of information is the same common information that everyone else visits.  So unless I can add to the conversation I usually won't post about it.  For the funny posts I usually let MediaGab handle all of that.

I found while going through my posts that my best posting was done in the beginning of the year and I started to get very sparse towards the end of the year.  I think that was due to my schedule and not having any time during that time.

Hopefully I can find some interesting things to write about in 2007.