A unique mix of technology, creativity and human interaction makes cnp_studio a Web development firm focused on connecting people. Creating simple, useful Web sites is what we do. Learn more about us.
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Recently I was talking with someone who threw out a few buzzwords which prompted all of us here to start reminiscing on some of our favorites. You know, synergize, monetize, vertical, end-to-end... the list goes on really. Well this prompted Mike to find this little gem, the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
Be sure to save this. You never know when you might get into a war of buzzwords with someone and need to "engage scalable web services."
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Sometimes you just can't find words to express yourself on Valentine's Day. Luckily these cards will do the job for you.
From BagofNothing.com
This one and a whole lot more from SomethingAwful.com - Thanks to Chip for the heads up on this.
And I can't forget The Simpsons classic...
Monday, February 4th, 2008
On February 1 support for Netscape 9 officially ended. From the Netscape blog...
While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.
AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.
I started using Netscape back when it was version 2.0. Even though I haven't used the browser since Communicator 4.0 it's like I've lost yet another a part of my youth. First Bob Barker retires from the Price is Right and now this. So long old friend.
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
So today my lunch was spent tracking Steve's keynote at MacWorld 2008. Since there's no live video stream, that left me keeping up via those who live blogged the event. No problem, if only those sites stayed up. Here are the sites I tried to use and how they worked for me:
My biggest gripe is that sites like Engadget and TUAW gave no consideration to the fact that thousands of people would be sitting on one page and hitting the refresh button every 15 seconds. By this I mean that the usual images/backgrounds/navigation/styles were all there as normal. Is it really necessary that all of this is loaded? As I and thousands of others sit and hit refresh do we care about other "Breaking News" or "Featured Stories"? No. I understand that the ads need to load so they can pay the bills, but everything else should be low frills.
After the fact, Engadget recognized the problems, which was appreciated. Let's hope next MacWorld will be different.
Oh, and I'm absolutely lusting after that MacBook Air.
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Steve Jobs will be giving his keynote at the MacWorld 2008 Conference & Expo today at 12PM EST. Lucky for us that's lunch time. We may be tied up a little after the keynote buying any of the new goodies announced today (come on Macbook Air!) so you'll understand if we're a little late back from lunch, right?
Plenty of people live blogging this, so keep up over at my favorite, Engadget, or for you Twitter fans out there, Valleywag is planning on live blogging via Twitter, so you can follow it there.
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Whenever we are approached by a potential client, 
we always try and have some initial questions we ask to assist in discovery. We try to get an initial indication of what the company is about, what they are looking for in a re-design (or design), and can sometimes also raise flags (both good and bad) about what it will be like to work with said client.
Well, some answers I received back today had me in tears:
What problems are you trying to solve a site redesign?
Our web site sucks and it looks like a 7 year old built it.
And…
What does your current site do right?
It is a URL… that’s about it. It really really sucks
Ahh… if only all the answers could be that funny. In all seriousness, it's nice to see that kind of honesty. It lets me know that the potential client is easy-going, and will appreciate the final solution that we give them (assuming we get the project).
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
I'm really sorry that after a seemingly long period of no activity, that I have to come out guns blazing with a post like this. But I got to get it out.
A lot of people think because I'm fluent in computers, that I love nothing more than to sit around and provide free help and advice about anything computer related.
Those people couldn't be any more wrong.
I have no problem teaching people how to do something on the computer. I have always tried to keep the "teach a man to fish" philosophy when showing someone how to accomplish a task on the computer.
But how many times does the man have to be taught how to fish? No matter how many times I repeat and demonstrate, it always seems to go in one ear and out the other.
This inexorably leads to an "over-dependence" on my help and advice which yields such questions as "I can't find the order receipt e-mail for the fishing pole" to requests for MySpace page layouts and optimized iPhone backgrounds of said person's favorite college football team.
This "over-dependence" has the tendency to evolve into plain old apathy and laziness on said person's part. The simplest issues require calling me or sending me an e-mail. Issues that if investigated for maybe 10-30 more seconds would resolve themselves. Issues like "So how do I get the worm on the hook?".
Stop.
At this point, it's safe to say I sound like a pompous ass who isn't willing to help anyone and anyone who uses a computer that doesn't know what I know about it is a complete twit who will only bollocks it up. And I can see where you would think that.
But I don't think that's the case. Like I said, I have no problem teaching or helping until people become over-dependent on that help and start to abuse it. I become a 24/7/365 support line. I might as well go buy a VW Bug, put on a short-sleeve button down and funny little tie.
During the day, when I'm working, is usually the worst (except for lunch when I become an avid Warhawk player). A lot of this work requires concentration, planning, testing, configuring, troubleshooting, etc. These are clients that are paying for my time. So when the IM box appears with someone asking me if they can forward their "better send this to 20 people or you'll have bad luck" crap mail and how to do it - guess what? It just completely derailed what I was doing, thinking about, concentrating on, striving for, etc.
Everyone is guilty of it. Friends will call/IM and ask me when is the best time to format their hard drive and re-install Windows. Strangers will ask if I can come over to their houses and remove spam mail on their computer. My own flesh and blood, my family, will call and ask me "What's a good personal finance program for Mac?" and "How do I install iWork/iLife?". The homeless guy on the park bench in downtown Winter Haven will even ask me if it's completely necessary to include the "ProxyPreserveHost" directive when configuring Apache to proxy to a cluster of mongrel instances.
OK, maybe not that last one. But the one thing they all have in common is they fail to ask me anyone of these sets of 3 simple words: "How are you?", "Are you busy?", "Got a sec?", and "Hey, what's new?". At the very least, you could ask how I'm doing before the onslaught of questions that could be answered if you spent an extra 20 seconds attempting to solve the problem on your own.
So from now on, my answers will be simple. Simple like that movie Rounders when Mike McDermott was asked by Johnny Chan "Y'have it?".
Sorry, I don't remember.
Monday, October 29th, 2007
My brand new copy of Apple's latest OS, Leopard, arrived on Friday. I chose to upgrade, and in less than an hour, I was back up and running. Now that I've had some time to explore, here are my favorite 5 and 1/2 new features about Leopard.
1. All the web developer tools (that I use anyways) ship standard and up to date. Apache, PHP, Ruby, and MySQL all setup and ready to go.
It did take some tweaking to get MySQL to work again with some apps and phpMyAdmin (thanks to Angry-Fly for the fix.)
2. Spaces! Who needs multiple monitors when you can have multiple desktops? Spaces allows you to quickly and easily switch between desktops, and features the ability to control which "space" an application should launch in by default. Sure, most Linux distros have been doing this for a while, but it is a great feature to finally make it to the Mac.
3. Quick Look No more waiting for Adobe Reader to launch, simply select the file and tap the spacebar. So far it's worked out great for looking at PDFs and other documents, although it loses some formatting when looking at office documents.
4. Tabs in Terminal.app Sure, it's not a jaw-dropping, main feature addition - but like Spaces, this has been long overdue. In addition to tabs in Terminal.app, you can now create and save color customizations and each tabbed terminal window can have it's own "theme". Very useful for having a visual indication for the different uses of Terminal.app
5. Time Machine This is a great feature to keep routine backups of your data and to restore folders and files from any point in time. Well, not any point - it just depends on how much space your Time Machine storage medium has available. Microsoft fanboys will tell you that Vista already does this, and did it first with "Shadow Copy" - but what good is a backup system that keeps your backups on the same drive and is only accessible on Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions ($299 and up).
...And a 1/2. Not really a feature on this one, just a comical statement of the obvious. When connected to a network, nearby computers are displayed in the left column of any given Finder window. This is the icon that Leopard uses to represent a Windows server/share. Yup, the infamous "Blue Screen of Death". (This was also pointed out by Jason at 37signals.com)
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
I have a 2.53GB ISO file just sitting on my hard drive collecting space. That space is Windows Vista Home Premium. I bought and downloaded my copy a little over a month ago. (for reasons I won't discuss here to save myself the embarrassment).
I don't want it. I wish I hadn't wasted the money on this bloated #$%^. So much so that I'm giving it away. No strings attached. No cost. Take it. Its yours.
I realize that this is kind of like saying "Yuck! This chicken catchatori tastes sooo gross... here, try some...". But if Vista was like chicken catchatori I'd probably keep it. Too bad it is more like salty garbage.
I'm sure some lucky, blindly loyal, Microsoft lover will jump at the chance to get his hands on a copy of Vista - for free. First person to comment (who is not a co-worker (that includes you, Josh), a friend, a family member, or someone I interact with professionally) gets it. Of course you have to leave a valid e-mail address in your comment (which will never be shown or displayed).
No, I will not ship to Nigeria.
Sunday, July 29th, 2007
Personally, I can't resist a good mullet reference (especially when you can tie together mullets and user generated content). Perhaps it's the abundance of mullets in our area (Polk County, Florida).
From BuzzFeed - The Mullet Strategy:
The biggest sites on the web are all embracing the "mullet strategy" - business up front, party in the back! User generated content is all the rage but most of it totally sucks. That is why sites like YouTube, MySpace, CNN, and HuffPost are all embracing the mullet strategy. They let users party, argue, and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay because the best way for web companies to grow traffic is to let the users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can wistfully admire their brands.
andrew:
hey mike -- thanks for the reply, let me clarify what i mean.... I know that PHP fu...
nick:
Hi Jeff, Thanks for the heads up on the link. It's all fixed now and you should...
Jeff:
I would love to try your plugin, but the download link appears to be dead again. Ca...
mike:
@Denise: 1. The image is selected randomly each time the code is run. So normally ...
andrew:
hey -- great plugin and would like to use on several different pages, not just the ...