Around the Office - Toys!

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

As seen around the office...

Spuda Fett

Darth Mash

Big Toe

Lego Motorized AT-AT

Thanks to Josh for the use of the new D300 for the shots.

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Breathe in… Now Release

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

OK, so I said we'd been MIA for a bit, busy on projects and whatnot and we're very excited about two coming in for a landing today. I'll touch on that here in just a sec, but first something I've been neglecting to recognize…

WordPress Had Some Work Done

In the midst of the hustle we skipped right over posting about the release of WordPress 2.5. Kudos to Automattic and Happy Cog for the wonderful administration facelift. Expect to see our full thoughts on the upgrade in a future post.

With the upgrade of WordPress the WordPress.org website also received an update. A section of the homepage is dedicated to a rotation of companies with sites powered by WordPress. I’m very excited to say we have several of our projects in the rotation. See below…

That eBay logo is a new one for us… as this week we were able to launch the official eBay Corporate Blog (eBay INK) as well as the eBay Insider Blog (both of which are cnp_studio/Voce joints). The others – PlayStation (PlayStation.Blog) and Yahoo! (Yodel Anecdotal) are previous releases that continue to grow. You can see more about each of those in the portfolio.

Posted in New Site, Social Media, Who We Are, WordPress | Add a Comment »

Where’d We Go?

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Posting has been a bit light here lately. We’ve had a jam-packed last several weeks and the exciting thing is that some big sites are in the home stretch. Can't wait to share.

We've been doing even more with WordPress and as a result are finishing a few posts on the topics of security, performance and scaling. All three seem to be a recurring theme lately so it seems fitting. Speaking of WordPress, WordCamp is this weekend out in Dallas. I won't be making it, but they say they’ll make the videos available online a week or two after the fact. In the mean time I'll watch the trackbacks on the schedule pages for anyone blogging the sessions.

We'll get the posting back to normal here soon. Lots to talk about.

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At Future of Web Apps (FOWA)

Friday, February 29th, 2008

After a late arrival to Miami last night, Josh and I are down here for Future of Web Apps today.

Rarely do I make it down to Miami, but this is the second time now within a month that I've been down here. The last time was for some personal abuse, though.

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2008 Local Addy Awards

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

This past Friday everyone from the CNP offices attended the local Addy Awards banquet to see what kind of awards we would walk out with this year. The Addy Awards are conducted by the American Advertising Federation and the local competition is the entry point to their national competition. Awards are given across a multitude of categories from printed newsletters to TV commercials, product packaging to web sites.

Photo by Sean

Basically, how it works is that we submit our best works from the previous year to the local competition and based on several criteria are awarded a gold award, silver award or nothing. Anything that is awarded a gold at the local level is then sent on to the state competition for the next round. I'm pleased to say that at this year's competition we had four of our submissions receive gold and they will move on to the next level. They were:

cnp_studio (one gold for the web site, one gold for our logo/stationery/business cards)

SeaWorld Journey to Atlantis

Kelly Homes

The award on the Kelly Homes site is bittersweet. We're glad the site did well, but sadly the entire site design as well as the HTML and CSS behind the site were completely copied and used by someone who thought it was OK to do such a thing. Expect to see more on this in another post here.

Sites receiving silver awards include Girl Scouts of West Central Florida, Polk Transportation Planning Organization, TrueDemand Software and Heacock Classic Car Insurance.

All of this is a result of the hard work of an all star team (Mike, Pete, Sean, Jeremy) and our great clients.

Posted in Design, Development, Who We Are | 1 Comment »

BMW Marketing Consultants Ripped Off Our Work

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

This really just makes me sick to my stomach and at the same time, angry enough to rip the head off a Chia Pet. BMW Marketing Consultants ripped off our work - pretty much in its entirety.

When developing the Kelly Homes site, we worked with Bonnie Williams of BMW Marketing Consultants. The project, under careless misdirection and disregard for the cost that Kelly Homes was footing, took a 2 month timeline and turned it into more than 6 months.

Months later, we received an RFP from BMW Marketing Consultants for the Silver Palms RV Resort site. The RFP was a spiral-bound book that rivaled the thickness of the phone book for Vermont.

We sent out a quote, and never heard back from BMW Marketing Consultants. A few weeks ago, I was reminded about this when I found this "book" during our move to our new office. Curious to see what happened with the project, I decided to pull up the site.

Lo' and behold:

Funny, guess they couldn't find their "own place in the sun"

Kelly Homes

The CSS, HTML, and most of the images were ripped off. If you pay close attention, you can even see some images were not completely ripped off.

Note the beige/orange color from the Kelly Homes site on the left edge of the banner image).

BMW's response? Well, from what I hear, the response was "well all sites on the internet are templates and can be copied." One of my favorite articles about this subject is Scab at Airbag Industries regarding the Joyent / Corkd design theft. Talking about Ray from Falkner Winery, the company that ripped off the designs…

Ray continued to tell me that all designers borrow ideas from other designers and that his web site design was no different. That line of thinking is the biggest cop-out, bullshit excuse (can't think of a more appropriate term) used over and over by those who simply don't care about how this affects the person who's work has been copied.
…
A real designer does not cut-and-paste the work of others, change some colors and resell it … that would be called a hack. The web is filled with hacks because the web makes it easy to hack. Hacks have about as much talent as the guys who "create" stickers at mall kiosks typically featuring Calvin either pissing on an auto manufacturer's logo or praying before a cross.

Couldn't agree more. Granted, I did not design this site - but I feel the same way about the months of work I put into it. I know Jeremy feels the same way.

No one wants their hard worked ripped off. Least of all, by the company hack that sends you the RFP for the project.

More to come…

Update: Googling "bmw marketing consultants" wields this post as the 2nd hit... got to love the Google juice, eh Hallett?...

Posted in Rants, Who We Are | 3 Comments »

Missing acts_as_conference

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Well. It's 8:30, and I'm sittin' here at my office instead of attending acts_as_conference. Why? 4 projects are comin' in for a landing next week, and in our business, the "billable" hour is gospel. I'm not mad or anything, you just have to prioritize this stuff and getting to do the "fun stuff" has to come after the bottom line.

I've known about acts_as_conference for months, and planned as best as I could, but I have got 2 projects (both launching next week) that walked in the door last week. What's a guy to do?

In a way, it's kind of like college. One attends college to go to class, not sit around and play Halo 3 all day.

Although, if I truly believed that, I'd be at the conference.

Posted in Rails, Rants, Who We Are | 2 Comments »

Veni, Vidi, Voce - We Came, We Saw, We Partnered
Sony Gives Back to WordPress

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

It seems that we've got a recurring theme in our portfolio. That is, development on social media projects for some really big brands. They're a product of the amazing vision of our good friends at Voce Communications mixed with the talent of our developers here at cnp_studio. IMHO we've made some beautiful music together and thanks to the incredible people involved we get to share some of that with everyone. Now, where to start?

Partnership

You know what it's like when someone gets you and you get them? You get one of those "Where have you been all my life?" feelings? That's what it's been like working with Mike, Josh and the others at Voce on these projects. To say they understand the industry is an understatement which is why I'm extremely excited to announce that we're officially partnering with Voce for all things social media. Consider the gap between strategy and implementation bridged. This really is only a formality for what has already been a great relationship. We're stoked to make it public. Read more from Voce's side of things here.

Plugin Release

So for PlayStation.Blog we've done quite a bit of customization to the WordPress install on the site. We use several existing plugins on the blog including WP-Polls, WP-Cache, WordPress Download Monitor and others. A couple of needs though left us without a plugin to fill the void. So, we created our own. And it's because of the great people at Sony and Voce that we get to release these plugins back to the WordPress community. Sweet.

Image-Rotator Plugin

If you look at the homepage of the PlayStation blog you'll see a main image header that they use to promote any number of things. We had originally created a simple manager to allow them to quickly upload these images and set a URL where the image should link, but they wanted to take this one step further and release it back to the community. Who were we to argue? So with some tweaks we made it into the plugin that you can read about/download here. Install it, add the line of code where you'd like the rotation to appear and you're set (oh and don't forget to add some images).

Author Comment Reply Plugin

The threaded comments plugin existed, but nothing that limited it strictly to authors replying to comments. Our fear, especially in the case of the PlayStation blog, was that the threaded comments would get out of hand. That, and it's not a discussion board, so we wanted to avoid that feel. This plugin allows authors to keep their response tied directly to the comment they're replying to without having to put the "@name" in order to reference back to previous posts. If you have a high volume of comments on your blog you'll find this one helpful. Read more about and download it here.

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More New Office Shots

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

So we just can't get enough of our new office. Sean got some great shots of our office a couple weeks back with his new Nikon D40 and Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 lens. This week Josh gave us a different perspective with his Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Check them out.

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We’ve Moved!

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

So we've finally moved. Construction finished a couple of weeks ago and the workstations were finally installed this past Friday. That left Monday to get things wired up with electricity, punch down the ethernet connections and then kick on the internet/phones. Well it's all happened and we couldn't be more excited. Check out the photos and feel free to stop by and see it in person. We're still settling in, but always glad to have company.

Mike's Desk

Pete's Desk

Sean's Desk

Nick's Desk

Posted in Who We Are | 3 Comments »