Something worse than NO is to receive an email explaining why it can be done cheaper and a sort of “what’s the matter with you,” and worse still, a between-the-lines “you are a pirate of the digital sea and likely have plans with my underage daughter,” (this last part is embellished).

I won’t say what the competing price was, but I can tell you it shouldn’t even cover the mock-ups (or even the project management for that matter). Yep, shitty software comes cheap — but why build it? Why have terrible design created by a programmer (rather than someone with user design experience), no user testing, no exciting features, and do nothing innovative?

The other thing about bad software — it can actually cost you more in the long run. Taking the time to plan carefully results in a better end product, which is more usable and actually provides a return on investment. Piecing something together for $500 that actually costs you an hour a day in downtime and user problems isn’t worth $500. Making a good investment means calculating your ROI and putting in the cash to make things work well for your company and its clients.

I tried to explain this without overstepping my bounds. I could tell from the response that he didn’t get it, and he never would.

To anyone looking to hire a development firm — please be gracious. Be thankful people experienced in web development worked for free to provide an estimate. Simply say ‘no thank you’ if you can’t afford it. Mercedes knows that there is a cheaper way to build a car than the McLaren, but it isn’t really worth it. Don’t assume a development firm will try and provide a quote for bargain-basement, garbage software. Any worth their salt won’t bother.

Although we’ve been providing Eckhart Teachings with web development and hosting for almost five years, this was a big step for both our team and theirs. We wanted to ensure that Eckhart could take advantage of this amazing opportunity to connect with a new audience for A New Earth, with zero downtime.

We took a few vital steps to make sure that Eckhart’s sites were running smoothly throughout these Oprah events.

First, we moved parts of Eckhart’s site into a semantic database. This allowed us to build faster connections between pieces of information. We relocated the site onto the Amazon S3 Cloud, so that it could grow dynamically throughout the Oprah promotion. And finally, we monitored the site manually for the first 24 hours after the Oprah launch to make sure that everything was running smoothly.

The result: Oprah.com went down while EckartTolle.com stayed live, even with upwards of a million hits per hour. With a little planning and creativity, we achieved zero downtime.

We’re now in the process of moving all of Eckhart’s web materials into our semantic framework and introducing a user centre.  Stay tuned as we rebuild the site piece by piece!

Once a week, a lovely young yogi named Katie comes to our offices and leads an hour-long yoga session on the Redwerks rooftop. We all bring our own mats, but Katie, who is CPR-certified and all that good stuff, brings the blocks and the music. She’s adapted our practice for a wide range of experience: some of our team have involved in yoga for years, and some are just beginning. She’s done an excellent job of connecting us as a team and allowing us to get out some of our frustrations.

The interesting part as well is that we’ve recently starting telling our clients about the practice, and some of them have joined us for a session. It’s a great way to bond over a project and make sure that everyone knows that we’re all in it together. Especially after watching some of us fall over doing headstands. It reminds everyone that we’re all human and mistakes are part of the experience.

If you want to drop in for a yoga session with the Redwerks team or get Katie’s contact info, drop us a note at kommonwealth(at)redwerks.org.

The good news is that we’ve actually started again in a really great way. In the process of dropping some of the old code, we’ve lost some old ways of doing things. We’ve hired some great new people who’ve helped us find a better way of approaching our software development, and we’re going to be launching a created-from-scratch version of Kommonwealth in a few months.

Yeah, it cost us some time and a lot of money. But ultimately we’re the better for it. We know what’s good for us, and what’s good for our clients, and if it means making some hard choices, we’re all for it. We’re only sorry we didn’t do it sooner.

So stay tuned for all-new blog posts, ideas and fun times! And drop us a note sometime to let us know what you think.

To avoid involving style changes when you only want to change content, and visa versa, CSS effectively separates data and design. In many cases it’s extremely effective. If you want to change the fonts on 10,000 pages you can do it in one file in CSS while in-line formatting would require changing 10,000 files.

A site called CSS Zen garden was famous for showcasing user submitted CSS files based on a single html page producing dramatically different results as each CSS file was applied. Unlike table design, CSS gives you the freedom to do things like move a vertical column on the left to a horizontal header from a remote file and across several pages.

This, in my opinion, is where some of the fantasy emerged. You could in theory radically change a websites appearance simply by changing the CSS to the point of a total redesign. In actual practice I’ve never seen this happen. There are certainly some sites that would be the exception but most redesigns I’ve been a part of have also involved content changes and the creation of brand new HTML and CSS.

It’s not that CSS shouldn’t be used for styling a website. My point is we should understand its limits on a technical level and on a conceptual level.

The desire for a pure CSS site may be critical for some websites and be an over indulgent waste of time and client resources for other projects. I occasionally see web posts where people claim they have spent about a week or more to almost prefect the menu style they want in pure CSS to work across all browsers. WHY!
Some of these practices are almost the anthesis to the very purpose and power of CSS.

Just to underscore how much we have been brainwashed by CSS crusaders Shawn from W3C actually apologized for suggesting the use of tables in modern web design (instead of pure CSS). This deserves a shout: IT’S OK TO USE TABLES FOR TABULAR DATA. It’s much easier and if you neglect to do so you cause accessibility problems.

I’ve heard many developers claim that they could build Basecamp in a weekend. That’s not entirely true – I’ve built one and getting things simple is not as easy as it looks and there is much more involved than just programming.

You could, however, produce something that resembles it in fairly short amount of time. I didn’t realize this but during Jason’s talk at SXSWi he claimed it didn’t even have files sharing at the time of launch, which according to my calculations made it little more than a message board with categories. The anger comes back.

Still, this could be said for other successful web projects like Flickr, Twitter, early MySpace, and others. Most developers could create these applications in short order. Their success is not determined by programming innovation but rather concept and timing.

There needs to be some credit given to 37 Signals for recognizing that fewer features would create happier customers. In their case they created a new type of market category based on simplistic project management for the average user and then dominated this empty category. Now entrenched it’s difficult to topple them especially given that their success is based on simplicity. I said difficult but not impossible.

There is a sensibility in Jason’s insistence that 37signals not abandon the formula that made them successful. “Being good at one thing does not make you good at everything”. That’s good advice.

Still, listing to Jason’s talk in a packed room in Texas you can’t quite shake the feeling that some of their success was due to being in the right place at the right time. Not just because Basecamp is such as simple product (as I’ve already explained), but in the manner of his advice. I could paraphrase a lot of what he said with: just do something really easy, don’t plan too much, don’t try too much, hell you don’t even need a finished product just put it out there and people will come to it.

What I picked up from across the audience (in little snickers and laughs) was it sounds to us like a man who grew up in a biosphere. Just walk down the garden path to get your morning mango – all you need is just hanging on a branch in front of your face. It’s good advice to never carry an umbrella – if you live in a biosphere.

It’s funny because it’s true in his case and he presents this advice with such sincerity he makes you feel that he believes that it must be true for you as well.

I believe that the relative easy path to success has given 37signals a distorted view of the young emerging web. People will continue to want simple but begin to expect more power. More than this they will want the simple to be even simpler and easy to be easier and faster.

The concepts and file metaphors used by Basecamp are entrenched in traditional models that will fall away. 37signals’ refusal to innovate will eventually allow superior products to emerge. It will take one modern innovative powerful free product with an automatic import from Basecamp feature to bring them down.

I’m familiar with the term but I’m not sure how it applies to this particular form of social media.
Let’s look at what increases your Plurk karma: microposting, replying, getting more ‘friends’ and ‘fans’, using icons in your posts, and inviting people to join.

I mean, to me, karma’s about doing good and being rewarded. Plurk’s about talking about yourself in, possibly, a very inane way. It’s about being popular and joining a clique. It’s about being able to click on smiley faces. It’s about having the time to obsess about your little karma number going up and down.
Essentially, Plurk is engaging you in a game rather than a distinct form of social connectivity. Unlike Twitter, where the content of your tweets determines your value in the community, Plurk values frequency and absurdity (what’s the difference between a ‘friend’ and a ‘fan’? No one I’ve asked on Plurk even seems to care).

How does this increase one’s ability to connect and share through media? I’m not sure yet if it does. In fact, I think that it bypasses the ‘social’ part of social media in a way that encourages anti-social behaviours, to a certain extent. People trying to drive up their karma numbers will pollute the timeline with valueless fluff and winking yellow faces, bringing in additional players to the game.

Twitter may be falling apart half the time, but I’ll take dharma over karma any day of the week.

Guy Kawasaki didn’t count (because he was biz-famous and book-famous well before he became everyone’s go-to guy on Twitter) but Dooce did, and so did iJustine and Jeremiah Owyang. (Tris voted for himself, but Colleen and I both vetoed that idea; I told him he was more in the realm of Internet-popular than Internet-famous.)

But I digress. Does microfame on the Internet actually make an impact? Or are we just playing with microtrends that will evaporate into nothing? Is a meme a blip or a profound social construct that will matter in a historical sense?

Recently, New York Magazine published an article on microfame, detailing the rise and rise of Internet personalities and how to mack on their game. Focussing on the more raucous, self-styling iconoclasts like Tila Tequila, Ze Frank and Perez Hilton, Rex Sorgatz argues to make noise, make it loud and make it often.
I’m not really sure that Sorgatz clearly identifies the difference between traditional PR and social media promotion in that respect, but his article demonstrates something I’ve been thinking about for a while.  It may be easier to build a connection with an increasingly diversified global culture through the Internet, but  I’m not certain working social media alone can make people famous. Perez Hilton swung into the big time when he started getting picked up in the glossies, and Elaine Lui only started selling massive ad space on her site when she got her TV gig alongside Ben Mulroney on eTalk. Folks like Tila and Ze who up the ante on frantic and silly behaviour (Sorgatz calls it “oversharing”) will get attention no matter what the medium.
I guess it all depends on what your definition of ‘famous’ is. In the 80s, we called it having a ‘household name’.  Nowadays, Lui calls it reaching the ‘Minivan Majority’. I wonder if microfame is actually more akin to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes than true celebrity.

What social media can do, however, is level the playing field, allowing more entrants into the game. We all know it increases transparency as more conversations are opened to criticism, but that in itself provides balance for oversharing and our bombastic social id through a reactionary community ego. And those who truly have something profound to say transcend the idea of meme and create a longstanding philosophical connection with societal ideas, drawing connections between multiple media and communicating across socio-cultural boundaries.