Webster Interactive

It came to my attention this week that a Webster Interactive design has appeared on the popular CSS Design feed CSSMania. This is a site that we put together for the guys at Point Blank Nutrition in Indianapolis.

Like most small business sites we do, it's a sleek CSS-only site built as a theme sitting on a Wordpress backbone. Unlike most sites, this job also involved skinning a Network Solutions storefront--not a pleasant activity, but not too painful thanks to Firebug and the IE developer toolbar.

I wish much success to the guys at PointBlank. They have a lot of enthusiasm and are willing to go the extra mile to market their site, so I'm sure good things are ahead for them!

It was hard not to notice the fact that Google released their own open-source browser, Chrome, in beta two weeks ago. After downloading, installing, and experimenting, I have to say that I was a lot more impressed by the comic than by the browser. Not that it's a bad browser, just that it was not as exciting as I thought it would be.

First impressions aside, this release does have some serious implications for web developers and designers. 

• Those of us who don't use Macs usually put the webkit rendering engine underneath Mozilla's Gecko and IE's Trident in terms of priority--way underneath. We will need to rethink that strategy in the near future.
  
• Javascript is getting sexier. Chrome promises some dramatic and much-needed enhancements to client-side scripting. If they pull it off, Ajax will become a lot more useful than it already is.
• This could mean the end of FireFox. Google has the potential to out-firefox Mozilla. FF has achieved a near 100% penetration with technology professionals and power users, but they are unable to make a dent in the everyday user market. Google has the name recognition and relationships to make this happen.

The browser wars are far from over. The best news are that competition from a big player like Google is going to push better features and more creativity.

Hello, and welcome to Webster Interactive LLC.

My hosting company had some problems with a backup process last night and unfortuantely lost all of my MySQL databases. Needless to say, this did not exactly make my day, but it could have been worse. I didn't have any client sites in development in my account, and I only had a few posts in my own blog.

I've been meaning to switch over to BlogEngine.net for a while, and this provided an opportunity to do it. Please be patient while I work to get the pages and gallery restored. 

We're working all day everyday on a SharePoint deployment at the Health Alliance right now. At one of our new facilities, West Chester Medical Center, we want to bring everybody up with their own personal sites. As anybody who's worked wtih My Sites can tell you, it's difficult.

Here's a problem that we ran into recently. We're working on a method to customize the default My Site as soon as it's provisioned, but it's clear that this will take some time. We need to present a demo before that's ready, so the fastest way to get the demo ready seemed to be to do some manual customizations on a few My Sites. The problem we ran into is that even as Farm Administrators, we still didn't have access to everyone's My Sites!

That's not a good situation. Even if we leave it disabled most of the time, we need to be able to get into the personal sites in emergencies.

Lots of Internet searching turned up no results and no users with similar problems. But here's what we figured out. In Central Administration, under Application Security and Policy for Web Application, we added ourselves directly into the policy as users with "Full Control" for the My Site host.

This is a step you should take anytime you want a user to be a full administrator of a web application. Now that it's solved, I found a post to this effect by Shane Young.

One of the challenges of being a designer is the need to produce creative work on demand. No matter how heavy your workload, every client deserves your best efforts--after all, that's why they hired you. In personal work, we have the luxury of being able to wait for ideas, and that's really the stereotype of the typical artist, someone who goes through intense productive spurts, and then periods of rest. Well, as designers, we're not exactly artists, and probably don't get much rest!

Here are some ideas to jumpstart creativity on those days when you're just not feeling it :)

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