Out of Pocket
We will be unavailable from May 11th through May 20th for a much needed mini-vacation. We will respond to your e-mails upon our return.
Still Alive
We had a slow winter around here at SSDD Web Design. Other aspects of life captured our attention (family, friends, significant others, illness, travel, etc.). But the sun is shining and things are picking up.
Currently we’re working on our first ZenCart installation for a (the) local leather store, a shopping cart system for their wholesale business. Once complete we will proceed with setting up another ZenCart installation for their retail business. ZenCart is quite feature-rich and it’s been a bit of a learning curve but we’re currently loading products and should be launching soon.
In the meantime, over on the newly minted NETTUTS web site they’ve posted a nice roundup of the best of the web for April. There were some great web design and development resources posted on blogs last month, and NETTUTS is shaping up to be a “keeper” for the RSS reader.
“Missed it by that much”
It’s a good thing we’re better about deadlines than anniversaries. A few days ago was the one year anniversary of the launch of SSDD Web Design. Feels like it’s been a lot longer.
A Little Reorganization
So we decided to change things around a bit. The home page is now more of a traditional homepage and the blog has been “moved over.” There are more enhancements to the home page forthcoming, but it serves the basic purpose we had in mind. Whether it stands the test of time remains to be seen. As a general rule we eschew splash pages and will strive to insure our home page contains valuable content.
The Ins and Outs of Blogging (for Business)
Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 17th, I’m giving a talk on business blogging to the Montana Society of Association Executives. I’ll post my impressions (and the PowerPoint) afterwards.
Report (aka, Gmail to the rescue)
Well, it wasn’t a total disaster, but if a technical detail could go wrong it did. My laptop wouldn’t display through their projector. I don’t yet know if it was my laptop, Linux or their projector; it’s entirely possible I have a bad video port on my laptop. The hotel didn’t have wired internet access like they said they did (if they did it was through an ancient 6pin [RJ25?] jack), and I didn’t have my wireless card configured yet in Ubuntu Linux because I didn’t want to risk bricking my laptop right before the presentation. The gentleman who brought the projector also brought a spare laptop, but I couldn’t open my presentation on it, and his copy of Acrobat Reader wigged out when I tried to load my backup PDF version of the presentation. Finally, my saving grace was the fact that the other laptop had wireless access, and I was able to display the raw text version of the presentation, sans titles and graphics, via the Gmail “view attachment as HTML” feature.
As if I wasn’t nervous enough.
You might think I’m being negative, but all things considered I think it went well. Hopefully they don’t think I’m a complete dolt. I’m going to send I’ve sent a copy of my presentation in PDF format (117kb) to my contact and she’ll distribute it to the members. Perhaps that will help me save face.