SelecTrucks Center Sites
We launched two new Center Sites in November. Kansas City was a challenging design, with lots of absolute positioning, which caused a few problems when IE7 came out. The client was really excited about the puzzle theme. Birmingham is, I think, one of the best looking designs we've done. The diagonal navigation is really sweet.
Updates to existing sites
We helped out several clients with minor updates to their sites. In one case, we redesigned their homepage to emphasize a change in the way they're marketing to their users. In several other cases, we did some heavy-duty testing and bugfixing for IE7. In one case, we beat our heads against a display issue that the client was seeing that we couldn't reproduce. In the end, we managed to track it down to a sIFR problem caused by the client having JavaScript disabled. Or, rather, to the fact that I had forgotten to write styles for a non-JS environment. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, but it served as a good reminder for the future to consider what happens in non-standard settings.
Carrier Media Center
We also launched the Media Center for Carrier. This isn't a huge section of the site, but it was a lot of fun to work on. Ben created a flash movie player, and we got a solution set up to let non-iPod listeners hear the podcasts in the browser. We've probably got more multimedia work like this in the future, which is kind a fun break from our normal work.
Project "Bloom County"
Work continued on project codename "Bloom County" - our in-house WCM solution. Andrew spent some time on a functional prototype, and I spent some time making mockups of how I think a good structured content solution would work with one of our existing sites. Then we presented the work to Management, Design, and Client Services. Their reactions spanned the gamut, and it was really interesting getting feedback based on something real, instead of the abstract concept discussions we were having several months ago. This project may or may not continue, but the discussions we had as a result of it were invaluable.
Blogging
I finally "formally" announced the blogs site to the company early in November. There was no real reaction at first, but I heard that Steve, the CEO has some plans for it in the future, so I'm excited about the potential. I applied some anti-spam measures, since I was starting to get some comment spam, but I was disappointed that we don't have room in the budget for a commercial license for Akismet, but I managed to find a good set of spam-plugins on the Community Server site. (If you can afford it, or you're running a non-profit blog, however, I can't recommend Akismet strongly enough, and now that there's a CS plugin for it, you should really check it out).
I also found a problem with DasBlog and a related problem with CommunityServer. We've got lots of blogs set up on the CS site that just function as an aggregator to get content from external blogs into the CS Portal (so that Pop Art can have a single site for all blogs). This works pulling content from the RSS feeds on my WordPress blog and from Kelly's CS blog, but it was choking on Andrew's DasBlog.
What was happening was that all the categories on Andrew's blog posts were coming through mashed together, so instead of seeing three categories, "Programming," "ASP," and "Humor," I would get one category, "Programming;ASP;Humor." This was really screwing up our tag clouds, so I switched Andrew's blog to pull from his Atom feed - only to find out that CS doesn't support aggregating from an Atom feed. This is disappointing, but it's hard to be mad at CS, since the real problem is the messed up categories from DasBlog's RSS feeds. Andrew is going to hack his feeds at some point, but until then, we've got no feed for his blog.
Book Reviews
You may have noticed me posting some book reviews recently. That's because I took advantage of my downtime in November to catch up on my reading. I had three new books to read, Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cedarholm, CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cedarholm. They were all pretty good, but mostly it was just reassuring to see that I'm already following best practices for the most part. I've still got two books to read - DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith, and Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble.