Common Media, Inc.

YouthBuild Home Page

In conjunction with the fabulous design team at PopKitchen, we’re delighted to announce the debut of YouthBuild Providence’s brand new website!

It’s always fun to be on board from kick-off to launch, and this was no exception.

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We only have our tongue a little bit in cheek when we say if you really want to improve your search engine results, you might want to consider relocating.

By way of example, let’s consider what happens when you search for “web development” near Amherst, MA. Google Maps shows results ordered by proximity to the center of town, and guess which web development company has an office closest to the center of Amherst?

When the Amherst College development offices move on-campus, there will be some closer-to-the-center addresses available, just in case you thought geography was irrelevant in today’s virtual world.

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We moved in to this office in November, and it was already pretty chilly. It’s warmed up enough now that we’re opening the windows a bit, and we’ve discovered this means the office smells like a kitchen. More specifically, it smells like Bueno Y Sano.

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Another area CMI works in is taking complete designs from clients and rendering valid (X)HTML and CSS from the design documents. It feels like a pretty basic service, but it frees designers (who know what looks good) from the requirement of knowing HTML, and lets them create functional and interesting designs without worrying about how they’re going to realize them in markup. From the other direction, letting design proceed in parallel with code development means the developers won’t find themselves with working code and undesigned pages, a situation which (in our experience) usually leads to launching with a rushed and poorly-thought-out design.

We’ve mentioned our work on FlyFi before; the designers, Corey McPherson Nash, recently sent out a press release highlighting their role in the project.

Another project we worked on over the winter recently went live when Running USA launched their new site. Running USA, a trade organization promoting the sport and industry of running, started down the site overhaul road nearly a year ago. We consulted with them over the summer, assisting them in identifying the major issues to be addressed by a new site, drafting the eventual RFP, and advocating implementation of particular technologies. As the project moved forward, we worked with the project managers (a company apparently so busy they don’t have a completed website yet) to turn their wireframes and comps into valid templates.

In both cases, our deliverables don’t look like much in a desktop folder: a few .html files and even fewer .css files. But being able to count on the templates to deliver (and across browsers – thanks, Litmus) isn’t measured in file counts.

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Jason Mark Anderman of whichdraft.com:

I gave a presentation last week for the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Law Department Management Committee (there’s a mouthful!) entitled:

Web 2.0 for Contracts: Where to Go, What’s Free, What Costs Money

Anderman provides a list of sites he recommended in his presentation, including BaselineNDA, the application we built for Baseline Solutions Corporation. Here’s what Anderman had to say about BaselineNDA–with our emphasis added.

BaselineNDA (Pretty amazing application, with some limitations, it can read and mark up a confidentiality agreement for you)

Thanks, Jason! We think it’s pretty amazing, too, and we’re not even lawyers.

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The official Common Media caffeinated beverage of the winter is a large coffee from The Black Sheep across the street. The coffee is divided between two large mugs, to each of which is added a packet of hot chocolate mix and enough hot water to top off the mug. If the coffee is appropriately milked, it’s a pretty decent mocha.

So what do we call this? “The CMI” is inelegant. “Poor man’s mocha” isn’t bad, but a little bland, and it really saves time more than money (though it does save money). Maybe “The Subprime Mocha”?

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Actually, it’s Legal OnRamp that’s profiled in the December American Lawyer, but BaselineNDA gets a mention as one of the value-added services available through “the ramp.” And there’s more Baseline in the pipeline.

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As of yesterday, Common Media, Inc. has an actual office, the kind which isn’t either of our spare bedrooms, the kind we both have a key to, and the kind where the company pays for the internet connection. (Or will, once our telco shows up to turn it on. How do telcos still have customers when they make it so hard to become a customer of theirs?)

We’re now in the center of Amherst, at 34 Main Street #7. We’re still in folding chairs and spare tables for furniture, and we’re working on stuff to hang on the walls (and probably over that window in the door). But the DSL is coming, and now we have a place to work where there’s a reduced risk of cat-on-keyboard. You can see more photos of the office on Flickr.

If we were lawyers, we’d be painting our firm name on that window, but for now we’ll settle for a plate down by the street door. We expect CMI will celebrate its second birthday in this office. I’m guessing there’s room for five of us in there, so we’ll be there until we get bigger than that, or smaller than we are now.

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Today’s mail included an entertaining message from Andy Meisner, who is apparently running for county treasurer in Oakland County.

This puzzled me a bit, considering that there is no Oakland County in Massachusetts. Meisner, it turns out, is running his campaign in Michigan.

Andy, we wish you luck, but perhaps your campaign funds might be better spent on mailings targeted to people who can actually vote for you?

Update, 05 November: Looks like Meisner won, so he didn’t need the Massachusetts vote to sweep him into office.

Technorati Tags: election, massachusetts, michigan

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If you read Wired, you may have heard of Tripletz.com. The Providence-based company allows site users to compose three-part messages on postcards, which are then mailed on consecutive days, a sort of postal Burma Shave arrangement.

When they appeared in Wired, the resulting spike in site traffic exposed some weaknesses in the site architecture. The Slashdot effect is generally an entirely-online situation, but the Tripletz idea was compelling enough (and the name memorable enough) that thousands of readers followed up on the print article and visited the site. Tripletz contacted us to put out the fires. We pushed the first revision yesterday, shifting a big data-sifting operation out of the Rails code (where it was taking so long the page requests would time out) back into the database engine, where it happened in milliseconds.

There’s a lot to be said for the rapid production allowed by Rails, but when it comes to high-traffic situations, it’s worthwhile to be able to look at the application and figure out where bottleneck operations should be taken away from the comfortable, hip tools of Rails and given back to the gritty old database, which almost always performs them faster. Being opinionated about code can be lead to better results in some situations, but making the application work for the client means balancing the code’s poetry with pragmatism–a balance we’re happy to take on, even if we can’t take credit for the site’s undeniably cool idea.

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