Posts on Inside
Inspiration break at ADC Summit 2010 and a sneak peek of things to come
From time to time, it's good to raise your head over the rim of your cubicle and take a look around. In a daring attempt to fulfill my desire for an overdue escape from day-to-day work, I ventured to Frankfurt and this year's ADC Summit Expo with projekt-pr's Rüdiger Hahn and Anke Schöneweiß, a freelance graphic designer. 11.000 square metres worth of design samples were waiting for us on this sunny Saturday. read more
CVS2Mercurial — Or how to escape from servitude
For a long time now, we have been suffering from the limitations and errors of CVS. For almost as long we have been dreaming of a fast, stable and simple version control system (VCS) to replace it. read more
Templating with PHPTAL: Don't make your designer think (about the wrong things)
In former times, when some of us started to generate dynamic websites using PHP, we tended to generate XHTML output for, let's say, a blog post like this: read more
8 Golden Rules for Apprentices
Last week, we finally found a second apprentice and completed our team lineup for 2010. Simon Mönch will be joining us from May 1st to learn the craft of software development and Jessica Lazarus starts her apprenticeship for digital media design on August 1st. read more
Bafana, Bafana!
So I was the webfactory's intern "march 2010". Since I'm planning to study Communication Design this fall, I don't only need application-folders filled with endless sketches and samples, but also internships to show my further interest in the field and gain first experiences. read more
Fixing Fluid for Basecamp, Campfire and other 37signals products
Ever since 37signals introduced the launchpad and unified account management for all of their products, I couldn't login to Basecamp or Campfire with Fluid. I didn't have much success finding help via Google, but I finally stumbled upon Steve Sanderson's fix today: simply add *launchpad.37signals.com* including the asterisks to your whitelist of URLs in Fluid (it's in Preferences > Advanced), restart Fluid and you're up and running. read more
Yes, we geek or A Tale of Mincemeat and Zucchini
Yesterday we (dr, hs and sb) were working late, and around 10:00pm lunch seemed very long ago indeed. A quick survey of the kitchen confirmed that we had enough leftover ingredients for spaghetti bolognese with onions, tomatoes and zucchini. What we didn't have was mincemeat and somebody willing to leave his desk long enough to cook. read more
About the TCP MSS and wrong checksums
During the last days, I had to refresh my knowledge about the gory details of the TCP protocol. By far I'm not versed enough to get into something like this or that, but at least my current problem was solved. read more
wfDevCamp 2008: Work Away From Work
Sometimes, special tasks require unusual measures. It was obvious that we needed to move the development of wfDynamic, webfactory’s content management framework, a big step forward. So in December 2008 the webfactory team headed to an apartment in the Austrian mountains for a week of focused, uninterrupted work. read more
Preach What You Practice
webfactory has always been about creating highly usable and accessible websites, keeping a close watch on web standards and the POSH paradigm. This September we finally decided it was time to start preaching what we practice. read more
Browsertesting can be fun!
Okay, enthusiasm may have gotten the better of me when I was punching in this entry's title. But even when you're doing what every frontend engineer hates by default – testing and retesting your page in the major browsers known to mankind – there are a few tools that can really make things easier for you. read more
PHP Namespaces Explained
Namespaces are one of top new features you can expect from the upcoming major PHP versions. There's still a lot of discussion and confusion about how it's going to work in detail, especially because official documentation is scarce and behaviour is subject to change. That being said, in this article I will try to sum up what I could observe playing around with a fresh checkout from PHP's PHP_5_3 CVS branch. read more
Dokumentenmanagement in einem Tag
Nach 10 Jahren hatten wir genug von der Papierflut. Jede Eingangsrechnung kopieren und in verschiedene Ordner sortieren, das gleiche mit Ausgangsrechnungen. Umlaufmappen, Kürzel, Chaos auf dem Schreibtisch. Das muss doch besser gehen, dachten wir uns. read more
What 64 bits can do for you
Recently we bought a DELL PowerEdge 2950 and meanwhile deployed it for our web hosting service. We installed Debian Etch, the first Debian release that officially and fully supports AMD64. So we had to decide were able to choose between installing a 32 or 64-bit version of our favourite OS. Now what is that decision about? read more
The End is The Beginning is The End*
Web design has come a long way. We strive to play the game in adherence to Standards, we separate structure from presentation as much as possible and we have taken into our hearts the fact that indeed the Experience is the Product. Or have we? read more
Meeting Alistair Cockburn: The Secret of Effective Teams
Alistair Cockburn is a well-known author and consultant on software methodology. I was particularly impressed by his books Surviving Object Oriented Projects and Agile Software Development. Recently, Alistair gave a workshop in Bonn titled “The Secret of Effective Teams – Agility, Discipline, Focus”, so three of webfactory (Per, Matthias and Sebastian) took the chance to meet him and learn about his newest insights. read more
Geocoding with php
Recently one of our customers asked us to pimp his project database. This database is a pool of european wide projects in non-formal learning and youth work. The customer wanted the projects to be shown on a map of europe to emphasize their extensiveness. Unless we wanted somebody to put each of the over 500 projects on the map manually, we had to find a way to use a geocoder, because we had nothing more than a description text including address information like "Athens, Greece". read more
Clustering Algorithms for Tag Clouds
Today I will talk about how to create tag clouds that display different levels of importance. At this I try to outline different approaches on how to cluster the tags by their importance significantly. I like to come up with a definition of what I am talking about first: read more
Grid it! - taming the page layout
So I’ve just returned from @media2007 in London, my head brimming with new ideas and creative energy. The event was a blast and has indeed, among other things, acted as a catalyst to finally get this very blog started. read more
Microformats break-through just around the corner
Microformats have been around for some time now. We have been using simple hCards and hCalendar markup on some client's sites and on our own. Actually in new projects we are doing it for free as part of our ["Serienmäßig inklusive"] package. We tell our clients so in our offers but to be honest I do not expect anyone to understand what we are talking about at the moment. read more
Color schemes - get inspiration from t-shirt designs
We have been doing some research on color schemes recently - how to create them and where to get inspiration from. Adobe's Kuler is just great. The idea to take colors from nature - or more precisely from butterflies - is amazing. But what striked me most was one of the hints the great Jon Hicks gave in his talk "How to be a Creative Sponge" at this year's @media conference in London. If you are a designer you should definately have a look at his slides if you couldn't make it to the conference. Besides many other great things Jon showed an example (see slide #69) of a website he designed, for which he took the colors (and even more, but I'm going to focus on that aspect) from a t-shirt design by threadless. read more
Everybody else is doing it so why can't we? *
We can. I'm talking about blogging. read more
