I got owned ;(

• kevin
• May 30th, 2008
• 10:49:15 AM
• 1 Comment

It’s no secret that we frequently enjoy Starbursts here at BrightMix. In fact, in recognition of our addiction to Starbursts, Andy made the RSS icon for this blog a Starburst. Pretty swanky.

Now that everyone understands how important Starbursts are to our operation here. I will now tell you the most egregious story of a terrible joke that was played on me.

So, I was meandering around Allyn/Robert’s desks and I spotted some Starbursts on the table behind them.

Given that I hadn’t had a Starburst in probably 3 minutes, my desire for a deliciously colorful Starburst was quite high. So, what did I do? I grabbed a few of them.

Look Strange? They seemed lighter than normal. Upon further investigation, they were empty Starburst wrappers that had been meticulously reformed to look as though they still contained Starbursts!

I had been fooled. Hardcore fooled. I was also getting laughed at… for like 5 minutes straight by the interns. Robert, the mastermind behind the prank, laughed for 10 minutes.

Well done, guys, you win… this time. You better watch your backs, though - you just started a dangerous game

Another intern post!

• robert
• May 29th, 2008
• 10:46:00 AM
• 1 Comment

Hmm, well looky there! Another intern post on the blog! All within the same 24 hours; that’s odd, it’s almost as though someone forced us to write a post

Though, that is not the case; it is really because we have been making so much progress on the project! (I think they bought it Kevin, can I have my Quesadilla now?)

What have I been working on, you ask? Well, unlike Allyn, I have not been fixing coffee for Zink (Kevin) and Dusty (read the last paragraph in his post) despite how we were assured that this was not a coffee fetching internship. And I have not been looking at grids.

I, on the other hand, have been working planning social events! Yes, that is right. I am the co-social chair along with Erin #1 (Please correct me if I got my title wrong).

Here at BrightMix, we know how to party, and how else to party, than… Seeing Indiana Jones!

We have been working hard on our project, so what better way to celebrate than spending a Thursday afternoon watching a movie.

Yesterday we had a show-and-tell of what we had accomplished on the project in the past two weeks. And surprising, we have done a lot! So much showing and telling went on that it was dinner time before we knew it so Kevin and Dusty went and ordered Valentino’s Pizza for dinner! (Conveniently located 351 feet from Brightmix.)

Beyond that, the coding on the project has been going very well… Though not well enough that I would neglect my Ruby on Rails rant… It was hard finding something to rant about this time; it took me about 23 seconds before I could come up with rant.

And today the rant will be on: Rails Plugins!

Although Rails Plugins might seam… Helpful? They are far from. In the short term, they are very powerful entities. Despite that they give you the ability to add nifty features really fast, most of them are not coded to be dynamic.

I have found myself modifying plugins to get them to act the way I want them to because they are lacking in functionality. This goes against what you would think a plugin would add; functionality.

To me it seems like the Ruby on Rails plugin community does not care about other people using their plugin; they just care about their needs and desires. This can be seen in how they leave out the simple things to make their plugins versatile.

A common example that I have seen is how some plugins require a require certain classes with certain class names. Although the predefined names for the classes will fit 99% of the rails projects out there, why not add the extra 1 line of code to make the plugin dynamic for the other 1%?

In the end, rails plugins are nice, they give a starting point to adding features, though they are lacking when it comes to flexibility. Luckily plugins are open-source and can easily be modified!

Well, that’s it for me… We’re going to see Indiana Jones now!

now that I’m writing a blog about it, I find grids sound incredibly boring

• ering
• May 29th, 2008
• 10:31:25 AM
• 3 Comments

Let us discuss grids today. Grids are wonderful. Once you have a grid, you can rely on it to make decisions for you. This is true not only in design, but also applies to activities such as driving or refereeing football or eating a pizza.

For our grid, we wanted to consider the possibility of including some (really nice looking) advertising. If your site may, at some point in time, have advertising, I strongly encourage you to design your grid with some ad sizes in mind….lest you want this to happen:

I’ve designed sites and I’ve designed ads, but I’ve never designed a site that may include advertising. If you take a look at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ad guidelines, you may notice that the “standards” are not very grid-friendly. Just try finding a nice way to include a 728×90 ad, a 300×250, and a 180×150 without breaking the grid. And those are the super-standards.

With that in mind, I played around with a lot of different grids…four-column, twelve-column, ultimately deciding on a six-column grid, 940px wide(fixed-width) and 20px margins. 940px means users with a 1024×968 resolution (very common nowadays) can view the site in all its glory. The six-column is very flexible; it can easily be a two column, a three-column, et cetera. This grid can also incorporate three ad sizes, even the dreaded banner…which we will probably not use anyway.

So, here it is:

Next time, I’ll write about something cute, like icons.

Progress

• allyn
• May 28th, 2008
• 04:21:19 PM
• 1 Comment

Well, we’re halfway through another week of the Feisty Piranha Project. We’re not doing to bad. We have over a thousand lines of code between Bob and I, Subversion reports 56 commits, and Erin has made sweet progress on the interface. Also, our admin section has more then a few tabs, which any web developer can submit means the app is real. Once you have tabs, you win.

Earlier I ran into a rails problem which I solved with a loop. This doesn’t sound too bad, but observe:

(list.length-1).downto(1) do |x|
  item = (secrets)
    return false if not item or item.name.downcase != list[x-1]
  end
  return true
end

Those of you reading who know ruby will probably be able to point out the flaws in this code snippet. You’ll probably also be able to pinpoint where the tasty bits used to be, before I removed them to not give anything away. For those of you who don’t know ruby, I’ll summarize the flaws for you: it sucks. You can tell I learned Java first..Java loves those count controlled loops. In my defense, that is part of a fairly complex data structure, and I ran into many problems before I settled on this as a solution. The problems stemmed from the names being the wrong case, so that is why there’s a downcase call in there. I didn’t realize this at first, so my much more elegant one liner got turned into this, and I haven’t switched it back yet.

Just goes to show you, never write ruby on rails without coffee. I better go fix it before Zink or Dusty laugh at me.

just a quick hello

• ering
• May 24th, 2008
• 09:09:59 AM
• 1 Comment

Hello.

I thought it might be nice to introduce myself before I jump into rambling on about color theory and grid systems.

I’m Erin (number 2). I like to travel, which is how I came to live in Omaha. I am originally from Alaska and have been living in San Francisco for, oh, about 6 years…until now. I’m happy to be in Omaha and very excited to be working with the group of people that is BrightMix. Also, I’m very fond of oil-cured olives.