Archive

A nice little list of all the things that were talked about over the course of the 2008 BrightMix Summer Internship

  • We’ve Launched! — BetterOmaha.com

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    For those of you who weren’t at BarCamp to see the official announcement of the Feisty Piranha Project, we’ll make the announcement here as well! (albeit 6 days later … ) The project that our interns have been hacking away on for the past 3 months is…..drum roll… BetterOmaha.com !!!

    Essentially, the BetterOmaha site is a [...]

  • “E” Is For Erins

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    After reading Andy’s latest post on our Feisty Piranha blog, I realized that the whole Erin #1/Erin #2 thing might be a little confusing.  Isn’t it kind of odd to find 2 Erins in a 7 person company?
    I certainly haven’t spent my summer researching the occurances of multiple Erins in small businesses, but I my [...]

  • We’re launching at BarCamp Omaha!

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    In case you missed the original announcement, we’re officially launching the product on Saturday, at BarCamp Omaha! If you’re following the blog, you should definitely come out to the event and watch the unveiling! Additionally, BarCamp will be filled with lots of other interesting talks and great people… Definitely something to check out!
    What: BarCamp Omaha
    Where: [...]

  • A Summer of Coffee

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    Last week, Kevin literally got on his knees and begged me to write a post for this blog. He showed me my ridiculous keyboard-teeth avatatar and said what a waste to have created that in vain. While I have commented from time to time, I haven’t made a real post. That’s mainly because other than [...]

  • Crunch Time

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    Oh my! The summer is coming to a close, and with that, our summer internship.
    As such, we’re readying up for the launch of the FPP application. As dusty mentioned, we’re launching it next Saturday, August 16th at Barcamp Omaha.
    We’ve set ourselves a goal to have the application ready for launch by Wednesday of next week. [...]

  • oh, by the way, you suck

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    Internet Explorer doesn’t have true small-caps in it’s understanding of css. If you try to write this css:
    {
    text-transform: lowercase;
    font-variant: small-caps;
    }
    the first letter of each world will be a full-size cap, even though you specifically stated all letters should be lowercase. How terribly terrible. So you’ll have to do this instead:
    {
    text-transform: uppercase;
    font-size: 8px; /* specify a [...]

  • i’m tired

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    and I might take a nap.

  • Thursday

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    So, today is Thursday. Since I missed my Thursday and Friday posts last week, I’m doing them this week. It actually worked out pretty well like that, although after Friday I’ll have to think up a new scheme to find titles for my posts.
    Today has gone decently. I’m working on refining the search on a [...]

  • 7 nice search interfaces

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    It’s getting to that point in the project where I need to add a design element, thus far, unaccounted for. This is where it gets tricky. How do I keep the new element consistent with everything else? What if the thing I had not accounted for is conceptually and functionally different than everything else, but [...]

  • Track your Campfire Usage with Campfire Spider

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    For those of you that read every word I say, you might have noticed that I hinted at another project that Allyn and I were working on in our free time. Well, the time has come to unveil our mini project.
    It is a little known fact that Brightmix uses Campfire for office chat. [...]

  • 7 tips on css

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    …when it comes to css, here are seven things I do not only to make well-formed code, but also to create a sensible document for those who will be looking at it and editing it in the future…

  • When are we launching!?!

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    Want to be some of the first people to see the finished product that everyone here has been hacking (and designing) away on for the past 3 months?
    We are officially launching at BarCamp Omaha!
    That’s right. We’ll be launching the product in invite-only beta mode at BarCamp Omaha, on August 16. Right before all of the [...]

  • Wednesday

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    Wednesday is the every man day, because every man can enjoy a good Wednesday. It does, after all, mark the half way point to the next weekend.

  • Tuesday

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    Tuesday is depressing. It’s surrounded by weekdays, and what’s more, it’s as far from the weekend as you can get without it being a Monday.

  • Monday

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    So, today is Monday. So far, It’s been a pretty interesting Monday. No doubt, due to the decent weekend..

  • work from airplane Friday

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    Before I began my summer at BrightMix, I brought up to Kevin and Dusty that I had made a prior commitment out of town for a week in July. Of course, they were cool with it. Yay! Now that week has come, but I am feeling so excited about the progress of the project, I [...]

  • Finding Nemo

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    I have been busy this week cleaning up a task that is a major part of our project’s Phase Two. (The deadline is coming up next week!)
    I cannot go into to much information about the task I have been working on, but it involves a lot of automation to get things done easily (IE: [...]

  • epic

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    Lately, it seems like I’ve been churning out victory at a slower pace then normal. This frustrates me! Part of it, I think, is due to last weeks epic power misfortune - BrightMix was without power for over a week. This meant that we worked from home (or, really, from anywhere). Working from home was [...]

  • canary yellow for president

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    The progress pile progresses.
    Colors. That’s the name of one of my favorite magazines. It’s also what I’m going to write about.
    I’ve been setting a lot of limits on the design for this project. This many fonts, that many font sizes, width A or width B, and color choices 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or [...]

  • work from coffee shop Tuesday

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    Another day, another lack-of-power-at-the-office-so-I’m-gonna-go-to-a-coffee-shop situation. Good thing we’ve got MacBooks and Campfire. Since I basically can’t post anything I’ve been working on without giving away top-secretness (though I was going to post some censored screenshots on Friday, but the power went out and I took that to mean it was a stupid idea), I’m going [...]

  • Hack From Home Monday

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    For those of you that do not know, Brightmix is located in Omaha, Nebraska. Well, on Friday around 5:00 as we were right about to pack up for a nice quite weekend, something bad happened. A massive storm invaded the city of Omaha.
    During the 10 minutes duration of the storm, winds grew upwards [...]

  • End of the Week

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    There’s less than an hour of the work week left! Today I’ve been putting RSS feeds into our app - should be awesome. It’s been a bit of a pain, but only because we decided to do something a little more complex with it then just everything having a feed and that’s it.
    Our app has [...]

  • nevermind, the text looks terrible

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    So, I was thinking I was so awesome exporting a pdf from InDesign and importing into Photoshop to get a png with pixel-perfect accuracy (a one-pixel line actually shows up as a one-pixel line!), but of course turning off anti-aliasing makes the text chunky and sucky. Anyway……………
    At the beginning of the week, I made a [...]

  • Getting friendly_id to work!

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    If you have read Allyn’s post from a week ago, you would have noticed him saying:
    “For example, our current application has a page that executes several hundred queries when it loads. Obviously this is absolutely horrible and will have to be fixed before it’s released.”
    Well, this was exactly what I set off to do this [...]

  • Interns can Learn Ruby/Rails Quickly

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    This has been pretty awesome week for the ol’ FPP. As Bob already indicated, we’ve been busy implementing Erin #2’s design in with the code and markup. Basically, that means a lot of fiddling with HTML, CSS, and some javascript to make all the magic start happening.
    Interestingly, neither Dusty or myself have written much of [...]

  • Oh what a week!

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    It’s been an exciting week for us on the Feisty Piranha Project! Monday concluded Phase One of our operation! Around 3:00, we demoed everything we completed to people from the scary outside world, which was an interesting way to start out the week. The demo was very successful; the project is really [...]

  • From Campfire to Forest Fire

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    If you are a regular reader of the BrightMix blog, I’m sure you already know that Campfire is an integral part of running our business.  It’s a great tool, but we’ve recently found out how quickly it can get out of control.
    Shortly after I joined the company, Dusty, Kevin, and I were constantly in Campfire.  Kevin and Dusty [...]

  • Ruby on Rails

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    We’ve recently received a number of questions about Ruby on Rails. In this post, I’m going to attempt to explain why I like Ruby and Rails. In addition to that, there’s a bonus surprise at the end!
    While Ruby and Rails are often discussed as if they are one entity, they are in fact two parts: Ruby [...]

  • Feisty Piranha Project billboard?

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    Zach over at the NE Creative blog posted a great find. The Durham Museum is running ads featuring piranhas! Funny thing is, just the other night I was out with some people, telling them about the Feisty Piranha Project, and they were like “I’ve seen billboards for that!”. It confused me at the time, because [...]

  • An exciting week for all of us

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    A lot has happened over the past week on the FP project. Most notably, we started merging the code and html we’ve written with Erin #2’s actual design for the website!

    This is a real excitement for me because I was sick of looking at plain text pages on my localhost server (See screenshots

  • should i use Arial or Times New Roman to represent my brand?

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    Never, since the days of using my family’s Macintosh Classic, have I felt so limited by font choices…though it’s unlikely that, as a 6-year-old, I would have cared that much.
    Since the web is generally still relying on the user’s computer for fonts, I can’t design for the web using Ayres Royal Regular just because I [...]

  • Egads - Almost One Month Already

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    The end of this upcoming week will conclude the first phase of the Feisty Piranha Project. Since we haven’t publicly revealed what the project is about yet, I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about we’ve accomplished
    I can tell you that we’ve done a lot in a very short amount of time and [...]

  • progress

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    This is my progress pile.

    Crumpling up post-it notes really gives me a sense of accomplishment.

  • Paying Attention to Detail

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    Creating websites is easy, especially with Ruby on Rails because of all the plugins out there to make coding easy. The hard part about making websites is creating a user experience that is enjoyable for the user and content that is useful for the user.
    These prime objectives are what we have been focusing on [...]

  • The Hacking Lights

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    Here at BrightMix, Robert and I utilize what may well be the first system of its kind - The Hacking Light.

  • I got owned ;(

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    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 [...]

  • Another intern post!

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    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 [...]

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

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    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 [...]

  • Progress

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    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 [...]

  • just a quick hello

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    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. [...]

  • Ahoy

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    So, it would appear as though I am the other coder on this Feisty Piranha Project! We are about one week into the project, which has been quite interesting (Muaha, I know what the project is, and you do not!).
    I am new to Ruby on Rails (I worked on Java more in the past - [...]

  • One Week Down

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    Today was the end of the first official week of the FPP Internship. Erin #2, Allyn, and Robert are moving along quickly. We already knew Erin #2 was really talented, but the Allyn and Robert were fairly unknown quantities when we pulled the trigger on hiring them. Fortunate for us, they’re both kicking arse, taking [...]

  • ..hi.

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    As you may have guessed from my cleverly disguised user name, my name is Allyn. Yes, with a y. I’m a junior computer science major at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

  • Welcome to the Feisty Piranha Project!

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    Welcome to the newly minted Feisty Piranha Project website! We’re a little late getting the project site up and going, as we’re already two days into the internship! There’s still some kinks to work out, and some functionality to finish up, but all in all, I believe that this site is ready for the world [...]