• Ben Callahan | Work | Blog | Personal
• Jeff Friend | Work | Personal
• Andy Rossi | Work | Blog
• Mark Wells | Work
• Rob Harr | Work | Blog
• Mike Ward | Work | Personal
• Grant Root | Work | Personal
• Ryan Clark | Work | Blog | Personal
• Ryan Buttrey | Work | Blog

We got started off with a great conversation about how difficult it is to stay current with all the RSS we’re following. Mike and Grant both use Delicious tagging. While most of us are avid fans of Google Reader, we do get behind because of the rapidly changing industry we’re a part of. Shaun Inman has a beautiful little application called Fever that helps with this problem by tracking which articles are popular and bringing these to the top of your reader. Comment below if you have other ideas…

This month Jeff suggested that we each bring something to discuss. Here are a few of the items we discussed:

Andy Rossi did a quick review of Expression Engine, a PHP based content management system released by EllisLab. This is a platform he’s been reviewing and playing with. Things he likes: solid add-ons available, extreme customization ability, you don’t have to hack at PHP to use it.

Jeff Friend brought up a great conversation about designing in the browser. There has been a lot of talk about this lately on some pretty respected sites and even at An Event Apart. We had mixed reviews in the group about this work-flow. Most concerns centered around the difficulty in finding a web-designer who could code to the standard we all strive for. The opposite is also true, it’s not east to find coders that have a solid grasp of design principles.

Ryan Clark gave us a quick overview of Mail Chimp, a newer bulk email management system. It offers a great interface for managing your lists and emails, extreme flexibility in the structure of your lists and some great RSS integration features.

Rob Harr demo’d a super cool jQuery plug-in called AJAX Upload. It handles the selection and upload of an image with jQuery, allowing you to do this without a page refresh. Beautiful. [will add links when I can get Rob to provide them - he's surfing in Florida right now]

Grant actually brought HAND-OUTS and therefore wins the award this month for “Best Dayton Web Guys Presentation”. The article was from his blog, discussing @font-face integration with a site he manages. Some of the guys use other services to help, Font Squirrel and Typekit were two.

I demo’d a web-based design presentation tool I found called Vyoopoint. It allows you to upload images (or movies, swf’s, pdf’s) of designs for submission to your client. The client can then comment on the designs. It also handles versioning of your designs. There is a free account you can use to test the service.

As we were wrapping up, Jeff called out something called Primer CSS, which will parse your mark-up and generate a skeleton CSS file based on ID’s and Classes found in the document. Very interesting idea. We all recognized the difficulty of organizing a large CSS file and pitched around a few ideas for solving these problems. How do you handle CSS confusion as your sites grow? Leave a comment!

Thanks all for a great meeting. Look forward to the next…

It’s long been expected that, while navigating a website, clicking on the organization’s logo will take you to the homepage. Not every site does this, but most sites are adhering to this standard these days. I know in my browsing experience, I regularly click on logos assuming this behavior, so I thought it was pretty cool that Amazon now has this hover state for their logo:

Amazon Logo

Amazon Logo Hover State

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I’m really not sure when Amazon introduced this, but it was new to me. This peaked my curiosity, so I did a little digging around at some of my favorite sites to see if anyone is not honoring this expectation. In fact, I couldn’t find a major website that didn’t do something like this.

Honoring “Click My Logo”:

• Apple (nicely integrated into the site nav)
• Microsoft
• Flickr
• Yahoo
• Manic Mouse (had to throw it in)
• Dictionary.com
• Daring Fireball
• Aol. (very interesting implementation)

So, my challenge to you – can you find a major website that doesn’t do this? If you find one, share it in the comments below.

Manic Mouse on Neutica+

After a little over a month with the free Typebased theme from WooThemes here on Manic Mouse, I finally switched to something more my style. It’s not that I didn’t like Typebased, it just felt like I was struggling to make it work for my content.

Neutica+ was designed by Allan Cole and is a child theme of the Thematic WordPress framework. Though I’ve never done anything with Thematic (or any other theme framework) before, the first iteration of this site (which never went live) was actually a child theme of the WordPress default theme. I really liked the concept of child themes, but didn’t want to get stuck in a “perfectionist death spiral” of personal theme design and development, so I just found a free one.

Neutica+ cost me $15. So far the only modification I’ve made is adding the “Grab the Short Link” element on post listings. I’m not an expert in PHP, so I’m not certain that I’ve done this properly, but here’s the code I’ve added to my functions.php file to do it.

global $post;
$shortLink = rtrim(get_bloginfo('url'), '/') . '/?p=' . $post->ID;
printf(__('<span class="meta-utility entry-permalink">Grab the <a title="Short Link to %2$s" rev="canonical" href="%1$s">Short Link</a>.</span>',
   'thematic'),
   $shortLink,
   wp_specialchars(get_the_title(), 'double') );

If you have a better idea or more efficient method for doing this, please let me know. You can just DM me on Twitter.

I have no problem supporting a great theme with a little cash, especially if it helps me get my thoughts online and available for discussion. However, I am a web guy, so eventually I plan on making a custom theme for Manic Mouse. This monumental task will have to wait until my second child is born, any day now. Until then, Neutica+ it is!

Always great to find this kind of inspiration!