Archive for February, 2009

A few tips for successfully pulling an all-nighter

There are tons of tips out there on how to properly pull an all-nighter. To help you with the Overnight Website Challenge (18 hours away) we’ve pulled together a few of our favorites.

Get a Good Night’s Sleep While You Can
We’re talking the night before. Go to bed early, sleep as much as you can. It’s been shown that American’s don’t get enough sleep, so you’re already tired. Tonight get to bed early, squeeze in eight solid hours of sawing logs if at all possible.

Caffeine

“Experts” seem pretty divided on if caffeine helps or hinders during an all-nighter. Those who are against caffeine are wrong, dead wrong. It’s a beautiful chemical that interupts the sleep chemicals in your brain. While Benjamin Franklin was fond of saying “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I’d make a strong argument that caffeine might be the proof.

As they say, you can have too much of a good thing. Watch the caffeine intake. Too much might leave you jittery and irritable, too little might leave you snoozing, and way too much can allegedly kill you. You can download and print out this handy Caffeine Calculator or visit Death by Caffeine to see how much you’d have to ingest before it killed you.

Plan For a Nap

Susan Inglis who was on last year’s winning Team IB said planning for naps is imperative. Her team won last year, who are we to argue? Plus, our own president Luke Bucklin (pictured above during last year’s challenge) seems to agree, naps are good.

Get up & Get Your Blood Flowing
We suggest these kinds of activities to get your blood pumping.

Or, if you like to go the safe route, you could try something like this:

Eat

Light snacks throughout the night will keep your blood sugar from plummeting and help you stay more alert. Plus, you’re packing another 8 or so hours into your day, you need that extra meal. However, with fresh fruits, salty snacks, Chipotle, Umbria Pizza, Buffalo Wild Wings, we got you covered on this one.

Turn Up the Radio

Seriously. This is more than just a ploy to get Autograph’s “Turn Up the Radio” named the official theme song of the Overnight Website Challenge 09. Every article I read about the proper way to pull an all-nighter mentions music as an important factor, especially loud music with a lot of bass. But make sure to bring some headphones as to not to annoy everyone with your repeated listening of Human League’s Fascination.

Remember to Blink

The Mayo Clinic has a boatload of tips for reducing eyestrain when working in front of a computer for a long period of time.

Snowmageddon

Streaming live video by Ustream

It’s snowing in Minnesota. Sounds like a sort of “No duh” situation, doesn’t it? But it’s really, really snowing. It has been dubbed Snowmageddon, and watching the tweets roll in is actually kind of fun.

When it comes to snow, a lot of Minnesotans are of the hearty, so what variety. They do not mind driving in this kind of nonsense and go about their day without giving the weather a second thought.

There are others, like your fairweather blogger, who freak out and head for home as soon as the flakes start flying. It is a shameful burden that we carry and await being shunned by the Hearty Minnesotans and being forced to move to Wisconsin or Iowa.

Then there are still others, like our friendly neighborhood Bravocino machine, who revel in the weather:

Profiles in Nerdery: Brian Litzinger, artist turned programmer

• Astrological Sign: I honestly don’t know. Never really looked into it.
• Time at the Nerdery: Since September 2008.
• Area of expertise: Front end development mostly (HTML, CSS, JS), but I can knock around PHP pretty well, and recently did my first Rails project. I started off as a designer . . . who knew an Art degree would lead to programming?
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I make websites. Any details further than that and people kind of nod their heads and pretend they know what I’m talking about, but the “I make websites” usually brings an “oh, cool” response.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Ones that I can focus on for an extended period of time. I can juggle multiple projects, but its much more fun to have one or two projects that I can devote time to, but if they last for more than 2-3 months I start to burn out.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That I bring my dog to work. Also when I tell people it’s doubled in size in the last year.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) The IE 6 Box Model; 2) Name that CSS bug!; 3)Definition Lists or Unordered Lists; 4) IE 6 CSS hacks; 5) Bathroom tile removal tools; 6) Ways to annoy my wife; 7) World of Warcraft (pre marital bliss).
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Hiro, from Heroes, but he lost his powers recently and kind of sucks at the moment. There was a foreshadowing scene in the first season where he was a ninja and didn’t talk like a nerd, so I’m eagerly awaiting the episode when he becomes a kick ass ninja, but I guess he wouldn’t be a nerd anymore.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That question is too long. Can I pass?

‘This is the only way we’d get this quality of work done to our website’

Working Smarter Now from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

You’ll be singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” after watching this short clip from the nonprofits who benefited during the 2008 Challenge. Here they talk about how much their new website has changed the way they work and generally made things a kabillion times better.

Tech Tuesday: Validate Twitter credentials in AIR

Problem: Your AIR application needs to validate the username / password and handle failure gracefully within the application. If the user enters the wrong information you do not want them to be prompted with a Windows prompt asking them to enter their Twitter username / password. If the application needs to hold on to the credentials for any reason the Windows authentication to the API will break the AIR application.

"The server twitter.com at Twitter API requires a username and password."

Solution:
The URLRequest object has a property called 'authenticate' that must be set to false.

Most of the code from the example attached is from the Google code repository.

Here are the source files to an example AIR application that uses actionscript to verify Twitter credentials without prompting a windows box on failure.

I would like to give credit to Clayton (file_cabinet) for coming up with the solution to this problem. Thanks Clayton!

This was originally posted on blackcj.com, Chris Black's personal blog. Chris is a Senior Developer at Sierra Bravo.

Overnight Website Challenge on KARE 11

Only 4 days, 22 hours, and 25 minutes until the 2009 event!

Nerdy & Needy on KARE 11 Saturday

Set your TIVOs or get up early tomorrow (Saturday Feb 21) to see the Nerdy & the Needy on KARE 11. They'll be talking about next week's Overnight Website Challenge. Whee!

Web Makeovers Powered by Nerds, a presentation from New Times – New Tech

Today, our president, Luke Bucklin and User Experience Manager, Mike Johnson along with Molly Kennedy Lageson of Store to Door presented at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits' New Times - New Tech conference.

The presentation, which you can watch above, is about empowering nonprofits to take control of their website by treating it like an employee. We've found that oftentimes organizations treat their website like a copy machine, a piece of technology, but really its your hardest-working underachiever.

During the event our presenters took attendees through the Website Employee Review form (which you can download as a PDF) and talked about how you don't have to be super tech savvy to get the most from your website.

Finally, here are links to a few of the sites/services mentioned in the presentation:
Facebook
Twitter
Google Analytics
Google Alerts
Crazy Egg
Blogger
WordPress
Typepad

Also, further reading:
Advergirl's Rethinking Web strategy for nonprofits: The New Best Practices (part 1, part 2, and part 3)

Friday Links: Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party

• Business Card Etiquette In Japan - Boing Boing
• Fallon Planning: 6 Ways to Play Twitter - Winning Strategies for Brands On Twitter
• TV Shows That Cover Up Apple Logo on Mac Laptops and Desktop Computers
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know - The Book [97 Things] : Near-Time
• How (Not) to Write like a Designer: 5 Tricks You Didn't Learn in Studio - Core77
• Opinion: Field of Widget Dreams: "There's a phenomenon whereby normally intelligent people at both digital and traditional agencies decide that people will embrace their new widget or app simply because they've built it. It's as if the Internet were a giant cornfield in Iowa and the mere presence of yet another branded widget or app is enough to get thousands of people clicking."
• BrandFreak: '30 Rock' loves brands so much, it no longer wants their money: "Tina Fey actually says McDonald's didn't pay for the placement. But the Emmy-winning show generally revels in its over-the-top approach to brand integration. Fey has spouted a mini-infomercial for Verizon in the past, turning directly to the camera to ask "Can we have our money now?" after the pitch."
• Fallon Planning: "Good Enuff" Production Values and the Death of Commercial Craftsmanship""Good Enuff" isn't just for users, it enables us marketers to shoot more ideas fast(er), cheap(er) instead of rolling all our energies into a single overly produced "perfect" idea that just may fail. So fail fast(er). And fail cheap(er).
• Star Wars: Death Star Disco, Dark Side Inferno: "Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party."
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX: Part 2
• 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers - Learn-gasm
• Giulia Santopadre | Graphic Design | Nerd Glasses
• Does snark cast a shadow over online conversation?: The Social Path
• Connecting the Dots: Will Social Media Analytics Create a New Media Paparazzi?
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX
• Design: Create a Color Palette from a Single Image
• R/GA: Digital Agency of the Year 2008: "In a year when even digital agencies began to feel the pinch of a declining economy, R/GA plowed ahead, adding Hewlett-Packard, Mars and HBO as clients, and growing revenue by 20 percent to $126 million. As others scaled back, the Interpublic Group shop beefed up its London outpost to account for 10 percent of total revenue and opened in San Francisco in a bid to grab digital talent.For its financial performance and its continued success in proving the power of brand platforms rooted in utility, R/GA is Adweek's Digital Agency of the Year for 2008 -- its fourth such honor in the past eight years."
• The Advertising Age Timeline

Profiles in Nerdery: Brendan Beckham, sensitivity training drop-out

• Astrological Sign: Raging Bull.
• Time at the Nerdery: 1 year, 5 months.
• Area of expertise: Schmoozing with our prospects and clients, account management, and drinking.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I punch them in the face.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: Large projects with aggressive timelines and a whole lotta scope creep.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: We see no harm in a little innocent waterboarding from time to time
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1) Bare Knuckle Boxing; 2) Stand Up Comedy; 3) Who Sharted?; 4) New Ways to Injure Alex Trebek; 5) Pelosi at the Gallows; 6) People I Hate; 7) The Little Orange Cap
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: That little robot chick on Small Wonder, Vicky.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: No, and besides, that word sucks.