Yesterday The Nerdery raised $200 for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society by having waffles. Thursday night (August 19, 6:30-10:30) we host a poker party for the cause – and we’ll take your money. Our gambling/waffling ways represent a couple supplemental fundraisers leading up to our involvement in the Light the Night Walk on September 26 at Target Field.
We have good reasons for doing this, namely, our friend and colleague Bill Brown, who lost his wife Kate and son Matthew, both to Leukemia, both in the last year.
Two of the instigators of 30daysofbiking.com were on KARE 11 last Friday, and one of the other instigators, Ryan Kucera, works (and bikes to work) with me at The Nerdery. We’ve got a number of regular bikers on staff, and the company’s done a good job of making the environment bike friendly. We have places to park our bikes, lockers for clothes and a shower. In fact, they’re actually a sponsor of the initiative.
Personally, I love working in an environment where I don’t feel trapped or pressured to have a car in order to do my job. We do web development, and I spend the entire day sitting at a computer. So commuting by bicycle really helps prevent me from feeling like I’m living a sedentary life style.
Anyway, Ryan helped kick off the initiative by hastily registering the domain on March 25. Collectively, we’ve logged some serious miles since then, with peddlers in England, Indonesia, China, Australia…and yes, plenty here in Minneapolis where it all began – the city that just this week unseated Portland atop Bicycling magazine’s list of “America’s Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities.” Coincidence?
Anyway, thanks, Ryan, for getting this movement moving – and thanks, Nerdery, for sponsoring this initiative (and by the way we’re hiring – heavily).
First, a blanket thanks to all who made the 2010 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge our best yet. While this friendly competition has an all-encompassing winners’ circle, top billing goes to the champs, Team Placeholder – whose designated nonprofit, Dakota Wicohan, had no website whatsoever when our last long-lost weekend began. Look at them now, and watch how their team (which included eight people from Larsen, a design, branding, marketing and interactive agency) delivered the goods, literally overnight.
RSVP here for our “Interactive on Impossible Deadlines” webinar next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Central (we’re back on normal business hours), featuring Team Placeholder captain Reid Durbin (from Larsen) and other Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge vets.
OK, the previous blanket statement of thanks to the many Challenge supporters simply will not do. We’re gonna have to name names.
Competition is good, but judging such a competition could not have been easy – and for making tough choices in a timely yet thoughtful and gracious manner, we thank our judges:
Christine Durand, communication director, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits
Dan Grigsby, founder of Mobile Orchard and tech community organizer
Bob Huff, head of LaBreche Branding
Dana Nelson, executive director, GiveMN.org
We can’t sufficiently thank sponsors Benchmark Learning, LaBreche and ReliaCloud for supporting our nerdathon and its participants in their own meaningful ways. Benchmark Learning will donate training to nonprofits and give half-price rates to volunteer developers. They also hosted our pre-Challenge mixer, providing space (and beverages) for constructive speed dating. LaBreche, our frequent agency partner, joined us this year as an event sponsor and treated all the nonprofits to a pre-Challenge branding/interactive strategy session. VISI offered each nonprofit complimentary web hosting, including the option for its ReliaCloud service; they also provided each volunteer developer a $100 ReliaCloud credit.
We’d also like to send a shout out to all of our in-kind donors and meal sponsors who helped us to make sure that while participants may have been tired, at least they weren’t running on empty.
Bruegger’s (five stores donated a combined 340 bagels)
Chipotle (two stores donated a combined 200 burritos)
Cub (Minnetonka store donated gift card for groceries)
Jimmy Johns (two stores donated a combined five sandwich trays)
Kowalski’s (donated gift card for groceries)
Peace Coffee (donated 25 pounds of coffee)
Pizza Luce’ (donated 40 pizzas)
Red Bull (donated five cases of canned sleep substitute)
These companies also supported The Challenge in their own unique ways:
Adobe (prize donation of Flash Builder 3)
Arthouse (generously stepped up w/swag-bag donations)
GitHub (provided source code repositories)
Flashbelt (prize donation, tickets to conference)
Pilotvibe (pro-bono audio recording and editing for nonprofits/teams, including Dakota Wicohan)
Telerik (donated Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS to .NERD team)
Unwind Within (chair massages to revive weary workers)
We (the “royal we” of Mark Hurlburt and I) want to personally thank Nerdery founders Luke Bucklin, Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt for having the vision to see how much good an event like this can do in our community, and having the faith to let us take time away from our “real” jobs to further our ongoing experiment of mixing the nerdy with the needy. Also, thanks for being there to make the first of many pots of coffee (Luke), making multiple food runs (Mike D) and a midnight run for more coffee creamer (Mike S). And, oh yeah, about 3,800 hours of professional web development services were freely given to 16 nonprofits last weekend because of your willingness to run with an idea (Hurlburt’s) that was (and remains) just mad enough to work.
In addition to having volunteers on five of 16 development teams and the aforementioned extras on-hand, The Nerdery also dispatched a band of volunteers who came (and many stayed) to help keep the event running as smoothly as possible. Thanks to Jessica Mogen, Matt Tonak, Jodi Chromey, David Kam, Annette Johnson, Ginger Sorvari Bucklin, Heidi Schmidt, Kai Esbensen, Kris Szafranski, Dave Bucklin, Theresa Dahlberg, Brendan Beckham, Bruce Peterson, Simon Banks, Sara Tabor, Sonja Peterson, Bill Titler, Scott Spillman, Tony Webster and Merne Williams.
Our hosts at the U of M Continuing Education Conference Center deserve props for again letting us rock-star their fine facility, with particular thanks to Ken Gay, Mike Wybierala, Leslie Berry and Wendy Hanson.
The crescendo from the orchestra pit tells me I’ve rambled long enough, so thanks again, everyone – particularly anyone I’ve fool-heartedly forgotten.
On this blog, we’ll continue to post profiles of the finished sites created at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, so stay tuned.
It’s a grey and dreary day in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area. The kind of day that sucks all the energy out of a room and all the thoughts out of your brain. If I had any thoughts left, they’d surely be regarding this post about the history of the photo that’s the default wall paper for iPhones, or about how Facebook was really founded (be careful if you have delicate sensibilities when it comes to the f-word, there’s some swearing), or maybe I could weigh in on this point/counterpoint between Marco Arment and Merlin Mann.
But I have no thoughts, instead I have a very cool video to share.
Nonprofit reps and volunteers met-up last Thursday evening to prep for the March 20-21 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge. Hosted by Challenge sponsor Benchmark Learning, the pre-Challenge mixer was mostly dedicated to a speed-dating exercise during which volunteers made the rounds for a bit of face time with each of the 16 nonprofit organizations – knowing their teams of 9-10 web pros will work pro-bono for one of them, but of course, not knowing which org they’ll serve until March 20, with the big reveal just moments before the 24-hour countdown begins.
Before the nerdy/needy speed-dating began, several secrets of Overnight success were revealed by the Praxis team (defending champs), represented by Colle+McVoy’s Jason Striegel and The Nerdery’s Brian Litzenger. We’ve copied their notes and posted them verbatim below, but before you read and reread them, check out the good deeds they did for District 202 at last year’s Overnight Website Challenge.
Overnigt Website Challenge Strategery (unabridged), brought to you by Praxis:
In General
Come prepared
Get your critical thinking tasks done as early in the game as possible.
Assess risks as early as possible. You don’t want to be solving challenging problems at 4 AM in the morning.
Work in small bursts. Attack something concrete 30-60 minutes. Accomplish it. Take a 10-minute break.
Teams
Designate roles now:
server / connectivity / tech support
database guru
source control and backup master
back-end cms team
front-end html/css integration team
flash / jquery / front end dev
design team
writing / content plan
ia / wire-frames
producer
sweeper
special ops
Designate a person who can respect everyone’s opinions and who will make tough choices when there are differences of opinion. Democracy and waiting for consensus do not work well on short timelines. Choose the 1 person who you can all be angry at. Ideally, this would be your producer or your team lead.
Choose your tools – server environment, dev language, frameworks, CMS, plugins, etc.
Go with what you know.
Research what you don’t know. You don’t want to be figuring too much out the night of.
Have an expert on your team for anything you’re choosing to use.
Have a backup plan if things don’t work out. If that new CMS you’ve been wanting to use doesn’t work out the way you were planning, be prepared to fall back on that clumsy solution that you know you know like the back of your hand. Be prepared to make this hard decision within a few hours of starting.
Set up your server now.
Get everything you plan to use running.
Make sure everyone will be able to connect to it.
Test / simulate if possible.
You DO NOT want to spend the first 3 hours trying to sort through connectivity issues, getting people passwords, and figuring out how to turn off php magic-quotes and get mod-rewrite working correctly in order to get your CMS running.
Use source control.
Or, have a really good plan for making snapshot backups.
Have one or two people on the team make local backups at key checkpoints…
Count on someone trashing the wrong folder and deleting 4 hours of work at 6AM in the morning – that someone will probably be you.
Plan your attack
Get the whole team together for the first hour to discuss your plan with the client.
Make sure you understand their audience(s) before you begin anything else.
Make a site map. the client will hopefully bring their ideas to get the discussion started.
Content audit – understand what needs to be written, what images need to be obtained, where to source content for each section of the site map.
Spend time wireframing.
Listen to your client. Stand with what you believe is the right solution, but if you disagree on something in these early stages, don’t be afraid to listen some more. It’s worth the time. Remember that you both want to make the best site possible.
Outside of the standard CMS and site dev, plan on tackling only 1 or 2 custom features that address a core business objective.
Have one owner per custom feature. this is your special ops dude(s).
Failure or difficulty here should not jeopardize the rest of the project.
Start work on your presentation right away
Assign a presenter.
This is a joint effort between the team presenter and the client.
Your presentation starts when you begin planning. The output of your planning session should be an outline for what you want to accomplish. You want to present that the next day as an outline of what you did accomplish.
Do not start preparing this at 6 in the morning. You will have the effective IQ of a can of V8. Nobody cares about what tomato and celery have to say.
Non-profits
Come prepared
You know your business better than anyone else.
The better you can communicate this to your team, the more effective your site will be.
The faster you can transfer this knowledge, the more time your team gets to work on making things to solve your problem.
Delegate expertise
Your team knows design, understands user experience, and has experience making successful sites.
Send an expert that can represent and communicate your organization’s’s mission, brand, and message.
Allow your team to choose the tools they feel will best enable them to solve your business problem.
Understand your objectives
What does your web site need to accomplish? What’s your goal? What would a successful site look like / what role would it perform? Who does your site need to talk to? Clients? Donors? Volunteers? The Public? Staff?
Rank those audiences in order of their importance with respect to the site. Who does the site need to serve: Volunteers, Clients, and then Donors or Clients, Donors, and then Volunteers. This is hard, but you need to make a decision here.
For each audience, what does the site need to do for them?
Why do they come to your site?
What do they want to accomplish when they get there?
What do you want to entice them to do?
Make a sitemap
You can do this on a whiteboard or with post-its.
Make a page for each piece of content that you can think of: home page, how to volunteer, about us, staff, location map, what we do, etc.
Make sure you have accommodated the content that is essential for your primary audiences.
Organize these pages into groups.
Sometimes it helps to start first by grouping by audience.
Also try grouping it by subject matter.
Try to keep the site from being more than 3 levels deep. Then aim to organize things at a max of 2 levels deep. Can you take it to one level? Find the balance between organization and the ease with which users can find your content.
Plan your content
Does a page include photos?
Other than just a few paragraphs of text, are there other relevant data types to think about? Dates, youtube videos, inventory, links to other pages.
Special pages to consider with specific logic and data: job postsings, events, press releases, blogs, etc.
Find your content
Plan on bringing everything to the event that might be edited and incorporated into the final site.
Any content, images, or copy that isn’t brought to the event ready-to-go and awesome will need to be produced and written before it can be edited and incorporated into the site. Is this where you want your team to be spending their time?
You might be lucky and have a word-smith on your team. It’s also possible that you’ll end up with programmers writing your homepage copy. Think about that.
Logos, and brand assets. Vector format, if possible.
Plan on participating
You should expect to be a major contributor to your team.
Your contribution will make the work better.
A joint effort will be a huge motivator for all team members. At 5:00AM, you don’t want any team members feeling like slave labor. Your skin in the game will prevent that from happening.
Again, you have unique and special knowledge about your organization that can only make the work more relevant.
A Few Notes About Sleep
Try and oversleep for at least 2 or three days prior to the event.
If you think you need sleep, plan on taking a cat nap or two. If you are used to pushing through, do that.
Pace yourself with the expectation of diminishing returns on effort as time goes on. Try to get 80% of the work done in the first 12 hours, 15% of the work in the next 6 hours, and 4.5% of the work in the next 5, and the final .5% of work will be painstakingly constructed with the help of sleep-dep hallucinations and a few remaining slack-jawed, drooling, meat bags that you used to call teammates.
Beware of caffeine and sugar.
It can help keep you awake, but it doesn’t mean you’re making smart decisions.
You will crash at some point.
Caffeine might get you to 6:30AM. At 6:31 you may become a zombie.
If you need them, save the stimulants for the last minute, just before you absolutely need them.
Bananas.
Step out the door and breath oxygen on occasion.
Pay attention to the happiness of your team members. People will get cranky. Crankiness is infective as it is ineffective. Try to cheer each other up before the whole team’s mood goes sour.
Thus concludes the free advice from Praxis. Jason seemed pretty serious about his endorsement for bananas, and as thanks for sharing his team’s advice we’ll be sure to have plenty.
Before speed-dating began, the nonprofits also heard about free training they’ll get from mixer hosts Benchmark Learning (formerly New Horizons of Minnesota), free branding and digital communications advice they’ll get from LaBreche, and options for free web hosting they’ll get from VISI, including their ReliaCloud option. They also heard from Brian Peterson, a nonprofit veteran from last year, who returned to tell his experience working with perennial favorites Pollywog Stew to create a new site for a nonprofit he co-founded, Students Today, Leaders Forever; check out their transformation, including before/after shots.
Because brave trees still give their lives so magazines can be printed (with apologies to The Lorax), why not honor them by reflecting on the past decade’s running narrative as told to us by magazine covers.
Will your favorite magazine stay in print long enough to be in next decade’s montage? Do Kindle readers judge magazines by their cover? Remember when album art mattered?
Colbert vs. Miracle Whip. Ya gotta give to hearty thumbs up for bold, sassy advertising like this. Props to the copywriters on this one (also see this follow-up).
If you’re having a rough day and need to something to make you feel good about yourself, take comfort in the fact that you’re not (at least I hope you’re not) One of the five most common Facebook Fails.
The Nerdery is twice as picky about hiring programmers as Harvard is about admitting students, according to our fact sheet, making it true. Harvard’s acceptance rate is 8% while we hire about 4% of applicants, putting us in an Ivy League of our own. Still, we need more and more nerds.
We’re looking right at you, graduates of Neumont University. There will be no “What’s your major?” icebreaking banter, either; we know full well Neumont only offers computer science degrees through an accelerated two-and-a-half-year program. Our current Nerdery class will tell you that the gig here is an accelerated learning program in-and-of itself.
By 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the need for more than 324,000 new software engineers. All we want is half. However, the Computer Research Association reported that major universities awarded just 10,000 computer science degrees last year. This Red Bull’s for you, Neumont.
“We don’t have sports, we don’t have some of the extras. If that’s a compromise, it’s one that results in a fast launch into an exciting career,” says Neumont president Ned Levine.
Because HTML5 will be all kinds of rad and revolutionize the basic building blocks of the web – while at the same time creating a better web experience for everyone. “OK, great,” you say, “but how will it be all kinds of rad?” There is no need for future tense. The future is now! Most browsers currently support a subset of HTML5. Download that latest version of Google Chrome and check out these experiments. Then, download the latest Firefox browser and check out this radular display of awesome.
None of the glorious animation and audio goodness from the links above use any type of plugins. It’s all in the browser using HTML5. Animation, audio and data retrieval – all done using scripting. The drawing is done natively using the new canvas tag, which is exactly what it sounds like – a canvas that you can draw on. Only instead of a paintbrush you have JavaScript. Starting to get it now?
There is even a new video tag that could alleviate the need for Flash and Sliverlight based video players. There may be a slight conflict of interest there, explaining why Microsoft has yet to support the video tag in its latest version of IE8. Nevertheless, full adoption of HTML5 is bound to happen, and when it does get ready for an intensely magical web experience.
This is the stuff that Tim Berners-Lee couldn’t even have dreamed of back in 1989 while trying to help physicists at CERN reference research papers. How cool is that that we’ve come this far? HTML 4 has been out for 10 years. In those 10 years, we’ve seen a drastic move from web pages to web applications through the Web 2.0 movement. The web application is at the heart of HTML5. With the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS and the increase of cloud computing and storage, there is no doubt that the web will continue to have a greater influence on the way we live and work.
Cole slaw: Somebody (perhaps me) spiked it with peanut sauce – questionable?
7-layer dip: Really, who’s counting?
Beer: Noticeably absent, even at several minutes past noon.
Deserts: Plentiful.
Nerdery fridge: Loaded w/leftovers and easy pickins for weekend warriors.
OK, so a few side dishes seemed a bit … not-so-all-American for an an otherwise highy-patriotic outing – but all goes well with Freedom Fries. USA! USA! USA!
Fellow Americans and like-minded rockers of the free world, have a happy and safe Fourth of July weekend.
