Design Science: User Experience & Content Strategy – So Happy Together

The idea for this episode of Design Science was born from this conversation between Principal UX Designer Zack Naylor and Content Strategist Meghan Casey:

Meghan: Well you know, Zack, the user experience doesn’t really matter if our clients aren’t even creating or curating content people want or need.
Zack: That may be true, Meghan, but without a superior user experience, people won’t be able to read or do anything with the content.
Meghan: Yeah, Zack, I know. That’s why I’m saying that the content has to be stellar so that the user experience has something to shine the light on.
Zack: Meghan, WE ARE VIOLENTLY AGREEING.

Get the “what came first”and “who owns what” conversations out of the way and discover that the overlap between content strategy and user experience is a good thing. We’ll discuss how we’ve started to build content strategy into our user experience practice and how its making a huge difference for our team and our clients.

Using Conditional Logic with the Date Field in the Gravity Forms Plugin for WordPress

I’ve recently started using the Gravity Forms plugin for WordPress, and while I like many of its features, I was immediately stymied by the lack of conditional logic for date fields. (Lacking as of version 1.6, and a recent 1.7 beta that I looked at.)

I found an interesting example of using a hidden field for date handling, but it relies on setting the date when the form loads. I couldn’t find a way to hide and show fields based on a date entered by the user on the form. And I couldn’t find a lot of other information, so I came up with another approach. This technique relies on JavaScript/jQuery, but then so does Gravity Forms itself.

Buyer beware: If we start monkeying around with our own JavaScript alongside the plugin’s JavaScript, we could be inviting trouble. But it seems to work pretty well so let’s plunge headlong into the void. Read more

NerdCast #18: How Algorithms Can Read Human Sentiment – The Skynet Edition

In this episode of The NerdCast we interview Oleg Rogynskyy, the CEO & Founder at Semantria and Rami Nuseir the Semantria Marketing Director.  We learn how they detect human sentiment within data sets like social media data. Joining us from The Nerdery we have Sarah Sullivan and Doug Linsmeyer to talk about their recent experiences with integrating sentiment technology into a development project. Learn about how the technology works and how it’s changing the data analytics landscape.

I’m going to ask for your forgiveness up front – the audio quality is not the best, but between Skype and Mic sharing we did the best we could in post production to capture this great conversation.

Host: Ryan Carlson

Guests:

Oleg Rogynskyy and Rami Nuseir of Semantria.

Doug Linsmeyer and Sarah Sullivan of The Nerdery

Listen Now:
Running Time: 0:29:47 / Subscribe on iTunes

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Nerdery Primer: An Introduction To Building Windows 8 Applications

With so many mobile devices on the market, it’s hard to choose where to start when creating your next mobile app. In this Nerdery Primer, Chris Black look’s at the growing Windows 8 device market, with a  focus on barriers to entry and the development and design considerations you can benefit from.

NerdCast #17: Django Unchained – The Python Curious Edition

In this episode of The Nerdcast we talk with Python developer Chris Pickett. We learn some great information about Python, it’s strengths, what projects it could work well for, and we hear about how Chris got his start in development. Developers and non-developers will get plenty of information out of this episode.

Host: Ryan Carlson

Guests: Chris Pickett

Listen Now:
Running Time: 0:23:07 / Subscribe on iTunes

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WordPress Sites Being Hacked: Secure Your Site with 3 Simple Changes

There has been a recent wave of brute force attacks (hacking technique) on WordPress sites over the weekend (although this happens every day all over the world). WordPress sites in particular have been targeted in a recent string of intrusion attempts. There are some simple ways to make sure you are not the next victim.

If a site asks you to login, then someone will try to hack it. WordPress is no exception. The good news is it’s really simple to make your site even more secure.

1. Strong Passwords
This should be a no brainer, but people continue to use simple passwords. I’ve seen major companies using horribly easy to guess passwords. WHY?!

Now you don’t need to go all crazy and make something you’ll never remember, just get creative. Like cowsEatingIceCream4fun! or I’mBrining$xyBack4u. Those passwords have a lot of characters, include a number, and a special character, however, chances are you can remember them. According to one of the password testing tools, the sexy one will take a computer 364 quintillion years to crack. That’s a long time! Read more

The UX Files: Making the Most of User Research

Everybody. It’s happening. The world of technology is becoming more user-centered, and we at The Nerdery do our part to enable that transformation whenever we can. For us, this means every UX project that comes through the door starts with some element of user research. To design the right thing, we need to learn about the actual people whose lives will be impacted by what we’re designing. Clear cut.

This simple, quixotic idea serves as the basis for much of what we do as UX Designers, and it quickly becomes rife with complication when applied in the wild of actual projects. These complications come in many flavors but ultimately relate to one or more of these themes:

Read more

Tech Tips: 4 Great Things To Do With Your Shell Prompt

I spend a lot of time on the command line. Since I’m looking at my shell prompt so much, I want it to be as useful as possible. Here are some improvements I’ve made recently.

This isn’t meant as a starter guide on setting your bash prompt, but to review, you might have a standard bash prompt like this, set in your .bashrc or .bash_profile file:

PS1="\u@\h:\W$ "

Where \u is your username, \h the host name of the machine, and \W the current working directory, yielding something like:

scarpent@bigmachine:working$

I’ve always preferred the full path, with lower-case \w in my PS1. For example:

scarpent@bigmachine:~/tmp/long/path/with/many/dirs$

Okay! Let’s look at some stuff we can do with this thing. Read more

NerdCast #16 – Making The Most of Google Plus Communities

In this NerdCast we boldly go and discuss Google Plus Communities with Chris Weber, a Drupal developer here at The Nerdery. Chris happens to be a moderator of onto f the largest Drupal communities on Google Plus. We are also joined by Jules Sharred, the owner of the largest Star Trek fan Community on Google Plus,  a journalist for GeekMom.com, and the owner of the website Geeky Pleasures. Tune in as we talk about Trek, fandom, technology, and the features behind the success of Google Plus Communities.

Host: Ryan Carlson

Guests: Chris Weber and Jules Sherred

Listen Now:
Running Time: 0:34:49 / Subscribe on iTunes

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Tech Tips: Creating a SharePoint 2010 Master Page with Code-Behind

In our regular series of Tech Tips, we asked resident SharePoint expert Joseph Szczesniak to share some of the information in his brain about SharePoint. If you’d like to see more information SharePoint, let us know! ————————

Starter Page
For this example, I’m going to get you kicked off using a quick and easy custom Master Page starter solution available from CodePlex. Go ahead and download Starter 2010 Master Pages by Randy Drisgill.zip. This will give you a stripped down version of your desired Master Page with tons of documentation right inside the page. Very useful!

Read more