If you're a site administrator deploying Contribute to content teams, you'll want to register for the free Contribute 3 Site Administration Macrochat tomorrow (3/24/05) at 1pm PST (4pm EST - click here to get a local time if you're not in either time zone). Senior engineer Marni Sweetland will be hosting a live technical presentation/discussion on how you can set up and leverage user roles to control access, site styles/fonts, shared project assets and templates, and much more. Enjoy!
March 2005 Archives
Classic random Flash app for a Monday evening diversion- Grant Robinson's Montage-a-google allows you to enter a few keywords, and have a random collage made for you from the resulting Google Images search. Try a few names (or even cooler- phrases), you may be surprised at what comes back! And check out the rest of Grant's site while you're there- he's got some really interesting explorations of code and design lurking within.
(props to Sean Corfield for the forward)
Jazz fan? Flash fan? Both? Then check out "Giant Steps" by Michal Levy, a very, very sweet Flash 3D short film set to the classic John Coltrane tune of the same name. Nice.
... thoughts from indie designer Jason Santa Maria. For some reason this topic keeps popping up in my various haunts lately, and I can't get enough of it- I'm fascinated with individual workflows and efficiencies. Jason gives a great low-fi way of managing his clients at the link provided (an invoicing/tracking system built in MoveableType- classic seat-of-your-pants ingenuity!), well worth a skim if the subject piques your interest. All you indie developers/designers out there- how do you currently manage your own project/client load? What software/techniques are your favorites? (I'm currently using a hacked version of DotProject to manage any side project I work on at home, but must admit BaseCamp looks like it may fit my needs slightly better...)
Always a topic of curiosity to me- the social quagmire that is project management. Without diving postehaste into UML, specifications, or architectural best practices, this so-far-two-part-series at A List Apart by Norm Carr and Tim Meehan does a solid job of breaking down the fundamentals of use-case-driven project design and scope management. Check out both part 1 ('What is the problem?'), as well as part 2 (Taming Scope). Managing the scope of one's project (particularly with ultra nit-picky and/or fickle clients) is a difficult-to-master art- if you've ever struggled in these areas, these two articles may be a well-needed breath of fresh air.
