Digital Pulp Blog

We’ve worked with a number of content management systems over the years, and one of our favorites is Radiant: an open-source Ruby on Rails project. That’s why we’re looking forward to its next major release, due any day now.

There are a number of features which make this an especially exciting release, like the artfully redesigned admin interface and support for international and multilingual teams. But we’re particularly pleased because a lot of the new enhancements come from Digital Pulp’s own development team.

Working closely with an open-source project (Digital Pulp has employed several core Radiant developers) doesn’t just give us a warm and fuzzy feeling; it’s a great way to tailor the product to our specific needs. Larger content management systems fill a niche as well, but none of them can boast that some of their best features were written specifically for a Digital Pulp client.

We’re all excited to continue working with Radiant and the talented developers who run the project. If you have questions about Radiant CMS tweet @digitalpulpinc.

Google has announced that it’s taking into account the speed at which your pages load for ranking search results. They follow by saying that fewer than 1% of search queries are effected by this change. Based on recent estimates from Nielsen that’s still 6 million searches a month so it may be time to take a look at your site’s performance.

Read the full announcement on Google’s Webmaster Blog:

As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Radiant, an up-and-coming open source content management system, is now available as a service. The flexible Rails framework with enterprise level capabilities coupled and hassle-free hosting could offer exciting possibilities for clients with limited support from technical staff.

Check it out… http://radiantmachine.com/

Drupal, one of our favorite open source content management systems, has announced a beta launch of their hosted service ‘Gardens’. According to TechCrunch:

Open source content management system Drupal is increasingly being used by organizations, corporations and governments to power their websites and communities. But up until now, there was no other way to set up a website or blog with Drupal than having to download and run code from a server.

Built on the Drupal 7 core, currently still in alpha, Acquia powers the entire back-end for Drupal hosted websites and communities so users don’t need to worry about server management and can focus on the personalization and content part of the equation instead.

Unlike Wordpress.com, Buytaert tells me, Drupal Gardens isn’t really meant for individuals looking to set up their own blog as much as it is aimed to help organizations and small businesses set up a Drupal environment with multi-user blogging features, social integration, forums, custom content types, and so on.

Read more: Drupal Goes Hosted With Private Beta Launch of “Gardens”

The software as a service model has always been enticing for agencies and so we’re going to keep an eye on this one. We’ll have to wait and see what compromises they’ve made and limitations set on the system. But removing the hassle of servers and hosting could prove to be a big help to lots of organizations who want the community features of Drupal but don’t have the technical staff to support it.

Yesterday the buzz in the office was off the charts. Schedules were rearranged, pizza was ordered, and speculation was at an all-time high. What new digital revolution was Apple going to announce??

We gathered around the conference room table and watched “live blog” sessions from both engadget and gizmodo to ensure no details of the report were missed. As each feature of the new “iPad” was unveiled, we’d brainstorm ways that someone could use this “magical, revolutionary” device.

Someone else, that is. Maybe not us. We didn’t see much that made us want to queue up in the line that’s probably already forming around the SoHo Apple Store to buy this thing. Where’s the revolution?!?

Josh, a lead developer at DP, offered a great answer: the iPad (like the iPhone before it) is a device, sure — but more than that, it’s a platform that allows creative software developers to do things that couldn’t be done before:

The #1 comment on the iPad so far seems to be that it’s “just a big iPhone.” People say this like it’s a bad thing; I think it’ll end up being the selling point. The beauty of the iPhone was never in its form factor or its engineering…. The iPhone has been a three-year course in new modes of user experience. The best apps are those that solve the device’s size restrictions with elegance. Now that the designers and developers who brought out the best in the iPhone have some room to play, we’re going to see the same innovation applied to a whole new class of apps that approach the functionality of traditional desktop software. The iPad’s potential is as a platform, not a device.

(I totally hate the name, though.)

The iPad is here (or will be in March, anyway). But the real revolution is still to come, in the form of new applications that you’ve only just started to imagine…

Read more at: Apple’s Product Page | Engadget’s Live Blog | Gizmodo Live Blog

It’s easy to think of programming as a solitary task… one person with one computer. This approach makes sense considering the logic being developed requires a detailed plan and incredible focus. But when one person is solely responsible a given feature, the code they write is often limited by their experience and rarely covers all cases. To close these gaps, a technology manager is inserted into the process.

At least, this is the way it’s always been…but is there a better way?

A new concept has emerged and promises to not only reduce errors but elevate the skillset of all technical team members. It’s called Pair Programming. One person does the actual writing, or coding, and the other person checks it, corrects it and offers suggestions while it’s being written. Programmers, or software developers, refer to these roles as driver and navigator. More details can be found in this NYTimes article.

While we haven’t completely adopted this new method of working, we have begun to incorporate pair programming into our client experience. Beyond training marketing staff to use their new Content Management System we’ve also offered up pair programming sessions to seamlessly transfer our knowledge of the system to in-house technical staff.

ChangeWave Research announced survey results indicating that the number of iPhone users is catching up to the number of Blackberry/RIM mobile users. iPhone is showing a 30% marketshare which is a two-fold increase over last year. While Blackberry/RIM still have the lead with 40% marketshare, the number of subscribers has leveled off and even dipped slightly over last year. Take a look…

For more, read cnet news article: Survey shows iPhone threatens Blackberry

Producers are always throwing out crazy interface challenges to the DP Tech team. Beyond web site and interactive widgets some producer requests have gone to the ridiculous including requests for forcefields that repel rain and wireless power to keep cellphones charged (which is nearing reality). But this month Wired Magazine has grabbed the baton with its most recent article:

Russian Billionaire Installs Anti-Photo Shield on Giant Yacht

Aparently Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi “shield” where lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph. What can we say? Awesome.

What could be easier? You setup an account online, grab a piece of code, place it in your global templates and voila tracking begins.

Phase 1 – Benchmarks
Within days you start to see volume of traffic, unique visitors, number of pages viewed, time on site, location around the world, most popular content and more. These preliminary results establish a benchmark and start you thinking about how to improve your numbers.

Phase 2 – Compare to Past
Within a few months you notice the compare to past tools and start looking at the metrics from one month to the next. You overlay your knowledge of what marketing efforts are happening and start to make conclusions about what is driving quality traffic and what is not working.

Phase 3 – Campaign Tracking
Now you consider ramping up your marketing efforts but want an easier way to see how the various promotions are doing so you find the campaign tracking tool that automatically creates a URL embedded with a code for google to track it separately. From one screen you can see how all your campaigns are doing and even adjust the time period to gain more insight.

Phase 4 – Custom Segments
Then one day you notice a new feature in the lower left called custom segments. You click and realized that you can build profiles based on any data google offers. You create a group of users who looked at 1 page and another group of users that looked at more than 3 pages to see if there are any differences. You create a group of users outside the U.S., one within the U.S. and one in the northeast to see if behaviors change. You even create a group of people who viewed the client login screen and make a reasonable assumption that they are clients. By this time hours have elapsed.

What’s really amazing though is you had no experience with any metrics before and now you are a master of the data. That is the brilliant simplicity of Google Analytics.

Traditional Content Management Systems assume that the content you are managing lives within the CMS. What if the content that makes up your website is being syndicated from many disparate sources (RSS, custom databases, etc.) as well as arriving via manual content entry? Well, as long as they were used in different ways, it’s not a big deal. But what if every item–every article on the site–was to be managed and displayed the same way, no matter what the source? Those and other challenging questions were what we faced when we embarked on building the new Communications of the ACM website.

The DP team conceived and implemented a custom-built Content Aggregation Engine (CAE) to pull in, or ingest, content from all of the previously mentioned disparate sources and unify it into a single data model for publishing on the site. The hours dedicated to coding were significantly less than the time spent defining the business rules, testing the application and making the product rock solid. The project required everything from broad strategic thinking to very detailed execution. 

It’s a challenge to give a recognized industry leader the ability to supercharge their flagship publication. The Content Aggregation Engine was our way of providing even more value to their prestigous membership.