services
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
products
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries (Free)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
Elsewhere
Some unconventional wisdom from David C Baker that I'd like to revisit every once in a while: "“Why Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Arrangements May Not Be Ideal”":https://www.davidcbaker.com/why-monthly-recurring-revenue-arrangements-may-not-be-ideal. He concludes: "If I’ve confused you with all this, just concentrate on this one point: retainers and MRR relationships scream hourly work, and you shouldn’t be doing hourly work." But at least for me at Engaging, the opposite is true: I've always billed hourly anyway, and some MRR arrangements I've made more recently have freed us from thinking in terms of hours (even though I'm still habitually keeping a log of hours worked).
"State of CSS 2019":https://2019.stateofcss.com/.
"Naval's How to Get Rich: Every Episode":https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich. His bifurcation between wealth and status is particularly bracing.
The Beta for Strapi v3 is out, with such major internal changes that it might well have been Strapi 4. Strapi is the Node-based self-hosted content management system / API generator that I use (though not yet for this site). The "migration":https://strapi.io/documentation/3.0.0-beta.x/migration-guide/migration-guide-alpha.26-to-beta.html is quite involved, but for the first time I can remember, a migration like this went off without a hitch and worked first time! I'm very pleased with my choice of Strapi, even wearing the t-shirt. Bravo the Parisians!
Interesting /r/webdev thread: "Does real web dev exist? Like the stuff they write all those articles about?":https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/bu7lii/does_real_web_dev_exist_like_the_stuff_they_write/ The consensus seems to be that the further along the spectrum from web site to web app, the more testing and whatnot becomes worthwhile.
Nice frank piece by Monica Lent, a software engineer in Berlin, about "mistakenly believing one is a senior developer":https://monicalent.com/blog/2019/06/03/absolute-truths-unlearned-as-junior-developer/.
Well this is handy: an article on "all James Bond's watches":https://www.watchtime.com/featured/watches-james-bond/.
We must be facing this: David Gelertner on "giving up Darwin":https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/. Like Smith's invisible hand and even Newton's laws of physics, these glorious, newly-algorithmic cosmologies — the precursors to our wonder-world of bitty digitalism — aren't the full explanation.
First episode of "Views on Vue":https://overcast.fm/+Meco779Jw that I've found worthwhile, on things people _don't_ like about Vue, including a discussion on language and translation.
Processes
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Design
It’s the competing considerations themselves that coalesce to form the design.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
N
ow that the site’s wireframes have been generated during the architecture process, we turn them into mock-ups using visual elements such as a logo and an icon set; visual conventions such as a color scheme and a typeface collection; and visual rules such as a grid layout. Design appears in Jesse James Garrett’s useful Elements of User Experience diagram as the top level, labelled Visual Design.
As well as these elements, conventions and rules, the design must take into account a number of considerations that may initially appear to conflict until, with work, the tensions among them coalesce to actually form the design.
Dieter Rams, renowned industrial designer, has 10 Principles of Good Design.
Good design:
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- helps us to understand a product
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is consequent to the last detail
- is concerned with the environment
- is as little design as possible.
The entire process, with dependencies
