OK, so what do you know about dynamic infrastructure, sometimes called Infrastructure 2.0? Thanks to companies like Infoblox and Cisco, you’re about to hear a lot more about new ways to manage your networks more efficiently. As your network expands and your workload increases, dynamic infrastructure is the answer to make your life easier and your workflow smoother.
Quoting from Infra20.com, a blog dedicated to understanding Infrastructure 2.0, "dynamic infrastructure and virtualization “If networks cannot keep up with the dynamic changes enabled by initiatives like virtualization, application availability and the business case for IT automation-based initiatives will suffer. “.
We’ve been working closely with the Infoblox team on some exciting new projects. Visit their blog to learn more, and check out the upcoming event on Jan 15, 2009, "Unleashing the Power of Dynamic Infrastructure" and find out how you can transform your static network into a dynamic one ready to respond quickly to more dynamic systems and endpoints.
Instead of gifts from friends and family this year, I’m asking everyone to donate a dollar or two to bring fresh, clean water to a village that desperately needs it. We tend to take the abundance of clean water for granted, we fill wading pools for our dogs to play in on a hot summer day, but in many small towns around the world they don’t have clean safe water to drink or bathe in.
I’ve just posted this page where you can learn more about the cause and donate a small amount and make a huge difference in someone’s life. Just $20 can provide clean water for one person for an entire year.
Please take a look at the site and help me spread the word about this wonderful organization by sharing the link with your friends and family too. 100% of your donation will directly build freshwater wells and fund basic sanitation projects for people who would not otherwise have safe drinking water.
1.1 billion people on our planet lack access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. 80% of all disease on the planet is attributable to the lack of water and basic sanitation. I hope you can take a moment to help me spread the word and make a difference.
Happy holidays!
The Exploratorium is one of our favorite San Francisco museums and it was a pleasure helping them create a shiny new press site with a lot of social media features built in. The site is built entirely in WordPress so staff can add, edit and tag posts as they go up, and use the powerful content management and search attributes of WordPress.
We did a bit of custom code here and there as well to make it even easier for them to manage.
We built a custom template for the site so it fits right in to the current Exploratorium website, maintaining the user experience.
Custom post templates for the press releases allow the staff to easily create a release with video or images and include content directly from exhibits on-line or link to them for reference
Custom press kit templates allow the staff to pull together a list of press releases, video and images on the fly and create a full press kit on any exhibit easily
Featured releases get their own space and an image on the home page using custom fields
The whole home page is widget based, so staff can edit content without having to get into the code
A series of galleries were constructed to highlight selected images from the museum’s vast collection
We did on and off site training for staff and supplied them with video tutorials for reference
Take a look at the new site and give us your feedback, we’d love to hear it!
We are excited to realase a new website for Barbara Means Fraser PHD., Ms Fraser is an accomplished playwright and an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University where she served as Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department from 2003-2006. Fraser’s philosophy is driven by her dedication to social justice. The plays she writes are impactful and range in topic from gay rights, breast cancer, race and societal issues to sexual harassment and abuse. Her direction repertoire includes: The Laramie Project, Twilight of the Golds, Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, and Paul Robeson.
The goals of the site were simple: to make the body of work more accessible to the public and give her a place to send companies interested in producing her plays. We used HTML and AJAX for the main page elements and Flash for a gallery of playbills and a video player for some of her clips. As we dig more deeply into her archives and the repertoire grows the site will easily scale to allow for more work.
Some people get excited about the next new greatest ever you gotta have these features release of Adobe’s latest software. I used to be one of those people. In fact, I bought Photoshop when it was one of the first apps to run on a Power PC in ‘93, and again when the jaw-dropping layers feature came out in ‘94. I was very excited when Adobe incorporated all the Macromedia products I love with the Adobe products into one big X-mas package.
Over time I’ve become a tad bit jaded. I dropped a load of change on the last round of creative suite so I could get the apps I use on a daily basis and ended up with some I have hardly opened. (I’m a PSD gurl, Illustrator makes me itch). I’m in a rut, sure, but I know my tools and I’m comfortable with ‘em.
So you can imagine I’m not doing cartwheels about the new release of Adobe CS4. I breathe a huge sigh of relief as I write this after having read this review from OnWired. From now on I’m with that “every other release” crowd. If my designers want upgrades great, but for me, I think I’ll wait.
Let’s face it, being stuck with only a handful of fonts can be limiting for designers and frustrating for clients.Of course there’s Flash or even sIFR, but there’s another option. facelift (FLIR)is a javascript image replacement script that doesn’t require Flash or even a graphics editor. All you need is to be able to run a php config file and add some JavaScript to your page. Can’t run php? No problem, they offer a hosted solution as well.
Of course you can do a whole lot more than headings. Take a look at the quickstart and see where your instincts take you.
Anybody who knows me is aware that I love Flash. Say what you will, but it’s grown a long way from the baby animation tool it was when I first started using it. I admit that sometimes it’s use is not warranted, but the way that Flash is being used for graphing and visualization tools just can’t be beat.
If you are interested in learning more about social media and how to make it work for your business, you should sign up for my up-coming Webinar: “Putting Social Media to Work for You” .
This is the first in a series of Webinars about social media and social media marketing.I’ll take user feedback to create the next in the series to make sure everybody gets what they are looking for out of these Webinars.
Length
This is a short session, just 30 minutes and no experience in social media is required. I’ll start with the basics and then quickly get to the good stuff.
What’s it all about?
I’ll cover the following topics:
What is Social Media?
How can it help my business?
Overview of social media tools.
Examples of social media use - the good, the bad, the unfortunate.
Where to find data on growth and social media usage.
Creating an effective social media strategy.
5 steps to get started.
A few ex-Google employees just launched a new search engine called CUIL (pronounced cool). The UI is sexy, black with white text and laid out in three columns, allowing you to quickly scan the results. It’s got some nifty AJAX sliding menus on the searches that allows you to view sub categories in your search.
According to their website, CUIL “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”
CUIL ranks pages based on relevancy of the content so I did a search for my own name and got links to content I’d written or mentions of me or the company, but several of the images that came up with the search were totally unrelated to the content on the page or my name. (There’s no mention of the potomac on the page and we’re in California.)
I did another search for the Exploratorium and discovered some nice features. A box pops up with related searches such as location, other museums in the area, local information and maps. Sweet!
They may need more time to index as fully as they intend to. A search for Twitter on Google yielded 73,400,000 results and on CUIL 800,000. I didn’t go through them all to see if the 72,600,000 missing links were irrelevant. Maybe I’ll try a smaller search.
All in all I think CUIL needs more time to develop, but I like the direction. For the moment I prefer Chunkit which returns more digestible chunks of information, let’s you email the “Chunk” to a friend, and shows you an indexed version of any site you visit. More on that one later.
The 
Let’s face it, being stuck with only a handful of fonts can be limiting for designers and frustrating for clients.Of course there’s Flash or even sIFR, but there’s another option. 
