Developing Creative Ideas

Check out this great article at A List Apart on Developing Creative Ideas. Idea creation and development is a key part of my role and this article has some great tips on how to drive innovation out of an idea sessions (brainstorm). Getting a group of people together to be creative is never an easy task and having tools like these in your back pocket will always be useful.

Hackalytics.com: Share Web Analytics Articles and News

Hackalytics.com is a social bookmarking tool for web analytics news, articles, jobs and more. Simply create an account to contribute links, vote and save the links you find most valuable and discuss links to share more information.

The site is based on Hacker News (which is technically based on Reddit) so I’m hoping the interface will be familiar.

This site is a work in progress and I value any feedback you may have. Feel free to leave comments below if you have any suggestions or see any bugs.

Testing Open Calais

I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging and entity extraction lately (I know, exciting!). We use Inform on most of our properties and they perform very well, but new techniques and tools are all over the place. One of those tools is Open Calais by Reuters.

Open Calais is an open source API for automatically extracting keywords from text. I hadn’t had time to fiddle with it until I heard that someone had created an Open Calais Wordpress Plugin.

I immediately added both the archive and auto tagger to this site to test it out. While it came up with some odd suggestions and omitted some obvious ones (I tested a Computerworld article about MS Vista, and it didn’t recommend “Vista”), I was optimistic with this first test. Even for this post, Calais wasn’t perfect, missing the obvious “Open Calais” and “Wordpress” as key entities offering up only “API” and “Reuters” as tag suggestions. Calais is far from perfect, but a promising step in the right direction.

The Calais Wordpress plugin itself was very impressive, integrating seamlessly with Wordpress’ native tagging functionality. Basically, you can use Calais to recommend tags and then redefine them (adding/removing) as you see fit. Open Calais is officially on my watch list.

Aetna Fire Alarm Client Application

Aetna Fire Alarm needed an online tool to allow clients to login and view their building alarm tests and needed it quick. To save time, I reused Wordpress’ admin design, but developed the application completely from scratch to meet Aetna’s unique requirements including CSV file importing and exporting, multiple building address searches and bar coded device integration.

I worked closely with Aetna and their clients to ensure the product met everyone’s needs and delivered it on time and on budget.

HancockBuilders.com v2.0

Hancock Builders was one of my first clients and has been working with me for about 5 years. They recently decided that it was time to update their 5-year old website and once again turned to me for direction. Together, we came up with the new HancockBuilders.com, a site that better reflects their professional construction experience and brings the site up to “Web 2.0″ standards.

The site utilizes some advanced slideshow and gallery techniques which add a nice aesthetic while also improving the user experience.

Before:

After: