The Lab

Strategic Content Management

@nickdunn, the idea of Google Docs API integration in Symphony sounds very interesting. Our team members are transferring a lot of our processes to Google Apps, so that would be a good fit for us.

@newnomad, thanks for reminding me of @czheng’s reference to A List Apart’s article on Strategic Content Management. Kristina Halvorsen’s talks at An Event Apart have articulated a challenge that we often run into in getting sites to launch: content is often an after thought. The traditional process usually means that shoehorning content into a design, which doesn’t fit actual content requirements and forces a redesign after the fact. Obtaining or creating content early, so as to be able to design around the content, opens the door to endless iterations.

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Tools for Offline/Synchronized Content Creation

I’m curious to find out what process others are using to create content for their sites. The reason I ask is that I just came across a web application called Simplenote that synchronizes with the Simplenote iPad application and a desktop application called Notational Velocity. The API is not currently public, but you can sign up for access.

I’m interested to see how this could be adapted into a Symphony CMS publishing workflow, so I’ve applied for membership to the Simplenote API group on Google Groups.

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Don't Design Websites. Design Systems.

This morning, I received an email that was forwarded from a colleague at Domain7, where I used to work as Senior Designer. I have been forwarding a reasonable amount of traffic to Domain7 from a project I had experimented with on my own time: 960 Fluid Grid System, based on Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System.

The request went something like this:

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Getting Things Done

David Allen has written a book, Getting Things Done, that has been immensely helpful to many people. I’ve heard the book mentioned many times around the office. I have been using applications that were created with the GTD philosophy and methodology in mind. But I hadn’t actually read it until last Friday (and I’m not quite finished yet, because I skipped to the end).

I had been thinking about reading the book and was putting it off because I didn’t want to spend more money than I really needed to at this point. I discovered a podcast called Back to Work by Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin on 5by5 that had a series of talks about Getting Things Done.

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Preprocessors for HTML

Tools for Front End Design

CSS preprocessors are all the rage these days. Chris Coyier is musing about them. Stephen Hay uses them in his Responsive Design Workflow. The very popular front end design frameworks, Twitter’s Bootstrap and Zurb’s Foundation, use LESS and SASS, respectively.

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OmniGraffle XML to HTML

There are times when people will use a tool with a graphical user interface (GUI) such as OmniGraffle that provides an easy way to create an illustration of a complex structure such as a site map for a website. The output can be a file such as a PDF. It turns out that this PDF file does not contain text that can be selected, copied and pasted. For anyone wanting to reuse this data, this might mean having to recreate the structure by retyping it.

Thankfully, OmniGraffle includes the ability to export an XML file. The structure that is described by the diagram is exactly what one would want to recreate it in HTML.

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Jeremy Keith: Be Careful What You Wish For

XML and XSLT a Remedy for Vendor-Specific APIs?

The Web Directions panel discussion came around to the topic of APIs and the problem of learning a new one for every web service or having to deal with the problems of integrating those APIs into the particular systems that need to support them. To me this raised the question of why we are using APIs rather than a standard way of sharing data. It seems that XML, XHTML and XSLT would be all that we would need if,

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Setting Up A Git Workflow

A lot of my work involves developing HTML/CSS prototypes for often complex site designs and custom web applications. The workflow involves working with clients and other team members to iteratively develop concepts through various stages of the site development process:

• Site Maps
• Wireframes
• Layout Concepts
• HTML/CSS Templates

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