This past Wednesday (Jan 23rd), Patrick and I headed down to Durham, NC to attend and take part in the January meeting of Refresh the Triangle. This month’s “Refresh” was hosted at Bronto’s beautiful office space in downtown Durham.

This Refresh we wanted to try out a new and different form of presentation known as “Lightning Talks,” brief ten-minute talks in quick succession. Wayne Sutton kicked things off with his talk about using Twitter to drive traffic to your site, as well as some creative ideas on how to have fun within the growing Twitter community.

Our own Patrick Reagan showed us how we can clean up HTML mark-up within our Ruby/Rails projects using Haml. The crowd was all “oohs and ahhs” as Pat used his Keynote wizardry to transform messy mark-up into beautiful Haml code right before our very eyes!

Josh Vickery took us through the often intimidating world of the Gimp, with the unique perspective of a hacker in need of the occasional web graphic. This was especially appreciated by us developers who lack the expertise of our designer brothers and sisters, but who still require the occasional simple image for our projects.

Another Viget original, Peyton Crump, gave us a designer’s perspective on using and implementing the Google Maps API. Additionally, Peyton provided everyone with a large array of resources and links for everything concerning Google Maps API, making his presentation an invaluable resource in and of itself for both designers and developers interested in creating Google Maps mash-ups, maplets, and so forth.

Finally, Julia Kulla-Mader shared her enthusiasm and vast knowledge of the open-source PHP-based CMS Drupal. Julia is a contributor to the Drupal project and was very keen on expressing some of the reasons that make Drupal such a popular CMS in both personal and professional web markets.

All this information and knowledge-sharing took place over the span of 90 minutes. The meeting was followed by a few beers and friendly conversation down at Tyler’s bar, which shares the same magnificent red-brick building as Bronto’s office.

The January Refresh saw a mix of designers and developers coming together and sharing some of the technologies that we’re really passionate about. While we’re still settling into the rapid cadence of our lightning talks, we’re also really coming into our own at the Refresh the Triangle meetings. If you are a developer, designer, or just simply interested in technology and its rapidly-shifting trends, I encourage you to check out a Refresh meeting. You’ll get an opportunity to expand your knowledge on design and development topics, as well as get to know the cream-of-the-crop talent in your local area.

Over the past few months, I’ve been talking here and there about a project I’ve been working on - Sandstone. The general idea is that, while Rails makes it easy to build an application quickly, it’s unreasonably difficult to integrate two distinct Rails projects - but if you have an e-commerce site, you may have a need for static content that doesn’t justify the effort of running an entirely distinct Rails application like Radiant CMS. Sandstone meets this need by providing a drop-in, customizable CMS as a plugin, ready to be installed on any given Rails application.

There are a couple of really interesting things about this project. The first is that it’s an instance of what we at Viget are calling “resourceful plugins” - that is, plugins that provide a complete set of resources and functionality around them in a specific domain. These plugins are intended to be easy to integrate into any existing Rails application, and to allow for extensive modification and customization without losing the ability to upgrade the core plugin code.

That last bit is especially important, since that’s where a lot of alternatives fall down - sure, there are plugins out there that add CMS functionality, but once you invest the time in customizing them to your particular project you’re wed to the particular version you installed. If a new version comes out with some compelling features, you have to do a lot of work to upgrade. With a resourceful plugin, upgrades are relatively painless. When you install Sandstone, for instance, it copies a series of controllers, models, and views into your app folder so you can tweak them to your heart’s desire. The bulk of the core functionality, however, resides in modules defined in the plugin (which are included in the copied files). To upgrade, then, you just update the plugin and leave the copied files alone. The only problems you’ll run into are ones where the new version of the plugin adds some significant new functionality (with new controllers, models, and views), but we have a strategy for dealing with that easily, too.

The other aspect of the Sandstone project (and our other resourceful plugins) that excites me is the fact that we’re open sourcing it. If you’re interested, you can grab the current version of Sandstone (so new it doesn’t even have a version number!) from http://svn.extendviget.com/lab/trunk/plugins/sandstone/. If you’d like to contribute, we have Trac set up, so you can open bugs and feature requests and otherwise participate in the process. We’re hoping that Sandstone can help meet the needs of a lot of developers, so we welcome your feedback.

image taken by Ozyman; from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozyman/211749949/

We here at Viget Labs know that your web site might not be the sexy, sleek machine you know it could be. Here are some recommendations that will bring the type of gratifying results you can tell your friends about:

1. Get Analytics: Knowing what’s happening on your web site is crucial. My heart breaks a little when clients don’t track their site’s performance – especially because it’s free (see Google Analytics). If you need help, check Google’s list of Google Authorized Analytics Consultants, (we’re one) and just ask.
2. Get focused: Why do you have a web site? Do visitors know what you’re offering? Can your customers find what they’re looking for? Answer these questions, and then fix areas that aren’t achieving your goals and those of your customers, too.
3. Start Optimizing for Search: If none of your content is text-based, you are making a mistake. Have a link-building strategy and target keyword list to optimize your online presence for growth. Take the time to read about search engine optimization at SEOMOZ.org or one of the other 60,000 articles about it. Test your content’s performance. Substantiate your online budget with factual data.

This can be the year you radically improve your web site. These three tips will get you started in the right direction. Stay tuned for more.

In 2007, we took a big risk on technology – after 6+ years of honing our PHP skills, we officially began switching all our new custom development efforts to Ruby on Rails. Now that the new year is upon us, I can safely say that we’ve reaped rewards from the switch. Though ramping up the development team (myself included) on a new technology was difficult at times, we were definitely ahead of the curve. We had already standardized on a custom-developed MVC framework for all new client projects (we used an early version to help power one of the larger applications we’ve built) and had been doing doing Test-Driven Development for almost a year prior to the switch.

Though we had a good basis from which to start, we didn’t go it alone. Between formal training for the development team and our involvement with various Ruby communities, we’ve made tremendous strides in the past year. For us, last year was our chance to both hone our technical skills and showcase our talents to a larger audience.

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