We’ve finished up our testing and we’re ready to make the switch. As of today when you click our webmail link from the hutman.net website you’ll get the new login screen. If you prefer the old system – there is a link there to get to the old tool. We’ll keep both running for a while – but the old one will be phased out eventually.

Address books and account settings will be automatically migrated to the new tool when logging in for the first time.

We’ve added concrete5 to our portfolio of content management tools and we’ve been really pleased with the results so far.  It has a very similar editing approach to the hutman CMS with a much larger user community. This means that there is a lot of pre-built functionality we can tap into. For certain applications, the hutcms is still the way to go – but no one tool can fit all tasks.  Here are a few of the sites we’ve recently published using concrete5.

We’ve also published our first concrete5 add-on in the c5 marketplace. One of the nice things about concrete5 is the channel they’ve created for 3rd parties to share add-ons. Coders can build up modules which will work with any concrete5 site and publish them via their marketplace. This makes for easy access to extra functionality and let’s us publish some of  the items we think may have a larger audience. Check out our popup video addon at http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/popup-video/

Welcyon – http://www.welcyon.com
Along with 5 by 5 Design we created a few custom modules for Welcyon and made good use of the concrete5 permissions to create private site sections and various editor roles.

Park Ministries – http://www.upbc.org
Synchronicity Web Designs redid the look and feel of the park ministries site. We were able to help with a lot of functionlity including online class registration and moodle integration, online sales, a custom donation system and multimedia support.

Spectrum Medical – http://www.spectrummedical.com/
The spectrum medical site makes use of our custom news and events modules for c5 as well as a few multimedia enhancements.  This site is a great example of what you can do with c5 without a ton of extra customization.

We’ve pretty pleased with the addition to our arsenal and we’re looking forward to more fun c5 projects.

We’re happy to see that EatonGolden won an award in the Interactive Health and Wellness category for the Preventive Care Guidelines site they developed – http://www.uhcpreventivecare.com/

The site includes some cool survey and polling functionality as well as an embeddable API for including the data on 3rd party websites.

Have you checked your disaster plan lately?

57% Of SMBs Have No Disaster Recovery Plan — InformationWeek.

If you’re running a wordpress site on one of our machines – please update or give us a call for assistance.

WordPress › 3.0.4 Important Security Update.

Here’s a great article on prepping photoshop files for developers.  I’ve received the full range of photoshop handoffs – from 8000 layers meticulously named and grouped to a giany mishmash of Layer 1, Later 1 copy … Layer 34587 copy copy.   Merging and flattening layers is a great help – especially when you are using effects that interact with the background.

Preparing Photoshop Files for Web Developers – Noupe Design Blog.

Every time I hear that the client on a project uses IE6 I have to resist the urge to run screaming.  Any developer will tell you that troubleshooting css problems in IE6 is a nightmare. The only thing worse I’ve run into lately is trying to create email templates that don’t fall apart in Outlook 2007/10 – but that’s a different story.  I keep a virtual machine with IE6 running for testing – I can only hope it doesn’t get horribly infected with spyware. While I was testing the other day I decided to check a few other sites in IE6 to see how we were stacking up against sites with what I assume are sites with really big budgets.  I was a little surprised at how poorly a few worked. I took some screenshots in Chrome on Linux for comparison.

I’m mainly just complaining here – IE6 makes me want to harm cute furry animals – but I also think it’s interesting that development teams on some very high profile sites either don’t care or can’t make their stuff IE6 friendly.  Perhaps they understand that the people using IE6 are bound to have incredibly low expectations of their web browsing experience. Maybe they feel that their target markets don’t include IE6 users and their loathsome ilk. It could be that they just choose to use their budget making something great for current browsers.  Whatever the reason – it makes me feel a lot better knowing that I’m not alone in my desire to load up sites with transparent background images and floating divs and IE6 be damned.

etsy.com – I think IE6 was having trouble downloading all of the images here – I quit and reloaded and it seemed a bit better.

etrade.com – I couldn’t believe this one – so I restarted and retried a few times but no go. Wow -

abc.com – someone didn’t bother fixing up their transparent png’s – and this one consistently crashed the browser every time I tried.

digg.com – this one surprised me a bit. These guys are an Internet only company – but perhaps they know that anyone using IE6 is probably trapped behind a corporate firewall which will block them anyway.

office.microsoft.com – not terrible but these guys are the ones how made this abomination.

fox.com – again with the transparent png thing.

We’ve lost our last paying customers for dialup service – and I’m glad they’ve moved on to bigger and better services. As there is no demand for it – we’ll be dropping that service from our portfolio at the end of the month.

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released.

I’ve been waiting for these guys to release some code and it’s pretty exciting that they’re making headway. Diaspora is an open alternative to Facebook – they’re building a distributed system for social networking that allows you to run your own community page but share status updates and keep connections with other people on other sites.  No relying on the kindness of facebook with your privacy.