This last Saturday, Graham, Todd, Amanda, Emily (our new intern), and I trekked to Washington, D.C. to attend the 2012 DC UXCamp. Graham and Todd are veterans of the Bar Camp style of conference, but the rest of us had never attended one before Saturday, and I, for one, was not entirely sure what to expect. I am as fearful of speaking in public as anyone - would I have to present something on-the-fly? Would I be required to be actively involved in every discussion? Egads, I’m just the developer over in the corner with my head down, coding!

As it turns out, the entire concept behind a Bar Camp is that it is very informal, and how involved you choose to be is entirely up to you. The sessions ranged from full-on presentations with slideshows to very loose group discussions. I honestly expected there to be a lot more in-depth, fine-grained discussions about UX - including maybe some HTML5, or jQuery, specific talks with some nitty-gritty details. Instead, the sessions I attended were much more high level.

The first two sessions I attended revolved around wireframing and prototyping. The first was a presentation of a tool that the presenter’s company had built to facilitate quick creation of wireframes and the second was an open discussion about various tools that attendees use or have used and what we liked or didn’t like about each.

One thing I love about the Bar Camp format, is the informality. We attended WordCamp in Richmond in the fall, and while I do feel that I learned more there than I did at UXCamp, I found that it got to be a drag being in the same room the entire time. UXCamp allots a 2-hour break for lunch, which allowed us to venture out, get some fresh air, and get some quality team-time in together.

After lunch, I attended what was by far my favorite session. When I walked in the room, the presenter was showing a slideshow of pictures from a recent concert by the band Rush. I knew then that I was in for a different session than the previous. As people wandered in, he discussed Rush’s show aesthetic and how it relates to UX. Then the session transitioned into a presentation/discussion about Frank Lloyd Wright and how his architecture and designs relate to UX. Very cool concept, and my interest in FLW was renewed after this session.

I was very excited about the final session of the day that the entire team attended. I don’t recall the title, but it was about iPad/iPhone design, and I was hoping to learn quite a bit as Business Bullpen is growing our mobile development experience. Instead, the session ended up being about the new features in iOS5, and admittedly I found myself nodding off a couple of times. To be fair, we left Charlottesville at 6 am and had a hefty lunch so I’m not blaming this entirely on the topic or the presenter, but I found it to be a little too much of an Apple advertisement.

Having said that, I am already looking forward to UXCamp 2013! And who knows, maybe I’ll even find it in me to lead a session …

Posted by Brian Chenault, developer for Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr or Twitter.

We recently did a complete rebranding project for our client Cobec, which included not only a new website driven by WordPress, but also a couple of Facebook apps.

The requirements were fairly simple—two tabs on the Cobec Facebook page: “What We Do” and “Careers” (you can see the final result in the first image below). To start, I registered myself on Facebook with my work email address and created a Cobec test page so I didn’t risk mucking with the client’s page while developing and testing. Creating the apps themselves was a little tricky because I had never done any FB development before, but once I got the hang of the functionality in developers.facebook.com, it wasn’t too bad. These apps basically just display an external web page in Facebook’s content area through the use of an iFrame. The bulk of the work in Facebook is registering the apps, pointing them to the proper external URLs, and then adding the apps to a page.

One of the requirements for the apps was that they reuse content from Cobec’s website. Since the website was built in WordPress, creating the FB app pages and reusing content was as simple as copying the WP theme from the main site to a new theme folder and restyling the site with a fixed width to match Facebook’s iFrame. You may at this point be asking yourself how I got the Facebook apps to use the theme for FB instead of the website theme, which is an issue I wrote about recently. Click here if you are curious how that was handled.

You can check out Cobec’s Facebook page here.

The same content on the Cobec website:

Posted by Brian Chenault, developer for Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr or Twitter.

Disclaimer: I’m fully aware that this blog post is flying directly in the face of one of my other recent posts titled “Information Overload.”

I recently discovered Memolane. Still in beta mode, the app is a great idea, although I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I might use it. Basically, it allows you to add from a list of about 15 social media sites to aggregate all of your activity from those sites into a “lane” or a timeline. This timeline is what other users will see when they visit your homepage, and Memolane is nice in that it allows you to control what access you give to each of these social media apps.

I guess, for my money, the coolest feature is that in one place I can go back in time, currently as far back as the summer of 2006, and see all of my social media activity from then. Not that I have a desire to relive the past, but sometimes it can be interesting to go back and remember things that I’d completely forgotten. Now, what would be REALLY cool is if there were an option to link to Rdio and see what I was listening to a year ago.

Posted by Brian Chenault, software developer at Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr.

As a developer, I’ve always been an advocate of using existing tools/plugins/components when they are cost effective. Why spend two days reinventing a wheel that you can download for free or a nominal fee? Since joining Business Bullpen in the spring, I’ve been getting my feet wet with several WordPress sites for clients, and obviously there is a seemingly endless library of free plugins at your disposal for WP. Most of the plugin installs and configurations I’ve been through have gone fairly smoothly. Recently, however, I was forced with the decision of continuing to bang my head against the wall trying to figure out why several plugins weren’t working as advertised or go ahead and write the code myself to do the job.

Our client wanted to reuse the content from their WordPress site on their Facebook page, so I researched and discovered that there were several WP plugins for switching themes dynamically based on a match against the URL (i.e., “http://businessbullpen.com/contact/ for the default theme, and http://businessbullpen.com/contact/?facebook=1 or something similar for the alternate theme). However, when it came to actually getting the plugins to work, I wasn’t so lucky, and I probably wasted a few hours trying to mess with configurations, uninstalling and reinstalling, Googling for solutions, etc. SO … I found a snippet of code online to check a query string and switch themes dynamically, but the catch was that this code could ONLY be placed within a plugin. Long story short: 12 lines of code and a hand-rolled plugin install later, I was off to the races.

Now, sure I have to maintain the plugin, but I also have the confidence that I know exactly what the code is doing and if there are any issues with it, I’ll know exactly how to proceed. Sometimes it really does make sense to (re-)write it yourself.

Posted by Brian Chenault, developer for Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr or Twitter.

I admittedly have been struggling this week with the sheer amount of information coming my way. Work emails, emails from friends, songs to learn for recording sessions, trying to keep up with maintaining a couple of websites, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts. Throw in that Pinterest account that I just created and it adds up to a lot of information to keep on top of. Sometimes I struggle with trying to decide where to find a balance with it all.

I certainly don’t spend nearly as much time on Twitter as I used to. And I’m finding Facebook less and less valuable. As a newbie to a company that has fully adopted Tumblr, I am still trying to discover a manageable way to follow people and get content I might enjoy. It seems like everyone I know is clamoring this week for a Google+ invitation. And I have a friend who has been practically begging me to sign on to turntable.fm, and now he’s sending me emails about Spotify coming to the US soon. Well, you know what? One of our employee perks is a paid Rdio.com account, and I have fallen hopelessly in love with it. So … I don’t really have the time or the inclination for turntable.fm or Spotify at the moment, even if there features are quite different. And as far as Google+? Sorry, but I just don’t have the time or the bandwidth for another social network at the moment. If it reaches critical mass and it makes more sense for me to use that than to use Facebook, sure … but until then I’m just fine, thank you.

As a software developer, I know this isn’t quite a standard position on technology. Many of us are early adopters, tinkerers, and experimenters. Well, I’m making a stand and saying that at this time in my life, it’s getting to be too much. I’m trying to find ways to simplify in all areas of my life. I’ve recent downsized the guitar amp I use for gigs, cleaned out my closet of clothes I don’t wear, and am trying to learn to say yes only to projects I truly want to be involved in. And this goes for technology as well. If I find myself logging on to a social media site every day and not getting much out of i t— bye. If there is a tool I’m using at work that doesn’t make me more productive or at least make the work easier — see ya.

Posted by Brian Chenault, developer for Business Bullpen. You can follow Brian on Tumblr or Twitter.

One of our clients is planning to add a photo album page to their Web app, and one of the requirements is to display thumbnail versions of each photo on the screen and then display a larger image in a lightbox when clicked. From there, the user should be able to page through each image in the gallery using navigation links. Easy enough, right? There are seemingly dozens and dozens of jQuery plugins that will give you this kind of functionality with usually as little effort as referencing a script and CSS file in your code and then initializing the plugin in your own javascript file.

Once I started “shopping” around for a plugin to use, I realized that, while many of the available plugins are quite attractive, many don’t provide much functionality other than letting you customize the look and feel. I finally settled on prettyPhoto (http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyphoto-jquery-lightbox-clone/), mainly because it allows you to add your own markup. This was ideal, because another requirement for the client’s lightbox was to allow a user the ability to view other people’s comments on each photo, as well as add their own comments, in a fashion very similar to Facebook’s photo functionality. Well, when I started trying to finagle my own custom markup into prettyPhoto, I started to get more and more frustrated—it was starting to look like I’d have to start hacking their code to increase the height and width of the lightbox to a set size (prettyPhoto expands and contracts to the size of the loaded image). After spending several fruitless hours attempting unsuccessfully to get this to work, I decided to scrap the effort and use jQuery Tools’ overlay functionality to roll my own photo lightbox.

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