Blog: March 2005

American Quarterly Manuscript Tool

March 31, 2005

One of our clients, American Quarterly, is just wrapping up a project with us.  American Quarterly is the journal of the American Studies Association, and they asked us to build a tool where they could securely post manuscripts for review by board members.  They wanted to be able to upload pictures, PDFs, and other files, and let authorized people come in a review those manuscripts.

We built it, but of course we can’t show it to you.  It’s secure!

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:34 PM | Comments (0)

Hop Studios Takes a Field Trip

March 29, 2005

Wednesday, we’re going to Techvibes’ Massive Vancouver exhibition at the recently renamed “Telusphere.” Though I note that the Massive site, and everyone else, still calls it the B.C. Science World.

Any suggestions for what which sessions we should drop in on while there?

Other than, of course, the Bryght booth?

And is anyone going to be eating lunch in the area?

Posted by Travis Smith at 7:42 PM | Comments (0)

Consulting on Setting up an ONA Student Chapter

March 28, 2005

I’ve been giving some of my time recently to the Online Journalism Student Society at the University of Ohio.  They’re trying to set up a student chapter of the Online News Association, and I’ve been offering them counsel and the occasional edit of their draft proposals.

I came from the online news world, and still participate in it frequently.  The ONA’s annual conference is a lot of fun—if you’ve ever hung around with journalists at an open bar, you’ll know what I mean—and I’ve learned a lot there as well.  I was really young when I started online, and could have used the experience and support of an organizational relationship like this, though neither the OJSS or the ONA existed at the time.  (This was back in 1994, the Internet Stone Age.)

I think the OJSS students have a good rational for wanting this partnership to happen, and a solid plan for making it happen.  I wish them the best of luck.

Posted by Travis Smith at 3:56 PM | Comments (0)

Fuel Music and the Oscar Party Invites

March 25, 2005

Fuel Music and Sound asked us recently to help them manage the guest list for their annual Oscar Party. They wanted to drive people from email back to their own site, ifuelmusic.com, for responses.  That way, they increase their brand exposure while also getting a valid head count, without using a free consumer service like eVite.

We also sent out scheduled e-mails to the various consolidated and unduplicated Fuel Music and Sound lists, removed the folks who’d already RSVPed, sent those folks a reminder the day before, and automatically produced a spreadsheet listing the responants for use at the door.

We must not tell you exactly how many people showed up (three figures!) but we can tell you that Fuel asked us to shut down the original RSVP and open a late-arrivals-only group because of the overwhelming response.

Oh, and we hear the party was pretty good, too!

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:42 PM | Comments (0)

About Site Outages

March 20, 2005

Recently, we had a client who was having outage trouble with the ISP we recommended for them.  They’d had four individual instances where their site was unreachable, in the span of about two months.

Hop Studios helped them investigate the causes, and also get an overall sense of why these site failures were happening.  No one likes having an unavailable site, especially around critical times like a campaign launch or at the end of a promotional period.  After the client understood the reasons behind each outage, they were a little calmer about it, though still, of course, justifiably anxious not to have it happen again.

So, I wanted to make sure you, our clients, know a bit about outages and what can be done about them.

Most basic ISPs offer 99.5% uptime, which means they might be down for up to 3.8 hours a month, for upgrades and service, as well as unscheduled outages.

This month the client I was talking about earlier actually was down for a little more than this amount, but it helps, I think, to keep in mind that when you pay $20 / month, you’re not getting the same level of uptime promise as is required at a credit card company or by an ATM—which, come to think of it, seems to always be down when I want to get money out…

If you ever have difficulties with your ISP, let us know.  Report the outage to them right away, of course, so they can start fixing it, but we’ll follow up and help you understand what really happened.

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:51 PM | Comments (0)

New client: Blog for Everlasting Communication

March 20, 2005

Last week, Everlasting Communication added a blog to their Web site.  Hop Studios was responsible for the design and implementation of the new blog.  I particularly like the look of this one; it’s designed to resemble a set of story boards. (A story board is the visual planning of a movie or TV show, after a script is written but before you start actually producing the show.)

The blog has category and date archives, an RSS feed, a great look and feel, and is built using Expression Engine, which also allows them to integrate it easily into their site’s front page.

We didn’t get a chance to work our magic on the rest of the Everlasting site—the project only took about 2 weeks from start to finish. I hope we might get the chance to better integrate the whole site’s design into one smooth flow.  That would also let us get shorten the blog’s URLs, which I’d like to see happen.

www.everlastingcommunication.com/index.php/news/latest/

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:17 PM | Comments (0)

Writing BitTorrent for Dummies

March 20, 2005

Susannah just signed to do her second book (actually fourth, if you count co-author gigs).  It’s going to be another book for Wiley: BitTorrent for Dummies.

BitTorrent is two things: a method for transfering large files efficiently to many people at once, and a the name of a program that uses this method.  BitTorrent is especially good at allowing someone to “publish” a really big file—an application, a video, a large chunk of data—and deliver it to thousands or even millions of people without having enormous bandwidth costs.  So, while some people use it for digital piracy, others are already using it for education, for news reporting, or for distributing important software updates.

Susie’s blogging book was the first to talk about business blogging, but wasn’t the first blogging book. This time, she’s doing the very first book announced on this subject of BitTorrent.  Bleeding edge!

The book is already listed at Amazon, but you can’t order it yet.

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:17 PM | Comments (0)

WKC Blog Launches Native American Blog

March 10, 2005

This week, we helped one of our clients, the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, to launch its first (of many?) blog:

WKC Blog: Covering Indian Country

The blog is designed to “illustrate and promote best practices for media coverage of ‘Indian Country’ by highlighting examples of well-written or effectively produced stories and discussing issues that affect Native Americans.”

It’s a co-authored blog by the many savvy participants in a week-long journalism seminar.  As the blog says: “You will hear from journalists who cover Indian Country and from sources who are covered by those journalists.  You will hear the personal stories and read the published stories of those enriched by the time spent there.”

There’s already a dozen posts, including one with great photographs, and another with some exclusive news about John McCain and his views on Indian gambling—McCain spoke with the seminar participants.

For this project, we provided the templating, the design, integration with the existing site database, an RSS feed, some server tweaking and some general blogging advice.  They’re doing the hard part—writing it! Good luck and have fun, WKC folk!

Posted by Travis Smith at 3:57 AM | Comments (1)