shotgunflat

Modern American Customer Service

A little over a month ago a client of ours contacted us to inform us that anytime they tried sending email to an email address from a major web/phone/tv provider the emails were rejected.  Shortly after that another client on the same server alerted us that they were experiencing the same problem.  For about 3 weeks, we went back and forth trying to figure out the situation and trying to work out something with our server host company.  On a couple of occasions I was told “they’ll be all set now” only to learn a few days later after testing it that they were not in fact all set. 

 This has brought me to today with the new week a sheer determination to get the problem solved.  So about an hour ago I called our server host company, explained we had spoken with them before but we’d made no progress on getting the issue resolved.  The answer?  “Call (major web/phone/tv provider).  The problem is on their end.”  Excellent.  3 weeks and now I have to sit on hold for who knows how long trying to get through.  So I make the call. 

 ”Thank you for calling (major web/phone/tv provider). Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.  Please enter the phone number of the location where you have or would like service.”  I don’t want service.  I hang up.  Seeing no better option, I call back and enter our phone number.  I figure eventually I’ll get to a person. 

Call #2 - after entering the office number and selecting option 1 (for English), than option 2 because I don’t currently have an installation schedule,  than option 2 (for internet), the option 2 again for business solutions, I’m told there’s an unusually high call volume.  I think that’s just a default statement since I’m immediately connected to a person.  An after explaining the situation, he gives me the phone number of technical support.  

 Call#3 - I go through the usual rigamarole of option 1, 2 etc and this time have to hold for a bit.  Not too too bad though, only 5 minutes or so.  The first person I speak with transfers me to someone else in technical support who gives me two numbers for Technical Support for Security issues.  Also tells me that what I want is to get my ip on their safelist.  

 Call#4 - My call is important to them, but if I want to leave a voicemail I can just press 1.  My phone’s weak speakers provide me some encouragement courtesy of Journey - “Don’t Stop Believing…..”.  My call is still important to them, but voicemail’s available!  I’m back listening to Journey and their lyrics provide me with the added encouragement to stick it out.  I will speak to someone in the Technical Support for Security issues department.  Finally I get Josh on the phone.  I explain the situation, my four previous rehearsals have really got me nailing the delivery,  Josh says he can take care of it and it will take about 5 minutes to correct.  

 I hang up the phone elated.  I alert the clients.  I continue to worry deep down inside that this will not help and I’ll have to spend another hour on the phone and send more emails to clients saying “Yeah I know I said it was fixed but apparently (major web/phone/tv provider) didn’t fix it.”  One can only hope that 5 phone calls might have done the trick - now that is service.

PNG Background-Image Transparency and links, Internet Explorer, and Nested DIVs

It’s simple enough to create a site that has a repeating background image with a content area layered on top that features a drop shadow/outer glow around it. But what if you want the drop shadow graphics to be called via the CSS file as background images like they should be? That makes some of the quick and dirty PNG Transparency hacks for Internet Explorer useless, and brings up the need for another solution. And that leads to another layer of complexity if you’ve got floated/nested divs within the content area the features the transparent background image.

To summarize, we want:
1. A patterned background.
2. A content area that appears to be layered on top of the background area, with some kind of drop shadow effect to give it a feeling of depth.
3. The images that create our depth effect to be called from the css file as background images instead of the html.

Basically, it can be worked out in a series of pretty simple steps.

First, your HTML:

Basically, the wrapper div, called content, has a repeating background image that features a drop shadow and repeat-y. In order for this effect to jive in IE, we need to use some old Microsoft-specific fun. First, here’s how our browser output should appear:

Of course, by default, IE 6 displays some horrid gray solids instead of our lovely drop shadow effect. So, some simple css trickery will fix the issue:

There’s a few things going on here. First, the content div’s background details are outlined for good browsers (background-image and background-repeat) and then were done, really, for Firefox/Safari etc.

On to the Internet-explorer fixes…

First, we use the star hack to tell IE that there is no background image. Then, we use the AlphaImageLoader filter to turn around and tell IE that, actualy there is a background image, and that despite how desperately it wants to destroy our pretty dropshadows, it musn’t.

Finally, we set the z-index of the content div to 1 and the z-index of any nested divs to more-than-one and the position to relative. This is so the content will be properly layered on top of the new fancy transparent PNG background. You may be able to get away with not using z-index at all. Give it a try!

This works in IE 6 and 7 as well as Firefox for PC, and Firefox and Safari for Mac.

2008 has already been great

My apologies for the campy title. I was hoping to come up with something more original, but decided that I might as well cut to the chase.

The first two months of the new year have nearly come and past. (In fact, tomorrow would mark the beginning of March if it weren’t for the extra day that will be bestowed upon us.) In this time, we here at The ‘flat have already launched a slew of new sites that have made both ourselves and our clients proud. Each is unique in both its design and functionality. I’ll give a quick summary of each:

Jathar Salon: We focused on aesthetics for this wonderful Salon & Spa located in Waltham, MA.

Montgomery Home: We captured some excellent seasonal photos of this beautiful Victorian home in Downtown Middleborough.

JilArt: We created a website and PDF catalog for the beautiful hand-made silver and stone jewelry wholesaler.

Just For Parents: A modified logo and a site packed full of useful information were built for the website whose name explains it nicely: Just For Parents.

Southeast Motors: We built, from scratch, our brand-new inventory management tool into our clean-but-catchy design for this auto dealership in Middleborough.

As you can see, we meet a wide variety of needs for a wide variety of clients. Our client list continues to grow, with businesses from all industries using our services. On tap are websites for a Cape Cod League baseball team, an online store for hand-sewn children’s clothing, a custom home builder, an industrial supply company, a plastics manufacturing firm, and a public assistance organization, just to name a few. Shotgunflat continues to produce excellent websites for businesses, no matter what type of business (or organization) it is.

We are putting the finishing touches on our two new products: E3 e-commerce management and our social-networking tool. Stay tuned for updates on these excellent tools, and contact us if you would like to see a demonstration.

~RE

Creative Recycling

Rather than just letting our Veer catalogs biodegrade in the studio, we decided to have some fun and reuse them—and entertain our clients this month.

Basecamp Talks to Campfire

Today, Nate Clarke cooked up a quick PHP-based app that allows our basecamp RSS feed to talk to our campfire chat. In a few hours, we’ve got it behaving just how we want.

A user named Basecamp Feed comes in every 15 minutes and hooks us up with the latest activity from Basecamp. We now get to simultaneously stay passive and up-to-date.

Weather, Juxtaposed

Iheartskiing lives.

iheartskiing.com is alive and kicking. Skiers, unite.

Hard Boiled Baddies

Illustrator Michael Heald’s latest work is really, really good. Take a look.

Leopard Use Case #1

Leopard is fun and pretty, and there are some useful features, such as screen sharing (just ask Nate and Peter Wilkins from Inspectaclaim).  However, I was mildly underwhelmed in that I really hadn’t found and really good, useful features that blew me away. Then, I found an actual use for the “cover flow” method of file browsing. 

Finding a nice-looking font is now waaaay faster and better than using, say, Font Book. Just browse your font folder with cover flow. 

 

4 Months on a Mac

It happened about June 27th. And it brought about some mixed feelings. There was the usual excitement that accompanies all tech-nerds getting a new gadget - especially when that new gadget is a laptop. But there was one hold-up. My new laptop was going to be a Mac. Having been firmly ensconced in the world of Windows since my father upgraded our Epson QX-16 (where I proved myself as a Convoy prodigy) to Windows 3.1 in the early 90s, I was a little hesitant to make the jump. Mike talked about all the advantages of a Mac: better software, better operating system, better collaboration (joining he and Nate on Macs would make things easier). He convinced me it wouldn’t be that difficult to make the switch. He didn’t have to work that hard to convince me. I was looking forward to working on a laptop again, and felt he had made some good software/collaboration arguments. But mostly, I was excited to get a new toy. So on July 1, 2007 I became working on a Mac. I didn’t quit cold turkey - I have two computers in my office running Windows. But since that day my primary computer has been my new MacBook. And each day I’ve been sipping a little more of the Kool-aid.

There are three main things that have brought me over to that which I once considered the dark side. Performance, platform, and programs.

For the performance end of things I can’t place any blame on my old Windows computer. Its really not its fault. Updating to a Intel Core 2 Duo with more Ram really isn’t all that fair for comparisons sake. Powering up (and being ready to DO something) takes about half the time. And all in all its just so much faster (again the processor deserves most of the credit), that when I am on my old computer I find myself getting impatient.

As for the platform, it took a little getting used to, but not as long as I’d expected and now when I have to work on my HP, I don’t know what to do without Expose! Expose allows you to move your mouse over a corner of your screen to view everything or nothing, literally. I currently have my bottom right hand corner configured to show all windows. So if I’m working on a few different PSDs I simply move to the bottom right to switch between them. My top left corner hinds all windows and shows me my desktop, my top right is reserved for the Dashboard. Another very nice feature with numerous widgets including weather, date, the clock for Boston and Rome (to keep tabs on Nate), the most recent Red Sox score and the number of open trails at my favorite ski area. I can’t tell you how many times I find myself scrolling to the corners of my Windows computers before realizing I need to minimize all 6 Windows to open that file on my desktop.

For programs, there are really too many advantages to list. From cool programs like GarageBand, iPhoto, iChat and Photo Booth that came with the computer, to free downloads like Pyro and Coda (purchased after trial version) there are so many pluses. There are of course a few drawbacks. Not having the Microsoft Office Suite is what more often that not pushes me back onto the old computer, but that’s just a purchase away and the trial versions were quite nice.

So four months later, I have to admit. I’m a Mac Guy.

Lavoro con l'internet in Italia? Ha ha ha....no...da vero?

A week ago, I packed my entire life in to two small bags and moved to Italy.

Specifically, I moved to Siena, a small medieval city 45 min south of Florence, often referred to as “the heart of Tuscany”.

Very little planning went in to this, and considering that I told Mike two weeks before leaving, he took the news pretty well (actually, now that I think about it, he really didn’t seem to care in the slightest). With the exception of a few time zone shifts, my job hasn’t changed at all, thanks to the miracle we call The Internet. I have my weekly meeting with Drew and Ruston via video chat, and the time difference actually gives me all morning to work on projects before anyone in Middleboro has arrived at the office.

My accommodations are, by any measure, modest. I am renting a room just outside Porta Romana that is roughly as long as I am tall, and there is an ominous looking dark spot on the wall (i’m thinking mold) that has grown an unsettling amount during the past few days. However, those are my only complaints. My room has a fantastic view of the nearby hills as well as a DSL connection - €10/month - that I think might be faster than Shotgun’s connection in Middleboro. All in all….just about perfect.

If you’d like to see some photos, I have recently started a wordpress blog (styled from scratch) at natelaffan.com. Visitors welcome!

Happy Clients Means A Happy Team

One of the things that we’ve been working really hard at lately is operational excellence. It’s something that has traditionally come as a challenge to us, largely because we’ve been busy working in the trenches and concentrating on the immediate tasks at hand. As our workload has increased, we have been careful to maintain the same amount of attention to customers and response time. However, we have just recently put in a new system of working together, and the early results are in: our clients seem to be pleased. We just launched the Method Advisors website today, and Eric Stewart sent along the following note.

“Thanks again for your great work, and your unparalleled responsiveness throughout the process. I realize that you probably aren’t hit with continuous requests like I’ve thrown at you guys for the past few months.”

It’s notes like this—and the good feeling the whole team gets when seeing it—that make the difference here at the ‘flat.