SiteCrafting, Inc.

I try and run at 5:00am most mornings, and during that time and the cool-down period I do my best to reflect on what's going on in my personal life as well as what's going on in our company. I am constantly looking to challenge the way we do things and look for ways to increase my personal effectiveness and SiteCrafting's effectiveness. Read more →

So, there's been a lot of discussion around town as to why we at SiteCrafting felt we needed to create the SHIFT Awards. The answer is actually very simple. We're creating this recognition event to celebrate local business and their utilization of technology.

This event springs from the refrain that was often heard at the South Sound Technology Conference about how we in the South Sound need to get together and create events around technology and collaboration. The reality is that there is a ton of great stuff going on in the South Sound relating to technology, and it's about time we look around and say, "Hey this is a pretty great place to live, work, and innovate."  Read more →

An SVN command that gives a list of modified files between revisions. It is very useful when uploading files to a live server and when running through quality assurance. Another command to keep in your bag of tricks.
Read more →

On December 22nd, over half the SiteCrafting crew headed down to the Pierce County YWCA to help out in their Christmas gift center. Every December, the YWCA's gym is transformed into a "store" where residents can pick out gifts for their parents/children/siblings.

13 of us volunteered to wrap and label presents during two different shifts. While the first few presents seemed to take an eternity to wrap, we soon got into the swing of things and were cranking them out like nobody's business. Good thing too, as there were lots of presents to go around. Donations come from several sources: individual donations, Girl Scout troops, churches, even Hell's Angels contribute everything from toys and clothes for the kids to housewares and perfume for mom.


Read more →

Last night, myself, Brian, Julie, Mandi, Michael, Nick, and Kirk attended the Business Examiner's Fastest Growing Companies event at the Tacoma Glass Museum. Last year, we were honored to receive the #6 spot out of 10 finalists, but this year we received third place.

Finalists were selected from companies headquartered in the South Sound. The winner of the #1 spot this year was Wichert Electric Inc from Chehalis.

BCRA also won the Longevity Award for the second year running.

Congrats to Wichert Electric, BCRA and all the other finalists. 

I had the privilege of being on a panel discussion this morning at the South Sound Technology Conference. Our panel consisted of Derek Young from Seasonal View, John Dimmer from FIRS Management and Tacoma Angel Network, Mark Briggs of SerraMedia, Graham Evans of the WTC, and myself. Our topic was on Entrepreneurship in the South Sound.  Read more →

Last week Michael and I had the opportunity to spend some time with the staff of Spokane's Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery. As a Gear Grant recipient, we'll be working closely with the crisis nursery on giving their website an overhaul, updating it to better serve their current needs.

Amy Swanson, the nursery's Executive Director, gave us a tour of the location and let us in on both the sad and really positive things that come with running a crisis nursery. Some of the stories make you really feel for the children that can't do anything about the situations that they are in, but the amazing success stories shore up the positive work that they are doing.

Read more →

Usually, it's a bad idea to allow elements in a tree to be parents of themselves, because that creates problems with trying to add other children to those elements, or even listing out the tree's structure.

But, sometimes things have to be their own parent. For example, if you want to report details of an element's children to the parent element, what happens at the top level of the tree? You can't outright exclude a tree element from the reporting, you can't create a placeholder element because that would skew the tree, and you can't add in a special case in your code base for that single item.

Well, you could, but you don't want to. You'd rather have a simple and elegant solution that doesn't require lots of special cases for tree levels, and that doesn't require maintenance. So what do you do?
Read more →

A common task in web development is updating a live server. There are many ways to do it, but some of them require downtime. Rather then turn users away, it is best practice to put up a maintenance page. But what if you still need access to the site while you are updating it? .htaccess and Cookies to the rescue!
Read more →

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure to attend and volunteer for the StackOverflow DevDays conference in Seattle. StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site, much like Expert's Exchange except without the nagging to register. It boasts over 1 million page views per day and something like 20 thousand active users.

There were many interesting topics covered, from ASP.NET to Qt, and there's a few new ideas that I want to try out now.
Read more →