Concrete the Studio

two good ones going around the office right now:

ManBabies.com

Caruso One Liners

enjoy.

Some sites that I think are making the world a better place:

Minti.com – a parenting site that people seem to really use to reach out and find solutions and fellowship in parenting.

FreeRice.com – a mindless game you can play where the more you play the more rice they donate to the World Food Program. Does it make a difference? I dunno, but I like the idea of the energy people put into games being recycled into something useful.

SchoolPulse.com – full disclosure: we made this. That being said, the idea of teachers, parents and school administrators having another way to communicate appeals to the BBS guy in me who thinks that people can open up in different and sometimes better ways through digital media.

current.tv – I actually liked the last version more than this, it was easier to find the indie political videos. I like getting my news from the many, not the few.

I’m not going to name a political site, cause it’s been done to death and frankly I don’t really spend any time on a candidate/issue site.. weird.

Besides, that’ll give you some thing to post about, and tell me what else am I spacing?

If the web can make the world a better place, lets have some more examples….

http://www.thebigwordproject.com/
I can not lie, this is a good idea that we simply didn’t have first.

If someone could please explain to me how concepts like this go from 2 users to 2,000 – I’ve got some work for ya.
-frz

It’s not all strategic crap and programming around the office.. in fact an awful lot of time gets wasted with stuff like this fantastically amusing video:

http://www.cracked.com/video_16019_video-game-pitch-meeting-1979.html

Nothing shocking here, just reality. There are a lot of unique problems in the world and we don’t have time to solve them all perfectly. I’ll be the first to aknowlege that a Content Management company using something like WordPress to blog about their adventures is somewhat ironic. We do have a blog component in Concrete today, and it works well if you need to incorporate a blog into a larger more design centric site. For this problem, I did not. I just needed something I could setup quickly and use well from anywhere without having to take my developers away from building a CMS that serves our client’s needs… So in addition to WordPress, here are some other 3rd party tools we enjoy around the office:

Intervals – we used to use a timetracking app called Harvest and a bug tracking app called Unfuddled. Intervals does a great job combining the two into a single tool we can use to keep track of what needs to be done and how long it took. It’s all hosted of course, ajaxy web2.0 lovin. good product, reasonable rates.

gMail – there is a corporate version that is way buried in google’s site where you can point your MX records to google and use the gmail interface for all your mail. It’s free if you want, or pretty cheap to kill the ads and get more storage. You also get the calendar thing thrown in. This replaces exchange for us, it’s accessible via an iPhone (well the calendar only kinda, but doable) and it’s really just the best thing since sliced bread. I love the labels instead of folders, I love the threading, I can even download mail via imap to my iphone and mac mail client and organize it when i’m waiting for someone in the rain or with a slightly better interface in mac mail when on a plane. Did I mention its free? Microsoft charges thousands of bucks for this kinda stuff… hmmmmmmmm?

MailChimp – we don’t do bulk emails, we hate spam issues, we do our own newsletters and council our clients to do their blasts with a 3rd party service. I’ve heard good things about constant contact and some others, but i like mail chimp. Being able to track open rates and see where people clicked is huge. If anyone knows of a service like this that offer an API so we can do custom mail merge stuff I’d love to hear about it.

So just to re-iterate: Concrete CMS is a full site management tool. It websites for small to mid sized organizations that need complete control over their site’s presentation and content. The latest version will have some cool starting points so one could get started “in three easy steps!” but it’s not a blog, won’t ever be just a blog, and given the choice of spending my money on building a better CMS to give away, or recreating tools that already exists… well makes sense now, eh?