One more thing to know if you're a mac user at Perimeter

ok, ok, ok. I had to say this, especially after reading Jeremy Scheller's post on Keynote.

The last thing you have to know if you're a mac user at Perimeter is:

Even though you may have some more polished tools than some of the people around you, you STILL have to play nice.

Case in point I recently was asked to put together a presentation for a new strategic planning dealy here at Perimeter. My first question: Am I presenting this or do I have to hand it over to someone else to present (run the presentation)?

There were a lot of early requests that would have been very confusing without doing some simple animations (made incredibly easy in Keynote '08). So, I went ahead and start creating in Keynote. 

It was easy and fun.

Some bonuses for me were:

Easy animations along a path, ability to animate scaling, rotation and transparency.

Fun and really fast

Finished product always has more polish

Presentation viewer is really nice

Works well with all types of media, including photoshop files (in case I'm too lazy to convert)

In the end though the guys upstairs wanted edibility and the ability for everyone to view the presentation on their computer. PDF wasn't going to cut it anymore.

So reluctantly (at least for me, to them it was yes sir) I went ahead with the conversion. It had to redo some text, bullets were a mess, and my sweet animations had to be replaced with before and after slides transitions. Bottom line though, it doesn't matter. 

I go back to we're lucky because we have a choice. So it's our responsibility to play nice with others.

Taking our licks

If you've paid attention at all you know we just lanuched our new website. I think this is going to be such an amazing tool for ministry here.

First though we've got to work out some of the bugs. There were a few things that because we knew it so well we never realized how unfamiliar they would be to other people. So here's a couple of things we're hit on and how we're working to make them more clear.

Visitor/Perimeter Family/myperimeter:

We created three different sections to our site. Really three complete sites. One for visitors with all the top-level-before-you-get-here information. This is our main url. The family section has all the deep ministry information. It's what you think of when you think of the site. We tried very hard to keep the site shallow to help navigatbility. Never more than four layer: home>ministry category>ministry>ministry subpage. Myperimeter is a personalized content site like myyahoo! or igoogle.

People are having a very hard time figuring out where they are. They land on the homepage and can't find ministry links. We've received this coment a couple of times: You have a lot of great information for visitors but where is ____ ministry.

So we're adding a new homepage that lays out the three site and directs them to the one for them. As much as I hate splash pages this is one extra click to get people where they want to go and maintain the visitor/family experiences.

Downloads:

We're having a few problems with very random downloads on some operating systems. So random we're having a hard time tracking it. It is becoming an increasing problem though. See my post on PDF's and Vista for more on this.

Week at a glance:

On our old site we had this page of things coming up this week including who was preaching and leading worship. I way undervalued how important that was. Not so much sure why but it is. 

We adding back the link from our e-newsletter, the pulse, which is where most people found it.

There are about 100 other smaller things that we've seen and taken care of since our launch last month. Here's a post we recently put on our intranet for our staff describing some of the bigger, small things.30 Day Update

 

Changes Made:

• Within the first week of the site we doubled the number of pages on the site – and maintained an average of less than 24 hours to make changes and corrections.
  
• In the first 48 hours:
  
• We had ~1,800 visitors
  
• Visiting ~20,000 pages
  
• Averaging 10.65 pages per visit
  
• While staying on the site an average of 6.5 minutes (600% the industry average).
  
• We have added password protection capabilities for sections of the site, specific pages, groups, and files.
  
• Enhanced our Content Management tool with a “duplicate page” option to make it easier to create new pages.
  
• Completely overhauled the MyPerimeter login and Create a Group process per feedback and suggestions.
  
• Added the “remember me” feature so you get “Welcome ________” when you login to MyPerimeter.
  
• More than 20 ministries have been featured on the Perimeter Family home page scrolling window.
  
• More of you are using the “Change Request” feature to manage content then doing it yourself.  
  

Coming Soon:

• We are increasing the visibility of our Search and Feedback options.
  
• We are creating a new Home Page in order to correct the confusion between the Visitor experience and the Perimeter Family experience.
  
• Improved navigation via new links on the Perimeter Family home page.
  

But I'm on a date...

I like to pretend I've got some things figured out here. The reality is I'm more a juior to a lot of seniors out there (that's for you Tony). I'm still kind of breaking into this thing.

So, today, my Sabbath, I'm walking through church and I couldn't make it to the service without being asked several questions about work. Why does this brochure look like this? How do I get this on the web? Any word on that project?

This isn't really unusual.

I retreated, to a room that me and only two other people have a key to. I'll pretty much hide here until just before the service, grab Sarah and run into the back of the auditorium.

Has anyone figured out how to work at your church and still enjoy a rich, full Sabbath? Is this just the by-product of working for a church? Should I accept this as my Holy duty?

My problem is I just wasn't thinking that way. I was thinking about worship, trying to prepare my heart (which is an all week thing, but corporate worship is special, it's like going on a date with God. You guys always talk but this is special devoted time to block out the rest of the world and focus on Him). I was thinking about how great it was to be doing that with Sarah.

BLAM! I get hit out of left field. 

I hear my name and then the questions. I love the person that asked the question, it was a good question. I just wasn't ready. So I stammered for some answer and finally came out with,"What can I do for you right now?" 

Any sage advice out there?

Vista and PDF's

I figure with the ultra-cool, highly sophisticated readership I have all the problems of the world can be fixed. Or the two people who actually read my blob (not a typo), Tony and Richard, know people who can fix this problem.

On our new site we're having some problems with downloads. Here's how it goes down:

Someone goes to this page on our site.

• Three out of the four pdf's download no problem. Lesson one corrupts on the way down.
  
• We've been able to track down that this might well be a vista problem.
  

What we've done to troubleshoot:

• Re-saved the pdf backward compatible to acrobat v.5
  
• Renamed the pdf
  
• Emailed the pdf to the person who couldn't download it, they were able to open the email.
  

This is becoming one of those increasingly negative problems. Just happens that other than homepages, this is our most visited page on the site.

P.S. Same seems to be happening with some audio downloads. Two work one doesn't. I think the problem is related, since it also appears to be a Vista problem.

My kitchen stadium

I don't get to do that much design anymore. I still love it but I couldn't do that and my duties as well. So, anytime I get to do a little design I relish it.

With the launch of our new site we added a flash scroller on our family page to show the upcoming events. With the volume of design that goes into that it simply wasn't an option to outsource. I was pretty reluctant to take it on as I thought it would suck away my time.

It's actually turned into one of the most fun things I do all week. I look forward to the one hour I set aside on Wednesday to do them.

That's right, one hour. That's the fun. I've turned this into a challenge. On average we have three new images a week. That means I get 20 minutes to concept, find imagery, design and test per image. 

It's actually opened up a whole new style of design for me. Here are my design criteria:

1. It has to be simple. I have to do this in 20 minutes, so the concept has to be simple for me to do.
2. It has to be simple. Deja vu. The image is only up for 5 seconds, so it has to be easy for the viewer as well.
3. It can't get stale. Again I do three a week. The tendency to create a white background, simple image, and text is too easy. I force myself to try and keep it fresh. Every week I watch the whole thing to make sure they don't look alike.
4. They have to match what our graphic style is for the web. Simple, clean, interesting, and contemporary.
5. I really wanted five points.... They have to be fun for me. Again this is my relished time of the week. If I hate what I'm doing, I need to stop.

See, it's just an opportunity to choose your attitude. When this got added to my plate I thought, it's just too much. This could have become a begrudging, belabored part of my week. Instead it's become one of my favorite challenges.

What part of your job or life could you turn into a challenge and enjoy more? I've even found cleaning can be more fun when we put a time limit on it and then add a reward. What can I say, I'm a simple creature.

If you're a mac user at perimeter

Perimeter is a PC centric place. That said our IT team graciously let's some people use macs based on their need. I imagine that's not very different from most places.

But as an off-the-grid user how to "play nice" with the people around you.

As I've said I like lists so here are my steps to being a mac in a pc world:

1. Realize you are not entitled to the platform of your choice. You are the alien and they owe you nothing. You've been given something in that you get a choice. So try to play nice.
2. Purchase the MS office suite for mac. One of the first steps to playing nice is using what they use.
3. Get a PC. Install some sort of virtualization software on your computer. I prefer VMWare, however, given that our "PC's" are all virtual at Perimeter I prefer to use a client as it doesn't use my processor or memory.
4. Map the network drives. Mounting in mac vernacular. These are actually a great drop zone between your virtual PC and your mac, plus you'll need it to access network files.
5. If you have multiple drives to mount use automator to write a script to mount all of them at once. Save as an application and put in your dock.
6. Download screenshots for free from versiontracker.com. Your PC friends can't open you png screenshot files easily. Screenshots let's you determine what format they save in.
7. Obviously get a good security suite and password protect your machine. You are now an open tunnel into the network.
8. Get IP addresses for your printers and print via IP. Our IT department is so awesome they added a server side application that allows me to add printers as a bonjour printer. I bet Tony may tell you guys what that is in a comment.

So there it is.

That'll teach me to pray

Middle of last year we were doing a lot. All the ministries were kicking off their promotions, we had normal year kick-offs, were working on a new website, new graphics templates, oh and it was our 30th anniversary (I'll add pics tomorrow).

I was getting a normal amount of positive and negative feedback, but a lot more of both given the nature of how many things we were doing. I have to admit I'm a fragile flower and can easily get my feelings hurt. I know bad combo for a designer. Ya think?

My boss, Randy, as someone described him, is like a muscadine. Now I've eaten a muscadine but I was intimately aware of the nature of this grape like fruit. But as they explained a muscadine has a really tough outer skin but has a really juicy, sweet inside. Think grape with the skin of a lime.

So I set out to be a muscadine. I prayed for a thicker skin. If only I knew that was like praying for patience.

Fast forward a couple of months and we're launching the new site. Of course, no one checked to see if their stuff was up to date, if their ministry existed, anything. In the week prior to launch we DOUBLED the number of pages on the site. I'll post some stats tomorrow. Pretty cool.

Just the way it fell I became point for the launch. For two or three weeks people called me day and night in a panic, mostly thinking we had intentionally deleted their ministry. I think I answered the same three questions about 100 times.

This did two things:
1. Gave me an opportunity to think about what I would have done differently.
2. Gave me a really thick skin.

Fast forward to today, one of our clients called a meeting to discuss a particularly cursed project. One of those ones everything went bad, for a lot of reasons, some mine, some his. We were able to talk it out without any feelings getting hurt and actually our relationship is better for it, all because I became the muscadine.

Macs are bulletproof

To be honest I've hesitated posting this, mostly due to embarrassment. But, I figure Richard Dolan or Tony Dye (names later) would end up posting it so I better get my side out first.

About a month ago I woke up, walked into my bathroom, looked and the window. It was still dark so it was easy to notice the streetlights shining off the wet pavement. I thought, why do I care the pavement is wet. Then panic hit me like jumping into a very cold pool.

I left my mac in the back of my pick-up truck.

The night before I did a little overtime, placed my bag in the back of my truck to come home, as I've done before. My intention was to come home and do some more work. I got home really tired, walked in and fell asleep on the couch.

So I did the best I could. I opened the lid. Amazingly it came right up, my goal was to shut it down quickly. As I went to the shutdown button the screen did very weird things. I was able to get it turned off and took it very humbly into our Viant guys.

They were pretty optimistic. We did a complete tear down. Danny Ybarra, amazingly did a complete tear down of the LCD as well. Sprayed it with denatured alcohol and waited.

When we first powered it up it worked. The screen was glitchy. So I took it downstairs to remove the hardrive while I sent it off for repair. I figured any repair cost would be better than replacing a new macbook pro.

When I took it apart I looked at the video ribbon cable, it was loose. A little jiggle and it clicked. I closed it up powered it and it worked. Perfectly.

I'm actually still using my macbook pro everyday with no problems. Well except both fans run at 6,000 rpm's constantly. But hey, I have the coolest running mac ever.

I love my mac.