Matt Clark

Brad Treat at the PopShop

April 27th, 2012 by Matt Clark in General, Technology

I visited the PopShop in CollegeTown last night for an event.  The PopShop opened last month and is trying to become the center for student-led entrepreneurial ideas.  The popular Ezra Meetups and other meetings are being held at the PopShop, and the place appears to be a flurry of excitement and startup networking.

Brad Treat gave a talk last night about his entrepreneurial philosophy, and also anecdotal stories from the multiple startup companies he’s been involved with.

Thank for sharing, Brad, and good luck to all the PopShop entrepreneurs.  There are several more events scheduled this week, including some success stories from the Cornell 3-Day Startup event in February.

worked in academia, corporate research labs and several technology startup companies prior to GORGES. His expertise is software architecture, database development, and system administration. Matt brings GORGES over 25 years experience developing fast and robust software on a multitude of platforms and languages.

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Brian Post

Overcome challenges to meeting accessibility standards and your website will be usable to a much larger audience

March 16th, 2012 by Brian Post in Content Management, Web Development, Website Design

Building a website to comply with Section 508 or WCAG accessibility standards can mean meeting a number of specific technical requirements.  To assist in building websites that meet these standards, GORGES has found a number of tools that ease the development process.

Total Validator Tool will validate the markup of a web page against Section 508 and WCAG standards.  Getting the markup to validate to these standards helps prepare the website for visitors using screen reader software. Total Validator Tool generates easy-to-follow reports which detail where the markup of a page does not meet the accessibility standards.  From this report, developers can easily see what changes are necessary.

However, once the website markup meets the appropriate standards, there are other aspects of the standards that are beyond what the Total Validator Tool is designed to detect.  These include considerations for visitors with color blindness and preparing any video used on the website for visitors who may be blind or deaf.

Vischeck is a service that will simulate colorblind vision.  Images or screenshots of a website can be uploaded and processed for free at the Vischeck website.  This can give a general sense of how a website may look to those with a form of color blindness.

To ensure a website is usable by those who are colorblind, checking the contrast between foreground and background colors is essential.  The accessibility standards indicate what contrast ratios are necessary.  The WebAIM Color Contrast Checker will provide a ratio based on provided colors while the service Check My Colours will analyze the colors used on an entire site.

Universal Subtitles is a service for adding captions (and translations) to embedded video.  This service is compatible with many popular video hosting services and video players.

JW Player is good option for embedded video that is self-hosted.  It can meet some of the stricter versions of the accessibility standards using the optional Captions plugin and Audio Description plugin.  This includes not only closed captions but closed audio descriptions.  A closed audio description is an additional audio track that may sometimes be needed to describe the video scene to visitors who are blind.

For an overview of making video accessible, a good document can be found at the JW Player website titled “Making Video Accessible.”

Commonly used screen readers include JAWS and Window-Eyes.  For testing with a screen reader, an article on the Yahoo Developer Network suggests using a free and open source screen reader called NVDA.  The article “Easy Accessibility Testing with the NVDA Screen Reader” states:

“NVDA for Windows is one of several screen reader programs available on the market today. NVDA is free and open source. It is very strict in how it treats web pages and thus can serve as a perfect testing tool.”

By utilizing these tools, many of the challenges of meeting accessibility standards can be more easily overcome, and your website will become usable by a larger audience.

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Posted in Content Management, Web Development, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Don Ellis

Website and App Maintenance Agreements

February 16th, 2012 by Don Ellis in General, Mobile Development, Security, Web Development

Maintenance Agreements – They are — They are not

Websites and apps are not commodities and the purchasing of them is not a one-night-stand. Websites and apps are born into dynamic environments. Their full value is realized when they are maintained current with those environments. The developer relationship established during the initial development is part of the purchased value. Economies accrue when a structured relationship is maintained.

A Maintenance Agreement provides the budget to prevent obsolescence. The sad news is that a new website or app is becoming obsolete even as it is built. All three sectors of the technology advance rapidly.

  • New display and interaction devices replace the old at increasing rates.
  • There is daily industry news about greater power in databases and middleware.
  • Methods-of-use, ways of thinking about these technologies, sprint into our lives.

The users of any valuable website or app will chafe immediately when it does not take advantage of this or that new device, or some new way of searching, or some social opportunity. Staying atop these concerns is the noble use of a maintenance agreement.

A Maintenance Agreement budget also should be provided for installing important updates to the underlying software. The price should be small, maybe $250 per event, maybe two or three events per year. Security updates in particular must be done.

A Maintenance Agreement provides a management structure for all the above. There is a prioritized wish list, a clear line of communication, and a non-intrusive billing arrangement.

The Maintenance Agreement budget is not for hosting the app and ensuring its connectivity. These services are budgeted under Hosting Agreements.

GORGES would be embarrassed if Maintenance Agreement budgets were spent mostly on fixing the app. In some cases this is appropriate use, but there should be very little of this. Websites and apps are warranted for thirty days after going live and after major upgrades. Clients should test the app thoroughly before and during that period to take advantage of the warranty.

The best websites and apps pay their own way. Allocating a portion of the return for maintenance extends their lives and empowers their constituencies.

Posted in General, Mobile Development, Security, Web Development | No Comments »

Rasmus Schultz

Client-side Data Binding

February 6th, 2012 by Rasmus Schultz in Technology, Web Development

Anybody give much thought to client-side data-binding these days?

OrientDB is nearing version 1.0, and it has a native HTTP/JSON interface – it supports classes, inheritance and all kinds of relationships, all the things we try to simulate with object-relational mappers when building a domain-model, which makes me wonder… why use an ORM at all?

If you’re going to do all your data-binding on the client-side, and if a graph database can natively represent your domain-model without a line of code, why struggle to achieve the same thing with server-side code and object-relational mapping?

You’d only need controllers/actions for actual business-operations. You could probably implement a thin “proxy” for operations like updates and deletes, access control and user identity, etc… You would never need to render a template, generate tables or forms or parse a form-post or implement tedious CRUD operations on the server-side.

It all sounds dreamy, and I can see this working out great for applications.

But what about SEO? The internet lives and breathes HTML. So it seems it’s not an approach that will work for public-facing pages.

Any thoughts? :-)

Rasmus Schultz has worked for web development companies, advertising agencies and a music software company during his extensive development career. His main strengths are software development and database design. Rasmus has more than a decade of experience with many development platforms, languages and standards.

Posted in Technology, Web Development | 6 Comments »

Don Ellis

Website Search Strategies

February 2nd, 2012 by Don Ellis in Technology, User Interface UX, Web Development

Search strategies should relate to a website’s mission and message. They also need to respond to the anticipated user skills and preferences – optimal search strategies on a website for scientist or engineers would be quite different from those for the general public.

Search is really just part of navigation. In many cases information found by running a search routine can also be found by just browsing through the pages. Which serves the visitor best? … is that also what serves the mission best?

Search needs words (also phrases) for searching. When visitors compose their own phrases, will those phrase be effective in searching the website? If not, then search terms should be offered as items in drop-down lists or some similar selection interface.

Next there is the question of what will be searched. A Google-like search can theoretically see every word in the public space of the website. Will this work OK? … will many irrelevant items be returned? … or should that type of “free word” search be used, but restricted to parts of the space with relevant content?

Another approach uses either “free word” input or “selected word” input to search only prepared fields in the database. This allows the web administrators to help or control the search results, but requires maintaining those fields of search phrases.

Many choices and variations are possible. Least expensive is installing one of the free search routines, one that can be limited to just the one website, as Google can. It has quick setup, little maintenance, is familiar to nearly everyone, but in a small website it can be quite imprecise and may often return empty lists.

I recommend a careful discussion with your website’s Information Designer.

Posted in Technology, User Interface UX, Web Development | No Comments »

Don Ellis

Medical Data Proliferation

January 26th, 2012 by Don Ellis in Marketing, Technology, Uncategorized

Medical Data Proliferation – One Pattern, One Value, and One Prediction

Medical data will proliferate exponentially in the coming years. There are many drivers and patterns. Of special interest to the US data industry is the proliferation generated by mobile sensory devices.

The devices themselves are proliferating. While away from medical facilities, one may wear or be attached to devices that sense pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, blood flow rates, and many of the other vital indictors. These data can be generated and stored at high rates. In the US, increasingly the data are stored in private medical practice networks. Imagine a small, 4,000-patient group fitted with a device or two, each generating data 24 hours per day.

In its “The World in 2012” edition the Economist points out the high value obtained from such data by Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. They are able to closely monitor the benefits of new drugs and expensive treatments. There are studies showing the US value of such systems could be in the hundreds-of-billions range.

The data are accumulating, the value is becoming obvious, and the contracts to aggregate data from scattered systems will be many and huge. Nearly as demanding, will be the contracts to order the data so it may accessed by business intelligence systems.

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Posted in Marketing, Technology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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