16 Jan 2013
Every year, Planet Argon releases a retrospective compiling the past year’s events; this includes business accomplishments like app launches, and personal milestones like marriage and travels. A couple months ago, I, Jack Bouba, was tasked with getting the ball rolling for the 2012 Year in Review. I felt this was right up my alley because (1) I love being in charge and (2) I’ve been rolling balls since childhood.
9 Jan 2013
2012 was a big, enormous, giant year for the team here at the Planet Argon World Headquarters. We launched a multitude of new projects; we traveled for both work and pleasure; we blogged extensively about web development, project management, and capsized kayaks; and, most importantly, we got a foosball table. We’re proud of everything that we accomplished in 2012, and we’d love to share our experiences, photos, and writings with all of you.
We thought outside of the box this year when designing and implementing our annual Year in Review page. For many of you, the Planet Argon team probably just seems like a bunch of extremely good-looking faces on the Who We Are page, but we’re so much more! Join us as we flex our performing skills and reenact all of the major events of 2012. In addition to the immersive video, the 2012 YIR includes photos of our infamous antics and links to many of our blog posts, which can be consolidated into a reading list with a simple click of the mouse or tap of the screen. We sure hope you enjoy it!
2 Jan 2013
As 2012 was winding down and the holiday season was winding up, I took time to work on some of our internal projects.
While updating some applications to Rails 3, I noticed that our gem, Flash Message Conductor, was not still Rails 3 ready.
Instead of replacing all of the syntactic sugar that Flash Message Conductor gives us to the Rails defaults in our applications, I decided to update the gem to use Rails 3.
I'm pleased to announce that Flash Message Conductor 2.0 is now available for download and it's compatible with all versions of Rails 3 (3.0, 3.1, and 3.2).
Still using Rails 2? Don't worry, you can still using version 1.x of the gem in your projects.
18 Dec 2012
We helped out one of our fellow local businesses raise the funds to get a new marquee. We’re big fans of this historic Portland landmark and glad that we could do something to help shape the neighborhood for (we hope) many decades to come.
17 Dec 2012
Great video to highlight how important it is to monitor how your users are searching for your products. Are there alternate spellings, abbreviations, and/or pop-culture slang that they might be searching for that you’re search indexes aren’t accounting for?
In many of our e-commerce projects, we’ve worked on a handful of solutions to address this. For example, a product like “LA Vacation” could be found under a number of possible searches:
The great thing with most search index tools is that you can shove a lot of additional keywords without having to expose this to your users in some archaic list on the site.
10 Dec 2012
Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Carl Anderson.
7 Dec 2012
Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Jack Bouba.
6 Dec 2012
Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Joshua Bennett.
5 Dec 2012
Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Brian Middleton.
5 Dec 2012
“People don’t hate progress, they just prefer inertia. This stops them from buying your product even when it’s the logical choice.”
An interesting piece on the other factors going on in a potential customers head.
Have a project that needs help?