Insights from Planet Argon -- Planet Argon Blog

Article | Internship

Planet Argon Gets an Intern!

8 Apr 2013

Hey! My name is Corinne and I’m excited to introduce myself as Planet Argon’s first intern! I’m currently a student studying art, graphic and web design at Portland State University. I was lucky enough to land an intern position here at Planet Argon.

A large part of my education has been from studying resources on the web. And by “studying” I mean for four or five months I locked myself in my apartment and tried to learn as much as I could about web design and development.

So, as you can imagine, after a while this got pretty lonely. The amount of information out there was daunting. I decided to put my new skills to use and launched a portfolio site in hopes I’d be able to land an internship where I could learn around professionals.

Link | Development

Can I Use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8?

3 Apr 2013

Can I Use?

Here is a little knowledge nugget that Jack and I picked up during our time at An Event Apart: Seattle (more on that to come). We learned about this handy little site called caniuse.com that was created by Alexis Deveria. The site lets you look up HTML5, CSS, JS API, SVG, etc. elements to see what their support is across browsers. Then you can assess.. Can I use that?

We are freshly back from the conference and I have already started using and benefiting from it. Give it a look and find out what you can use. (Turns out you can use the first-child pseudo-element in IE8!)

Article | Work

A New Partnership with Meyer Memorial Trust

1 Apr 2013

Welcome Meyer Memorial Trust to the Planet Argon team!

Quote | Misc

Did Google kill RSS?

13 Mar 2013

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

Aldo Cortesi from Google, destroyer of ecosystems

My RSS consumption was at an all-time high in the few years prior to Google Reader coming out. Once I migrated from a desktop RSS reader to Google Reader, I found myself opening it less often. Over the years, it's fallen off my radar. I only check a few times a month. Did Google kill RSS? On purpose? Accidental? Is RSS dead? Do we all need to rely on the sites we "follow" now via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter? Better? Worse? Inevitable?

Link | UX

UX and Front End Performance

12 Mar 2013

Improving UX through Front End Performance

Good article that ties user experience to front end performance.

Article | Development

Web Dev Workshop Announced!

25 Feb 2013

Planet Argon will hold its first Modern Web Dev workshop on May 6, 2013 in Portland, OR at the historic Kennedy School. This workshop will focus on new and emerging front-end development techniques including Bootstrap, SCSS, Jekyll and Github.

Link | Strategy

What is your compass metric?

21 Feb 2013

Pick your compass metric

My old early-Rails adopter friend, Tobias, of Shopify shares how they the share their reporting metrics with the organization.

Article | Development

Inviting you to attend our first Modern Web Development Workshop

21 Feb 2013

We’re pleased to announce the first scheduled date for our Modern Web Development Workshop, which will take place on Monday, May 6th, 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

Video | Studio

Planet Argon Shake

12 Feb 2013

A remix of our Danse Gooshers video from 2009.

Article | Strategy

How to Chart Page Load Time and Bounce with Google Analytics and Spreadsheets

7 Feb 2013

We recently spoke with one of our clients about improving their site performance; specifically, we chatted about the relationship between page load time and user satisfaction. I found a number of articles relating page load speed to bounce rate, but there’s no study as convincing as an analysis of a client’s own statistics. With the help of Annie, our very own analytics expert, I was able to fumble my way through the creation of a helpful chart plotting load time versus exit and bounce rates using Google Analytics and Google Spreadsheets.