PCFD Site Update

This week we launched a new version of the Park City Fire District site. The design remained the same (for the most part), while the back end was completely rebuilt on WordPress. View the site Here’s a list of the site enhancements: Site-wide Google Translation Site-wide Search function Breadcrumb Navigation Improved News layout Improved Archives…

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Sorry Typekit, you’re unusable (for now)

With the launch of the new site I decided to try once again to give @font-face another try. I’ve been disappointed in the past with how most browsers render embedded fonts, including Firefox on both the Mac and PC. So when the Great and the Good in the web community began touting typekit as the…

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Small Business R&D

The term ‘R&D’ is usually heard in context of big industrial corporations and the pharmaceutical industry. It also brings to mind big budgets, big spending, big dollars, big big big. The most successful big companies in the world all have a Research and Development division who’s sole purpose is to push the limits and find…

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Dropping MobileMe

10/21/2011 Update: This is an article from 2009 about moving from MobileMe to Google for syncing of contacts, calendars, and email. While I did move away from MobileMe at the time, I’ve since transferred nearly everything back to Apple’s iCloud (and loving it). If you’re looking for info on switching from MobileMe to iCloud, try…

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Gravity Forms vs Every Other Form

If you have a website, it’s virtually a given that you have a contact page with a form on it for collecting messages from your users. Pretty much everyone does. Which is why if you run a query for “forms” in the WordPress plugin directory, you’ll be overwhelmed with hundreds of results. Some of the…

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iChat: Multiple Accounts, One Contact List

Nov 2011 OSX Lion Update: Chax does not currently work in Lion. The main reason I used Chax was to consolidate contact lists across IM services, which is now included in the new version of iChat. The other thing I really liked about Chax was Growl notifications. iChat should support Growl, but it currently doesn’t.…

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Why we don’t do Flash

In the early days of Spigot Design, Flash based websites were all the rage. We’ve long since learned new tricks, and as a result have pretty much dropped Flash based work all together. Not a lot has been written on why we’ve given it up, so perhaps it’s time (although here’s an early tidbit from…

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Chamber of Commerce Email List Update

Just a quick update on the Park City Chamber email list article from back in May. The plan was to take the 1200 or so contacts from the Chamber list and send one last unsolicited message requiring each recipient to explicitly subscribe if they wished to continue receiving the newsletter.

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Fresh Foundation for Spigot

As a professional web designer, it comes with the territory that one’s own site is rebuilt on a fairly routine basis. So lately I’ve been spending my nights and weekend work hours rebuilding spigotdesign.com. The focus this time was not the design, but rather the foundation on which it’s built.

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WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Error

This morning I was pleased to find that a new version of WordPress (2.8) was out and it was time to upgrade. One of the nice things about WP is the automatic upgrade option, which basically means you backup your site, click upgrade, and you’re done. Well it didn’t go quite that smooth this time,…

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