Handwriting

SB Nation Redesign

Pablo Mercado — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:53:00 -0400

A couple of months ago Handwire was engaged by SportsBlogs Nation to develop a next generation sports-centric social media platform. Because SB Nation has been alive and growing for years and because it already encompasses more than 100 fan-driven communities with hundreds of thousands of visitors each month we are incredibly excited and a little bit daunted by the challenge. But, as the saying goes, even a journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step; and with the relaunch of the SB Nation portal site last friday night we are proud and happy to say that we have taken that first step.

These before and after screenshots speak for themselves:

What a difference some thoughtful design makes!

But the redesign is more than just skin deep. Our goal was not only to impress visitors with the breadth and depth of the SB Nation network, but also to guide visitors towards what makes SB Nation the premier sports blog network, the great writing! To that end we built out some back-end workflow that enable SB Nation editors to highlight the great content that our bloggers and community members create. Check out the featured posts for a great selection of fan created sports writing.

Big changes, new project

Michael Lovitt — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:53:00 -0400

I’m writing this blog post on a plane bound for Alexandria, Virginia, where tomorrow we’ll kick off the first major project that Handwire has accepted in over a year. Handwire has been alive but mostly dormant for many months, but we’re about to wake it up again. The company is now composed of three people, three partners, Pablo, Trei, and me. And starting this month, Handwire is the technology partner of SportsBlogs Nation. We’ll be developing the custom software to power their massive and growing network of sports-centric blogs.

Free water

Michael Lovitt — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:33:00 -0400

I started running a few weeks ago on the Town Lake trail, which is a few blocks from our office, and was blown away when I learned that RunTex, a local runner’s store, provides free water all day long at two locations on the trail. At each water station, there are half a dozen big coolers filled with ice cold water, and paper cups, every day, all free for anyone.

Free water every day! RunTex is basically a shoe store, but they know who their customers are – runners – and what they do, which is run, and identified a problem that they all had, which is that it’s a pain to find water when you’re running, and then stepped in and solved that problem.

Every time I stop on the trail to get water, the experience implants positive thoughts about RunTex into my brain.

It certainly seems like one way to make your users really happy is to find all the things that suck in their daily lives, then pick the one place where you can help them the most, and then help them.

Server Woes

Skip — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 21:35:00 -0400

We have been having a lot of issues with keeping our lighttpd sites up and running on TextDrive (even with a @reboot cron job set). There is a ruby script called daedalus that can continually check for your lighttpd process, and if it’s not found attempt to restart it, but due to overuse the TextDrive admins banned it from their servers.

We decided that the easiest thing to do was just use Ruby’s own Net::HTTP module to request the headers for our blog every 10 minutes or so. If we don’t get back a ‘HTTP 200’ we know something’s wrong and run a shell script that SSHs into our server and restarts lighttpd. Since we’re just requesting the headers the bandwidth won’t be a problem and the resource load on TextDrive is no more than a regular web request.

If you’d like to use it for yourself, feel free.

Single Table Inheritance

Skip — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:46:00 -0400

Last night I gave a talk on Single Table Inheritance to the Austin on Rails user group. Single Table Inheritance (STI) is a way to have several Rails models all extend from a base class sharing properties and behavior. If y’all haven’t checked out the Rails phenomenon, I wholeheartedly recommend drinking the kool-aid. It’s a fabulous framework and Ruby is a joy to program in.

The presentation went great and I got a lot of good questions from the audience. I used Eric Meyer’s fantastic S5 slideshow code to present with and the slides are up on my personal site (twelvelabs) if anyone wants to take a peek.

Skip On Rails

Kristina B — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:44:00 -0400

Skip will be speaking at the next Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday, April 11th at Frog Design’s Austin office.

Introducing BlogProQuo

Pablo Mercado — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:46:00 -0400

Handwire is Keeping It Real by offering both free access and pro access to our blog: Introducing BlogProQuo

The Value Of Blogging

Pablo Mercado — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:04:00 -0400

We at Handwire have been blogging for only a little while now. Our MeasureMap stats are pretty meager. I think that I personally count for half of the daily hits because I obsessively check the blog from work, home and wherever else I find a computer.

Our Feedburner stats are not that great either. There seems to be some mysterious NetNewsWire subscriber out there (if you are reading this, Hello! Thanks for subscribing!) that has saved us from having a total goose-egg on the subscribers page.

But despite having almost nil readership, and despite not getting any sweet marketing hype (yet!) I am prepared to declare that this blog is an overwhelming success. Why? Well, because it has fostered a six billion percent increase in thoughtful online and offline discussion here at the office.

Before we started this blog I thought that we all did a pretty good idea of sharing ideas and hashing out things and discussing topics; but it turns out that our previous level of communication was just a drop in the bucket. Once the blog started going messages began to fly around the office as discussions and opinions blossomed and bloomed like mushrooms after a rainstorm. It really has been fantastic.

So we may eventually get some readers, some more exposure, and some sweet marketing hype out of the blog. That is certainly one of its intended purposes. If this does happen that would be great—but as far as I am concerned, it would just be icing on the cake.

Modern Management

Kristina B — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 21:27:00 -0400

Cynics call it “Bubble 2.0”, others call it “Web 2.0”, and everyone is full of opinions. Caterina Fake says it’s a bad time to start a company, many others disagree. For better or worse, Handwire is running a company right now, and, at the least, we’re inspired by what Kathy Sierra calls management 2.0.

Before this movement grew a label, the founding partners of Handwire started a company that already had what are now considered the right ingredients for success. It was a small company from the start and remains that way by choice. The team was built based on shared passions, curiosity and the desire to innovate rather than “x years of experience in x technology”. Through it all, the secretive and dictatorial atmosphere that Sierra labels so 1.0 has never really taken hold around here.

My favorite quote from the comments of Sierra’s post:

A resume itself is kind of 1.0ish… in a 2.0 world, you don’t list your accomplishments – the hiring team knows about you because they’ve seen your work on the web. They know you have technical chops not because they’ve grilled you on pointers in an interview, but because they’ve collaborated with you on an open source project. They know about your speaking and communication skills because they saw your demo at a User Group, or your talk at a conference. They don’t rely on references they’ve never met – they could be your references.

I like this idea, though I’m not sure how scalable it is. (If all of a sudden one day everyone up and decides to start collaborating on Open Source projects and speaking at conferences, most people would still only know of a select few by reputation.) Still, the idea behind it is a clear improvement on the way people both establish and evaluate professional experience. Wouldn’t you rather hire some one who you’re familiar with by reputation than based on their own claims about their skills? It’s a better situation for companies, individuals and clients. Why clients? Because they’ll have a much better experience if it’s delivered by happy, passionate individuals.

Email as a collaboration tool

Skip — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:37:00 -0400

Found on slashdot today…

So, why are Collaboration Software Vendors (Central Desktop included), keen on vilifying email and so quick to promise a practical alternative to the chaos of email? And, if the vendor’s software is so much better than email, than why do users revert back to email as soon as they hit a snag in the system? Why do users refuse to adopt collaboration software?

The Good In Email (or Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool).

Interesting read. Reminds me of all the times I’ve built a tool that gathered dust while the people who it was written for continue to use Excel.

Sigh.