Amphora

Check out our new blog over at blog.endorsy.com. Endorsy yellow!

ImagineRIT is coming up, which is an innovation festival on the RIT campus showcasing a multitude student projects. The team will be presenting Endorsy to the public this Saturday, and if you are in the Rochester area, you should come check us out. We will be in front of Webb Auditorium in Building 7A (Booth) — more information coming soon.

The past week, the developers have been typing like mad to get our site up and running, and the designers have been cranking out poster after poster for our somewhat complicated display. Looking at the progress link our developers sent us day after day is getting me pretty psyched for the launch, but at the same time, I know we will have to cut out a few features in order to showcase a working product. So, ImagineRIT will be more of a soft launch for us, more or less for testing purposes.

Want to see how crazy some of us have gotten?

Stay tuned for more information about our showcase!

We aren’t just about business and meetings, we give each other pleasure… by making each other laugh. We have all been re-introduced to cat videos and pictures, all thanks to Marla’s cat obsession;  as well as anything else that is absolutely ridiculously awesome.  It seems to never ever get old. Dan tends to leave us a present in many of his emails it’s usually a LOLcat.

We luckily get along really great, so getting funny emails of cat pictures or a tweet with a ridiculous video makes us a lot closer and makes working with each other much easier; and not to mention a wonderful stress reliever. We are all under pressure between school, finishing this project, and also getting jobs.

We have our favorites, but my personal favorites are trolololol

I’m a Kitty Cat and I dance dance dance dance

The designers have been crazy working this week to finish and make beautiful comps for the studly developers to code this weekend and next week, Jason was great enough to make a spreadsheet to help us designers. There are crazy amount of pages to develop, 28 all together. We are all assigned 5-6 pages each with our names. Marla, ok, and myself were beginning to lose it and go crazy, so we decided to have a bit of fun, we think it’s hysterical and a great idea.

Can you believe we have Dustin Bieber in our group?! He’s sooooooooo ccuuutttteeee!!!! And I was like baby baby baby ohhhhh

Anyways, we have been doing nothing but work and comps meetings, but we do have some fun, we NEED it.

There are 2 new CSS3 properties we be implementing on the Endorsy website. Again, while they aren’t official specifications yet, these specific properties are supported in a number of modern browsers, and degrade gracefully in older browsers.

The first we will be using are the new :nth-child() pseudo-class selectors, which will be helpful in implementing the appropriate colored backgrounds to different sections where the color is alternated by row from a light gray to a medium gray. We’ll do something like:

li {
	background: #fafafa;
}

li:nth-child(2n+1) {
	background: #f1f1f1;
}

 

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Currently, we have selected specific elements from specific comps that all the designers have submitted. We decided to use certain elements; such as Dustin’s header.

In addition, we decided to use some of Dustin’s typography and use of color. One specific page that we have focused our attention on is the user’s profile page. Dustin’s color scheme is used throughout the page; the social network horizontal bars and the “contact” button are yellow. Dustin’s color scheme is implemented with Marla’s layout of the statistical horizontal bars.

Also, Marla’s layout of “interests” and “about me” sections are adjacent to each other.

Most of the feedback that we have received is to work on hierarchy and typography. We have  narrowed down our design style so that we can determine a consistent look and feel.

To supplement my entry on @font-face last week, I’d like to share an excellent resource an incredibly skilled RIT classmate, Jon Gerlach. According to Jon, his Typekit Web Font app is “a little web utility so that I could more easily preview the Typekit fonts without logging in and using their previewer.” Cool, right?

He first blogged about it on his Gerlager blog this fast fall, so check out the entry for more information. He also has linked some additional resources that are very helpful.

While there, be sure to poke around both his blog and portfolio…lot’s of great stuff happening in both.

[EDIT] Here is a similar resource created by our very own Jason Eberle. (– Marla Mrowka, 4/20)

While the entrepreneurial concept of our project has been the main focus of our energy thus far, our efforts are now shifting towards making our website push the boundaries of what’s being done now in web development.

Although it’s not incredibly new or ground-breaking, implementing non web-safe fonts throughout our website is one way we’ll be progressive in development. The idea has been around for well over a decade, but recent advancements in browsers and a little CSS specification known as @font-face has now made font replacement sensible now.

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As spring quarter rolled around, the developers set out on an aggressive three week goal to develop the back end.  Before we even started, Jason, Dan and I first discussed the possibility of using a php framework.  While all three of us had never used one, we had no reason either to not use one.  After doing some very careful research, we decided to go with cakePHP.  Going through numerous reviews as well as creating a twitter poll, cakePHP seemed the best to use.  In the end, it also made sense to use a php framework to cut down on development time.

Two weeks in, Jason and I have been busy in the cakePHP framework.  Our verdict so far, some pretty cool stuff going on here.  Within cakePHP, Jason has been working with models.  Models in cakePHP simply mean data models.  I myself have been working with the page controllers and components.  The page controllers allow us to simply create new pages.  With components in cakePHP examples are security, sessions, emails, cookies, and etc.

Stay tuned for more cake as the dev team progresses.

Organization has been the elusive white rabbit on a number of levels. There have been more than a few times that communication has lapsed and members have been hung out to dry due to disorganization. We are slowly getting better at keeping on top of things, but it takes time to get every person on the same page.

For starters, scheduling is a huge issue. As seniors at RIT, we have classes, work, and extracurriculars all over the place, spanning from before 8am to after 11pm, Monday – Sunday. The few steady times we have been able to meet are usually on Saturday mornings, much to the dismay of the sleepers of the group (myself included). We try to put all our meetings and events on our Amphora Google Calendar, but sometimes dates are lost and not everyone remembers to check back every now and then. For scheduling, the best practice we have found is to email everyone a quick reminder before the meeting, and that usually gets everybody up and moving.

Files are another issue. In a previous post, Chris talked about where the Developers are storing their files, but the Designers had yet to get on board. We have been using ConceptShare for a while now, to view and make comments on each others’ work. Just today, we started using Basecamp for sharing our Photoshop files. This will make it easier to migrate different components of our comps between each of the designers, saving time along the way. This will especially become useful when we settle on a final design style and start creating all the pages of the site.

I’ve never known a group of people so good at emailing than Amphora. We have chains of emails thirty pages long, with one-word answers and unrelated photographs of animals wearing ridiculous things to keep our spirits high. Of course, there are important things in those emails, too. This is a screenshot of one of our longer ones, when we were trying to come up with a name for our site. Most of the group uses Gmail, except for a few that are either attached to their email client or thinking about switching to Gmail. It has handy dandy collapsable emails that keep your inbox clutter-free and manageable, and an awesome tagging feature (as you can see in the screen shot, this email is tagged as ‘NMTP’, for New Media Team Project). It just makes life so much easier.

Credit/blame Marla for the name.

This past weekend marked the culmination of our month long search for a name for our start up: Endorsy. It may seem like an unnecessary amount of time to come up with such a short title, but the team wasn’t willing to settle and we really wanted something that worked on multiple levels.

First and foremost, we obviously wanted a name that fit the scope of our project. Endorsy, which is somewhat derived from the word endorsement, does just that, as our advertisers are having their products and services endorsed, and our publishers are the ones taking that role of endorsing them.

The most limiting of our requirements was the availability of a first level .com domain, which immediately eliminated well over 75% of the names we considered, especially since in general, we were looking for relatively short names and subsequently short URLs. We had to pass up several names that we may have gone with because of lack of availability of an exact or even relevant .com domain, including Voices, The Soapbox and Step Right Up.

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