Recent Entries

The Beginning

In late 2006 Mike and I decided to form Digital Octane with out really knowing what we wanted to do; other than to work together on something. It wasn’t until after a few stumbles that we really started to hit our stride over the past few years. Fast forward to about 6 months ago when I finally decided to take the plunge into full entrepreneurship.

A Short Time Ago

Over the past 6 months we have seen some amazing growth at Digital Octane. This growth has come from steady project stream and hard work by Mike McKenzie and myself. While we continue to grow the business, there comes a point where you have to go back to basics. Mike and I have always tried to “Work Smarter Not Harder”.

Expanding our Team

In order to this. Mike and I sat down and planned out expanding our core team to better facilitate our client needs and also possibly give us the ability to have weekends. On top of growing our team, it will help us to expand our services we provide to our clients. With out Further ado. Mike and I would like to announce our newest members of our team.

Michael Chevalier

Michael is joining us as Chief Creative Officer and will be at the forefront of our branding/design efforts. He has extensive experience in the field and will be a invaluable in creating amazing experiences for our clients.

Jason Narciso

Jason is joining the Team as Director of Production. He brings years of web design and development experience to the team and is a whiz at getting things done. His work ethic is second to none and he will be helping us get our projects out the door in a more efficient manor.

Looking Forward

With the addition of both Jay and Mike we are looking forward to even bigger things for the Team, the business and for our clients…

 

While developing the new DigitalOctane, we’ve had the opportunity try and make our site no only more search friendly, but also just easier on our visitors. In doing so we created some very simple changes to our .htaccess file in order to direct our users appropriately.

With out getting too deep into the inner workings of all the awesome things you can do within the .htaccess file.

I am making the assumption that you know what a .htaccess file is, and where it goes.

Let’s jump into the very most basic aspects of what we have going on.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

# Remove www from www.digitaloctane.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^company/(\w*+)$  /company/$1/ [R]
RewriteRule ^company/(\w*+)/$ /index.php?page=$1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} m.digitaloctane.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mobile
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ /mobile.php?page=$1 [L]

Now lets breakdown each snippet from the example above.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

First off we are setting an option to tell Apache we are going to be creating “symlinks” (Symbolic Link). Basically this means that we are going typing in one URL and directing our users to another spot on our servers WITH OUT redirecting. This will make more sense momentarily.

Secondly “RewriteEngine On” is stating that we are going to be doing some url rewriting.

With these two options set. We can now get down to business. Let’s DO THIS!

# Remove www from www.digitaloctane.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

The next snippet allows the user to type in a page within our site such as

http://digitaloctane.com/company/about/ this url is then converted by the server to
http://digitaloctane.com/index.php?page=about so instead of having a really ugly url string we can create a new one that is a little bit cleaner and more human readable.

RewriteRule ^company/(\w*+)$  /company/$1/ [R]
RewriteRule ^company/(\w*+)/$ /index.php?page=$1

Lastly we created a very similar implementation for the mobile version of our site (In this example we are NOT doing any mobile site detection. That is being taken care of elsewhere)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} m.digitaloctane.com
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ /mobile.php [L]

Above we are first defining a Rewrite Condition. If our host is m.digitaloctane.com direct our users to mobile.php.

We can extend this conditional further to allow additional parameters much like the previous example. But for this posting I kept it to the most basic implementation.

tags

First off, this isn’t a “this vs that” post (It’s not about flash vs html/javascript, it’s about flash with html/javascript). If you’re looking for a flame war you might as well stop reading here.

At DigitalOctane we primarily build flash sites. It’s something we’re good at. At one point it was really the only thing we built. Over the past year we have been making a transition towards  more html sites and html/flash hybrids. This is a good thing! Flash peeps stay with me! How did we get here?

Short History Lesson

It’s a pretty amazing thing if you think about it. For those of us who have been in this business for a while (I’ve been doing this since 1999ish). We went from iframes, nested tables and “spacer.gif. Not to mention the MAJOR browser compatibility issues, with browser dependent versions of websites based on the users browser.

All these factors pushed more designers, ui devs and, agencies towards Flash (not to mention the relatively low learning curve).  Which worked across every browser and OS relatively the same way. Suddenly we had a web with an overwhelming amount of Flash. Too much even. I for one was guilty of “let’s make this crazy flash interface because we can”, not because we should.

Half the problem

One of the great things about flash is also it’s worst problem. A very low barrier of entry. This has allows years upon years of bad practice. From poor development fundamentals to poor usage of the tools in general. I for one blame sites / communities back in the day (I’m looking at you flashkit!) for allowing everyone to share code with out actually teaching correct implementation or usage. I cannot count the number of times I have interviewed potential hires and asked where they go for inspiration and tutorials etc to be told “Oh I just went to flashkit”.  The snatch and grab implementation attitude has created a sour taste in the mouth of many a web user.

The times they are a change’n

Our team has a large amount of experience in the automotive industry. I find that the auto industry is a good barometer regarding future trends within our own industry. This is mainly due to the competitive nature of the automotive space. Requirements for SEO, Seach engine maketing, paid placement and “Social Media” integration are huge factors for this switch. Mobile versions of sites are another majors

Now we’re seeing the trend go the other way. We’re utilizing flash and html/js to create a better user experience for the end user; but not necessarily a full browser window flash experience. Not to say that there isn’t still room for that. Especially with product marketing sites, Movie & Videogame promotional websites that benefit from the features Flash has to offer.

The other Extreme

There are some extreme scenarios happening though. I see another round of “Just because we can” happening with Javascript. The specs for javascript haven’t really changed over the years. There have just been some really talented teams that have created a lot of frameworks which have become quite popular jQuery, Moo Tools, YUI, prototype, etc you name it. Without these frame works making things easier. I don’t think we would honestly be seeing the amount of javascript being done today.

html5, Flash and the future of the business

I’m not going to make some half hearted guess to the future of the web. But the short and long term vision for DO hasn’t really changed only the technology. We will continue to suggest the best implementation for our clients. As long as they aren’t requesting Real Player support I think we’ll be just fine.

tags

First off, if you work on the web you should familiarize yourself with HTTP Headers.

HTTP Headers form the core of an HTTP request, and are very important in an HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. The headers are separated from the request or response body by a blank line. HTTP headers can be near-arbitrary strings, but only some are commonly understood. – wiki

Wow, What did that just say?

There are two add-ons to firefox which will significantly help you troubleshoot problems with your site especially if your making alot of calls for assets. You should have at least 1 of them, take your pick: Firebug or liveHTTPHeaders. Both will monitor HTTP Headers for you. I am sure there others, however these are the ones i have used and have had success with.

Now lets talk about how this can help you.

When you deal with Flash in the manner that i do. Your loading a base swf and XML. loading content in various swfs who’s content is loading XML, who’s XML has paths to images and assets. That can be a lot of data to look at, and when something doesn’t show up… Then what?

Personally, i turn to Firebug first. turn on headers and refresh the site. I then watch the headers, which is tracing every call I am making. With firebug you will quickly see red 404 show up with the file path that was called. This can very easily save you a TON of time digging through code… looking for some error only to discover you made a typo in the file name you called.

This very simple add on and change to your troubleshooting process can save you time and your sanity.

Firebug does not stop there, Firebug offers some Robust features for Inspecting elements which i will talk about at a later time. You should Install Now, And start using these great features.

tags