BigBlueHat

Yesterday, we pledged our support for saving developers over at SaveTheDevelopers.org. If you’re a fellow web designer or developer, you’ve likely lost hours of sleep, gained or dropped several pounds, and may have even damaged furniture because of an all too commonly used piece of software known as Internet Explorer 6.

SaveTheDevelopers.org has put together a site and a widget for promoting the planet’s migration from this wayward browser. We’ve added the widget to our front site, so if you’re using IE 6, you may have noticed it.

Thanks for doing what you can to keep your local development community alive, well, and sane.

dotProject is an open source project management system that we’ve been using, hosting, and customizing for the last 3 years. Over the last month, we’ve been working to get automated purchase, installation, and setup of dotProject available online. Today, we’d like to announce immediate availability of dotProject hosting via our sign-up site: getdotproject.com (it may look familiar to some).

In addition to much faster setup time (thanks to the little robots we’ve built), you can get dotProject without needing your own domain name. Your new options include:

1. your own domain name (ex: myreallycoolprojects.com)
2. a sub-domain of your sites domain (ex: projects.yourdomain.com)
3. and as of today, a sub-domain of gotdotproject.com (ex: yourcompany.gotdotproject.com)

The first two require you to own or purchase a domain name. The last one, though, is free as the wind. The only caveat is you have the be the first one to get your dotProject site. So don’t waste time reading any more. Don’t even comment, just run over to our purchase site and get some dotProject.

We hope you’ll enjoy the speedy setup. We look forward to adding more and more new features to our hosted installation. We’ll also be happy to manage and host your customized dotProject installation. Just let us know how we can help.

Most web sites build with a Content Management System (CMS) do not send the correct “Last-Modified” date to the browser. The average CMS (include WordPress which runs this blog) show the current time as the date the page was last modified. The truth, though, is that the average web page or blog entry hasn’t been touched for some time (and certainly not in the last 30 seconds).

BlueInk, however, outputs the date the page was actually modified last. If you view the home page, for example, and click “Tools | Page Info…” (or the like for your specific browser), you’ll see “Modified: 02/13/2008 11:19:30 AM” That is, in fact, the last moment I made a change to that page. Yesterday, though, before we added this marginal but useful feature you would have seen whatever your current date and time are.

So why should I care?
While this may be the first time you’ve ever bothered to look at the page info for a web page, this data is useful to other web sites and web services that may interact with your web site. Search engines would be the first most obvious group of services to perhaps use this info. The growing number of “Web 2.0″ applications and even what are being called “Web 3.0″ or the “Semantic Web” applications could (and likely will) make use of that data.

We hope that our increasing “geekiness” about HTTP, REST, and other web standards will continue to pay off for our users in ways none of us may yet have envisioned. We’ll keep the future in mind.

Regular users of BlueInk may have noticed that BlueInk now has backend search functionality. Brad began work on this near the end of last week, and got it rolled out on Monday–which also happened to be National Inventor’s Day, though, like most inventors, we forgot to celebrate.

The new search functionality provides a quick and easy way to find content items without needing to remember its name. Additionally, users will see a list of pages the content item appears on. This allows the user to know exactly where the item is in use before they decide to edit it.

If you’ve not tried BlueInk yet, please check out the demo. We’d love to know what you think about it.

One of our primary goals with BlueInk is to save web content editors as much time as possible. We hope this adds to the arsenal of usability BlueInk already offers.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 13 February 2008

Contact Information:
BigBlueHat
107 East Park Ave.
Greenville, SC 29601
Tel: 864.232.9553
Website: http://www.bigbluehat.com/

Greenville, SC — BigBlueHat announced the completion of a new BlueInk-based web site for Interfilm Holdings, Inc. web site: interfilm-usa.com. Building on the foundation of their BlueInk Content Management System, BigBlueHat created custom content types for Interfilm Holdings, Inc’s product line. These content types give Interfilm the ability to create and edit structured product data for display in a customized product table featured on the products page. The product table sports sortable columns, downloadable data sheets, and colorized categories.

In addition to the custom content type for Interfilm products, BigBlueHat created a custom map widget that displays contact items for their regional account managers. When users move their mice over various regions of the map, the contact information and photo of the account manager is displayed. This smooth navigation provides quick and focused data for users of the Interfilm web site.

BigBlueHat is a foothills-based web manufacturing company. We specialize in designing and developing web sites and products for the web. Our current feature-length production is known as the BlueInk CMS. We focus on web-related innovation with each product we build. Our clients benefit from our future-focus by receiving software and web sites that are built to last and receiving free upgrades to the software hosted with BigBlueHat.