June 10, 2019 — A mother with a wailing baby in her arms – maybe the baby has an ear infection. A trainer at the rec center who is overwhelmed with requests for team building exercises. A gifted data scientist who just. needs. to. focus. An executive with the future of a three billion dollar company on his shoulders.

These are all people who use the intranet web site my team builds. The code we write affects their daily lives, their work, their health, and the company we all work for.

The developer to end user relationship is very direct. We are in the perfect position to advocate for site users, and ensure that the site we build is compassionate in its design, because we write the code. We are the gatekeepers, and we have a both a responsibility and an opportunity to help, and not harm, the users of our site.

December 27, 2018 — A mother with a wailing baby in her arms – maybe the baby has an ear infection. A trainer at the rec center who is overwhelmed with requests for team building exercises. A gifted data scientist who just. needs. to. focus. An executive with the future of a three billion dollar company on his shoulders.

These are all people who use the intranet web site my team builds. The code we write affects their daily lives, their work, their health, and the company we all work for.

The developer to end user relationship is very direct. We are in the perfect position to advocate for site users, and ensure that the site we build is compassionate in its design, because we write the code. We are the gatekeepers, and we have a both a responsibility and an opportunity to help, and not harm, the users of our site.

June 4, 2017 — We’ve given the content owners of our big, complicated, custom WordPress intranet a great way to safely stage their pages on a private site, then move changes over to the live site without having to copy the entire database.

But when they need to launch a new section of the site, things get very complicated – and deploying a lot of new content to the live site on launch day is a stressful and time-consuming process. Content owners quickly get in over their heads when they try to manage a launch, so developers spend precious hours planning and executing content launches.

Dark launch to the rescue! Borrowing ideas from software companies that use feature flagging of new software to test the waters, roll out gradually, or roll back quickly – we’re gradually moving new content areas over to the live site well before launch day, as the new content is developed.

The cool thing is, no one knows the new content is there until we decide to make it available – not even the search engine – unless we tell them exactly how to find it.

Content dark launch is saving our sanity and giving hours back to our developers, and I’ll explain just how it all works.

November 7, 2016 — Semantic markup may no longer be a groundbreaking idea, but many modern web developers do not truly understand the concept. Good, semantic markup is the foundation of – and easy path to – an accessible and responsive web site that plays nice with search engines and virtually any other user agent you can imagine. But even if you understand semantic markup, your clients probably don’t, and keeping things semantic when they’re turned loose in TinyMCE can be a challenge.

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