A few days ago, I took 10 seconds to fire off a question to John Carmack of iD Software, who basically INVENTED modern gaming as we know it, over Twitter. This guy is solely responsible for gaming today. He created Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake (not to mention causing me to log hours and hours of gametime) and spawned countless games in their wake like Half-Life.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/

John Carmack, the legendary godfather of gaming answered my question from Twitter. I guess I ought to put Doom on my iPhone now, or at least die happy.

I’ve been using Twitter to connect with industry leaders, celebrities, and everyday people. If you’d like to know how you can utilize Twitter to build your business or online persona, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck or a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

Even if the email you’re replying to has many other people as carbon copies (cc), the next email you send back to the group is detached from the original. Your reply could also be lost if several others reply to the group. Email is also slow, subject to spam filters, and has the potential to be lost in transit. Every inefficiency that Email was created to solve has once again became an inefficiency in our fast paced world. Google wave is looking to tackle these problems and much more.

Google wave is a multipurpose communication tool. It’s somewhat a hybrid of email, text messaging (SMS, twitter, facebook), social/conference communication, and chat. You’ll be able to email other users of the service, allow others to join the conversation (at any point, with or without conversation history enabled) and manage all conversations using a drag and drop interface to keep everything organized.

Conversations are also no longer linear. Messages at the beginning of a conversation can be added after the initial messages, or you can add comments to other section (entire comments, or even individual words and statements) in the middle of the conversation. If you’re brought into a conversation, with history enabled, you can play a time line of message creation like a movie. This allows you to be brought up to speed on what messages have been added, when and how; without bothering your coworkers or friends to help make sense of the time line. Individual portions of a conversation can now also be split into their own conversations, with a different set of people assigned to it.

There is so much to look forward to with Google wave. We have only brushed the surface of what Google wave will truly accomplish. To get a better understanding of this application watch the video on wave.google.com, or on youtube.

Inclind Inc. is watching Google wave with wide eyes in anticipation of it’s beta that starts as early as September. It could allow our company to communicate much more effectively internally, and perhaps even with our clients in the future. Google has a sign-up on their site if you’d like to be notified when wave is available. This sign-up is also the pool from which Google will choose the beta testers.

zennette is #moonfruit even a FRUIT?

abllo wots with all this #moonfruit buzz?

Some are even formulating conspiracy theories:

SatansPuppet #moonfruit sounds like a filthy hippy movement it’s just as bad as communism!!

I am sitting back admiring Moonfruit’s marketing prowess and appreciating their product offerings. The DIY website template systems have come a long way in the 10 years I’ve been building websites. At this point, I believe there are only a couple of systems capable of providing you with the tools you need to not only build a basic site but also extend it. Drupal and WordPress are the cream of the crop of base content management systems. Being built on PHP they are lightning fast, and also being open source allow you to customize and add on to the code providing your own solution. For example, integrating ecommerce with inventory management capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics, like we did with Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s new ecommerce store (https://www.dogfish.com/store/index.htm).

But hats off to Moonfruit for a smart marketing campaign.

Their new site has everything they have been wanting and more. Dogfish Head Brewery can now easily manage their 800 page (and growing!) website, all its users, media, newsletters, news articles, events, RSS feeds, and comments. They can add/remove ‘locations’ of where their product is sold, served, or distributed. This allows customers to log in and see where they can find Dogfish on the ‘Fish Finder‘. Try it out!

With that, the new site features a fully functioning community section and social network. Users can register on the website for an account, after which they can create a basic profile. From there, they have access to submit a map location to their Fish Finder, add or comment on threads in the Forum, submit questions to Dogfish staff in Ask Dogfish, comment on Dogfish staff blogs (Blogfish), and connect with other Dogfish loving fans. All applicable content is able to be sent instantly through Twitter/Digg/MySpace/Facebook/etc in a single click of the ‘Share’ button. We really went all out to flesh out the community side and give users stuff to do in between staff blogs and answering questions.

Our new system that was used on Dogfish Head Brewery has no official name yet, or I’d tell you what it is ha. We hope to have that nailed down soon. What I can tell you is that its the most feature complete, stable and scalable CMS you are going to find on the east coast. I would put it up against anything the competition has to offer from Maine to Florida with confidence ours is as on par or better than what else is available. Since the code is modular, its not coded for 1 strict specific project (as we used to) but rather, any client who comes in the door can have the same power, accessibility, UI and functionality of big time folk like Dogfish. In other words, it makes our platform highly scalable and consistent.

All ya gotta do is ask us.

As for the rest of the week, Pete, Trey and Kevin are representing Inclind at DrupalCon in Washington DC. They will be talking to fellow developers and programmers and sharing / showing off work. You can follow what we’re up to on our Twitter (either by going to the Twitter site, or the side of our page on this site, or adding us inclindinc).

This is where I heard a statement that kind of jarred me.

“Oh I know, I make MySpace layouts….” – it brought my brain to a halt.

It wasn’t anything personal with her, but it was the realization I had that there are likely 1000s of young people just like her also doing the same. Some people are even making a career / making money off making MySpace layouts.

So why is this harmful to impressionable minds?

For starters, MySpace was never designed with the intent that a user would be able to toss the site theme in favor of something of their own design. To make one, you basically have to unlearn everything you knew about HTML and CSS in regards to site layouts or themes. For those who haven’t done anything with websites before, learning all the ins and outs of how to get a myspace layout to work are filling their heads with useless crap. Other social networking sites such as Virb are designed to allow the user to apply their own stylings in a non-insane way. I was actually quite impressed with Virb because it also allows you to disable all custom layouts at your discretion- something MySpace can’t do.

My best advice to her was to ditch MySpace layouts all together, and purchase a cheap web hosting account with WordPress. She would then at least have full access to change anything in the site layout while learning invaluable knowledge and design at the same time. That’s how I got started 12 years ago on Geocities (remember them?).

Could you imagine if there were sites that let you code your own add-ons, and it required you writing some screwed up PHP or Coldfusion that wasn’t accepted anywhere else in the world? How about a home builder who didn’t follow industry standards when building your home?

Can you believe some colleges still teach web design using tables and code generating software? Crazy isn’t it? It was like that when I was there and from what I’ve heard, not much has changed.

The thought of people having to do absurd CSS and table structuring just to make the myspace layout look a certain way just disturbs me. We have standards for a reason, and one of those reasons is to not repeat the sordid browser wars of the 90s which is where a lot of that mess stems from.

So for all you folks out there looking to get into web design, young or old, if you’re going to do something do it right. Refer to the giants: Zeldman, Meyer, Snook, Cederholm, etc… strive for greatness.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.

From this, I can access these news feeds at any time from my PC, iPod Touch, or Treo. I am able to stay informed of the days news as it happens, without all the distraction or clutter of advertisements, slow websites, snarky comments and the like.

Back in 2005 5% of the Internet users said they were using RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online (according to the Pew Internet Project).

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.

What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time.

By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

More information: http://rssday.org/spread/

Some of the best examples of using RSS feeds to enhance your productivity and general ‘awareness’ of whats going on can best be experienced on a ‘Start Page’ site like Netvibes or PageFlakes. You can add multiple RSS feeds to your page and view many at once, instead of crawl through each site individually, which would take a lot longer. This way you get a bigger overall picture and can zero in on the news stories that pique your interest rather quickly.

The last FOUR submitted websites are now on the frontpage of approved featured websites. Espuma Restaurant, Delaware State Fair, Wilgus Associates – Delaware Real Estate, and BayBall Classic were well received.

More to come!

American Portable, and CKY Alliance are now being featured on various websites, including designsnack.com and screenalicious.com.

It feels great that our clients websites make the rounds like this on top websites. For our clients this just adds to the traffic they receive, spreading the word of their service, product or existence on top of the hefty search engine optimization work we already do for them. We have the top graphics design team on the penninsula combined with the best application programmers in the area.

This bodes particularly well for the two projects that got featured, as American Portable is expanding around the nation every month with franchise operations from here to California. CKY is on the cusp of releasing their new album this Spring on their new label, RoadRunner Records. CKY has always done things their way, on their terms. Inclind knows just how to handle their web presence and coordinate it with marketing, web content, and the fans. Like all of our clients, they love us and we love them!

Want to be successful?

If you feel your website is bland, boring, or isn’t doing for you what you’d like it to do, contact us or give us a call at (302) 856-2802 and talk with us.

Launched 3 websites, featured on design showcase sites, and Friday I turn 25. Doesn’t this week kick a little ass!

Keep on the lookout, Inclind is everywhere!

DesignSnack and Screenalicious are websites where people upload websites, the community votes on them, and then site admins determine who gets “approved” through their guidelines and placed on the front page. Tom submitted two websites, his personal site at tbbjrgrafx.com, and a recently completed project of Inclind, Gavin Goodfellow.

Also submitted was American Portable, well received by the community there as well, which is pending approval.

Way to go Tom.

If you are unfamiliar with the band, here are two music videos of theirs. “Sink into the Underground” and “Close Yet Far” (respectively), both off of their 2003 release “Infiltrate.Destroy.Rebuild”.

Their new album (to be titled) is due in early 2008.

Sink into the Underground:

Close Yet Far:

For those of you on the Delmarva Peninsula, CKY will be coming around again on October 31st for a show at the Electric Factory, in Philadelphia, PA.

To see all their tour dates, please visit:

http://www.ckyalliance.com/events/index.cfm