Sonnet Media LLC

Sonnet Media Launches Film Site, The Greatest Silence, for Jackson Films

by Bud Parr on December 23, 2008

We are very happy when we help bring great films to a new audience through the Web. Lisa Jackson’s film about the heinous crimes being committed against women in the Congo is an important work and hopefully through the Website Lisa’s team will enable more outreach and get the word out.

Lisa says: “Yeah Bud - you have done such an amazing job transforming our paleolithic site and turning it into something new, powerful, connecting and affecting.  Thank you so much compadre.”

For this project we did a complete redesign of an existing site and incorporated a blog, screening calendar, outreach pages, Flash-based slide shows and trailer, all in an easily to update content management system.

Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Google Yourself!

by Bud Parr on November 24, 2008

The word google has been used as a verb for a decade now and since it became an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 it has been part of our daily lexicon. Anyone who lives their life online has googled (the company insists on the lowercase and that one when referring to the company that we use the uppercase) themselves and for good reason: it’s part of the conversation.

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Congratulations James Cañón

by Bud Parr on November 21, 2008

James Cañón, who recently moved to one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, was awarded one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes for his novel Tales from the Town of Widows. From his blog:

The 2008 French Prizes for Best First Novels were announced in Paris on Tuesday, November 18th. Le Prix du Premier Roman Etranger (Best First Foreign Novel Prize) went to Dans la Ville des Veuves Intrépides (Tales from the Town of Widows) by Colombian author James Cañón.

Congratulations James!

Carrie Kania Profiled

by Bud Parr on November 20, 2008

Carrie Kania (Olive Reader blog), publisher of Harper Perennial, is profiled in The New York Observer. Carrie says about her job in the article:

“Basically, they said we need somebody to come in and really look at the backlist,” Ms. Kania said. “To look at what we’re doing with Aldous Huxley, and Sylvia Plath, and—you know, the backlist is just gold. It’s a beautiful backlist. I mean, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 100 Years of Solitude. You know? I mean, my God. The fact that I get to put a new cover on The Bell Jar? That’s crazy!”

 

Forget Memorable Passwords

by Bud Parr on September 19, 2008

As we live more of our lives online it’s easy to get lost in all the passwords we’re forced to carry in our heads and it’s tempting to settle on something memorable that we can use for a lot of sites/accounts. But the following should come as a real warning:

“Yesterday, it was reported that wannabe VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked by a perpetrator wishing to find incriminating information in her emails. It was not done using some strange computer security vulnerability. It was not done by guessing her password. It was done just inthe same way as Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was hacked some time ago: by guessing the answer to the respective owner’s security questions. For Paris Hilton, it was the name of her dog. For Sarah Palin, it was her zip code, date of birth, ad where she met her husband.

How hard is it to learn somebody’s zip code? Not that hard.Try the whitepages. Date of birth? Easy for a public figure – try Google. This will take you less than a minute each. Now, we know that Sarah Palin and her husband were high school sweethearts. The answer to this question turned out to be “Wasilla High School”. All in all, it took the reported hacker less than 45 minutes to break into the account. In fact, using your pet’s name appears more security conscious than using zip code, date of birth and where you met your spouse.”

- IT World

This goes for personal as well as professional accounts. We suggest using long, non-word passwords, which may even include characters like ^#& and odd, perhaps even incorrect answers to security questions. These of course are not memorable, but there are many programs out there that will store them for you and your Web browser does too; Firefox is particularly good with handling passwords, although I’d suggest keeping them in another secure program as well (if you want suggestions for password storage programs, just drop me a line and be sure to mention if you’re on a mac or pc). Also think about changing your most important passwords from time to time. Organizations should have a formal protocol for this.

There is hope for our increasingly overloaded info-age life. Standards are being created to both increase security and make access easier. Some of those are very high-tech, but one standard, OpenID seems to be catching on widely. OpenID, according to Wikipedia is a a service that “allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.” I’ve been using it for a year or so at least and like the layer of security and relative simplicity, but it takes adoption by myriad Web applications and Web sites to be useful and we’re not there yet. Some of the services that use OpenID are Blogger, a free blogging service (owned by Google) and Basecamp, a project management system.

Press for Jelly Press

by Bud Parr on May 09, 2008

The New Jersey Star Ledger has a terrific profile of our clients Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring whose blog JellyPress.com we just launched.

Laura Schenone and Nancy Gail Ring were profiled in the Star Ledger and at Philly.com. The site we built for them, Jellypress.com is even mentioned. Here’s an excerpt from NJ.com:

“Cooking is a bright spot in our shared history. Nourishing one another and making sustenance—these are good things to pass on if you can,” noted Laura Schenone, 46, of Montclair, author of the newly released “The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family” (Norton, 2008) as well as “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances” (Norton, 2003).

With Nancy Gail Ring, 51, of West Orange, an artist and writer, Schenone has created Jellypress.com, an illustrated culinary blog that features “Antique Recipe Road Show,” which solicits questions about old recipes, and “Not To Be Forgotten,” which adapts an old recipe to contemporary life. “My hope is that it will get people interested in thinking about how food connects us from past to present,” explained Schenone. “There seem to be more people looking to the past for sustenance,” noted Ring.

A former pastry chef and author of “Walking on Walnuts” (Bantam, 1996), a culinary memoir that chronicled her experiences in Manhattan restaurants, Ring learned to make the mandelbrot, rugelach, matzo ball soup, brisket and kugel of her Eastern European ancestors from her mother and grandmothers. “I still feel like my grandmothers are in the room with me when I’m baking,” she said.

 

Some Useful Stats for Thinking About Your Website

by Bud Parr on May 06, 2008

I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.

As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:

Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.

(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

My comments:

(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.

(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.

(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.

Min Jin Lee is So in Vogue

by Bud Parr on April 01, 2008

Our client Min Jin Lee reports this on her blog: The U.S. paperback of Free Food for Millionaires will be released on April 9th. It has a new cover designed by the talented art director Anne Twomey of Grand Central, and copies should be at bookstores near you presently. There’s a new essay in VOGUE this month (April 2008) titled “Weighing In” in its Up Front column.

Best of Both Worlds: Offline Access for Online Applications

by Bud Parr on March 31, 2008

Google reports today that they are rolling out offline access for their Google Docs application and that will be just the first as they utilize their Open Source browser extension Google Gears to download and upload data from your hard drive to the Web in the background. This will allow you to use Google docs (and in the future other apps, I’ve already seen it in use on a nifty to-do app called Remember the Milk) whether or not you’re near an internet connection.

According to Macworld “Google has lofty aspirations that Apps – with Docs in tow – will extend its reach into medium-size and large companies, and to that end has been boosting its security and administration features, particularly in its fee-based Premier version.”

This is good news because I believe one of the major hurtles Web-based applications have to overcome is availability (at least until every corner of the earth has Wi-fi or its next iteration). Although the aggressively functional Zoho suite of online apps offers offline access, it’s Google’s success that will drive the industry toward Web apps. As offline access becomes a typical feature, adoption of online apps will widen and developers will be able to create better and more varied applications.

The key to Web-based applications is not just the convenience of never having to synch devices or being able to collaborate with teams (or coordinate with family), but the ease with which data can be used from one app to enhance another – say for instance, you could pull financial data in from an accounting app and manipulate it in a spreadsheet app, without downloading or synchronizing. It remains to be seen exactly how the new functionality will handle this “mashed up” data, but as with all of this technology, it’s a work in progress.

The New Fast Way To Find Out What’s Going On

by Bud Parr on March 25, 2008

If you’re new to the concept of RSS, then this might be the fastest way to figure it out…