centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Centresource’s Evan Owens recognized as a Nashville ‘Top 30 Under 30′
We are thrilled to congratulate Evan Owens from our team as a Nashville 30 Under 30 award winner this year.
Nashville’s Top 30 Under 30 recognizes the city’s most active young philanthropists while benefiting the CFF. Honorees were nominated by co-workers, friends and family for their charitable and professional endeavors. The top 30 honorees were then selected by the Top 30 Under 30 selection committee during the month of June.
“This honoree class has once again shown that Nashville is full of young professionals that care about their city. We hope the community will help the CFF congratulate and honor them by supporting the Top 30 Under 30 celebration in September,” said Top 30 Under 30 co-chair Anne Elizabeth McIntosh.
Facebook, and your Privacy Settings
As you may know, Facebook has been doing some pretty stupid things recently that can cause your privacy to be shot on Facebook. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help you adjust your privacy settings to be more protective of your information.
I came across this tool tonight: http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
Basically, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, log into Facebook, and then click the bookmark. It will run some tests to see where you’re protected, and where you’re potentially exposed. I was surprised even how much I hadn’t protected, despite trying hard to be extra cautious.
Flood relief efforts underway in Nashville
Photo by Chuck Bryant
As you may have seen in the national news, a series of storms over the weekend have caused the worst flooding in Nashville in decades. At least six people in Middle Tennessee have lost their lives, and countless more have lost homes and businesses. More than 2,000 people stayed in storm shelters last night. We are truly blessed to report that all of our team is accounted for and is safe, but our hearts and prayers go out to those who are not as fortunate.
My Thoughts On Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone OS 4.0 ToS
There has been a lot of discussion about the changes that Apple made to the upcoming version of the iPhone OS 4.0 Terms of Service:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
As both developers and consumers, CentreSource is affected by this decision in two ways.
“I feel the need… the need for speed!”
For anyone (like myself) who has been religiously following Google and the amazing things that they have done to improve people’s experience on the web, you would have noticed a pattern in December 2009 of “speed.” The reasons for their speed obsession are clearly justified; a user’s experience on the web is made or broken by the speed at which they are able to browse, including the initial page load, the responsiveness of the interactive components, and the number of clicks to get to retrieve their desired information.
As such, Google has been busy releasing various tools to help with user’s experiences on the web:
Introducing the new CentreSource.com
When your company has had so much success at planning and building world-class Web sites for companies and organizations of all sizes, it is easy to start to think “Hey, what about our site? When are we launching the new one? Can we put a treasure map on there? Can Chris take our pictures?” The answers to the last three are: “today,” “absolutely” and “if you ask him nicely.”
Join us for BarCamp Nashville 2009
It will be LEGENDARY!
CentreSource is once again sponsoring the midstate’s leading tech-driven “unconference,” BarCamp Nashville. This free event will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Saturday, October 17 at the Cadillac Ranch on Broadway in downtown Nashville (map). At last glance, there were more than 60 presenters that had created sessions on topics on everything from Web development to entrepreneurship. We are also very proud that several of our team members will be presenting at this year’s event:
- Nicholas Holland - From Cave Walls to Facebook Walls
- Chip Hayner - Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
Social Obligations
On the drive into work today, I was listening to “This Week in Google“, one of the amazing podcasts from the TWiT network, hosted by Leo Laporte. In the most recent episode, one of the guests spoke briefly about how he felt that he could let non-direct Twitter messages and Facebook wall posts to him go without reply, but he felt obliged to respond to emails and direct messages. This got me thinking about the “Social Obligation” that I feel with various forms of communication.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
At CentreSource, we have a motto that “outcomes always outweigh the output.” Through this, we try to focus on meeting the individual goals of our clients, versus focusing on the process of how they get done. One goal we often hear is that our clients would like an easy way to update the website themselves. By using a Content Management System (CMS), we enable our clients to accomplish this — without having to install anything on their computers, or know too much about how websites work.
Over the history of CentreSource, we’ve worked hard to choose the perfect CMS to be able to meet the individual needs of each client and project that comes our way. There was always a balance that had to be struck — it couldn’t be too cookie-cutter, or else we wouldn’t be able to do everything that the client was asking. Conversely, it wouldn’t be cost efficient if we had to custom build a CMS for our clients each time. By focusing on the outcome (the client’s goal of an easy-to-update website), we decided that the best single CMS option was not a single option at all, but instead a “toolbox” approach that would allow us to use the appropriate tool for each unique job.
Dream Big, Take Action: Ellie’s Run for Africa
The summer is here, which means that once again it is time for us to join forces to help out Ellie’s Run for Africa (ERFA), a 5k run and family fun day that raises awareness of and funding for Africans who struggle to meet basic needs such as health care, food, water, shelter, clothing and education. Since the first event in 2004, ERFA has raised over $155,000 and helped to put over 420 kids in school.