I’ve been working on a project using Google Gears for the last few weeks and I’ve hacked together some classes to allow the user of the Open Rico Live Grid to use Gears to operate offline. A result of using Gears to take an application offline is that it is much easier to move data around in a raw data type format as oppose to a markup format that you might use if you can format the data on the server. The advantage is that if your server produces raw data and your Gears database produces raw data, then you can do all of your formating in one place. In the browser via JavaScript. If your server is pushing fragments of markup to your page via AJAX, then when you need to replicate that functionality offline, you have to grab the data from the local DB and then format via JS and try to produce the same markup that your server is producing. Then when you need to change something, you get to change it twice. Boo!

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I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard local business owners say that the Internet doesn’t really apply to their business. When we started our business adventure in 1999, I think that many businesses could have made a strong argument that that was true. The Internet had not really impacted their business, because the new business they needed to continue to grow was being delivered by phone book advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I came across Fancy Form and decided that it would be a great addition to a project I’ve been working on. It’s a great piece of code that will replace normal check boxes and radio button form elements with nice images to give you more control over styling those elements than you can get by just affecting them via CSS. I ran into some problems with compatibility between MooTools (required by Fancy Form) and Prototype (which I was already using). So I modified Fancy Form to be able to use Prototype instead. View the demo.

Plain Form VS Fancy Form

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Value Your Clients Will Understand
There are three rules for creating an effective email campaign that will help your clients understand the value in direct email. The first rule is to only send email to recipients that have requested information from you. The second rule is to only send your subscribers information they are interested in. The third rule is to create a compelling message. In my experience, if you can meet these criteria your conversion rates increase dramatically, and your campaign is a success.

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