larryaronson.com

I’ve just finished a project: DigitalHHR – a Wordpress blog for the Intellectual Property department of a big law firm. The IP department, consisting of 4 lawyers, wanted a online platform to promote their ideas and opinions about intellectual property and generate good press for their firm. I was under contract to a wonderful creative agency, Aha! Insight Technology and was working again with Howard Greenstein. Howard provided the strategic direction, project management and training for the client while I provided the technology.

Howard proposed a robust set of features to showcase their familiarity with leading edge, social media technologies and services. The specifications called for an integrated BBs, an event manager, feature-rich videos, a Flash-powered header with a customized navigation menu tying it all together. Howard and I knew we were pushing the limits of Wordpress and that’s what the client wanted to show off.

We started with a three column theme, Seashore by Sadish Bala. I added a video presentation space on top of the  sidebars and a game space below. With a bit of work, I was able to shoehorn the custom flash video the lawyers designed into the header code and replaced the generated navigation menu with a two-level structure.

The four lawyers were already blogging on other sites. This was their first opportunity, not only to write under their own brand, but to actually craft that brand as publishers and editors. As they began to post articles, they became concerned about their authorship rights —they’re IP lawyers, remember, and important ones at that! So, as we neared completion of the project, new feature requests started creeping in.

They wanted special lawyer profile pages so they could edit in additional content about themselves. These page would feature a portrait image and an expanded contact section with a download-able, virtual address card. For these special pages, I cloned the standard single page template and modified it to fetch the page author’s portrait photo from a sub directory of /wp-content. I setup custom fields for the contact information and displayed those next to the portrait image. Following that, I formatted a box to display the most recent posts by that author. Finally, I displayed whatever content they wanted to add via the post editor. Click here to see some of the code.

The head partner of the IP division liked the profile page so much that he wanted a special version just for himself that also displayed  any press articles written about him. I figured out how to accomplish that using a custom post field and some more template programming.

They also wanted to post co-authored articles. I know that there was third-party plug-in that did something like that, but at this late stage of the project, it was easier to add more template modifications to get exactly the functionality the client wanted. The solution we devised features a double portrait image, double email links and a hook to pick up the post for the special lawyer profile pages.

It’s been exciting to watch this blog progress from it’s initial launch last month. Everything we did is being used by the client and it’s all working well.

Two new Web browsers have recently become available for exploring the Internet. Google Chrome and Flock take radically different approaches to the browsing experience and I recommend you take a look at them when you get a chance.

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry