Back in the PlayStation 1 days, E3 was a totally happening event, full of game demos, elaborate booth designs and tons of freebies.  Each year since then, it has dwindled in size, finally bottoming out a couple years ago to relatively small airplane hangar in Santa Monica.  Fortunately, E3 has returned to its roots as a sensory overload event.  Each platform had something new to brag about.  The XBOX Kinect motion controller was a big hit, with ridiculous lines to try it.  The new Nintendo DS booth was so jammed with people; you had to wait just to get in and then wait again to play anything.   The PlayStation Move controller will also be a fun addition for PS3 owners, and will be instantly familiar to those familiar with the Wii.  Each exhibitor clearly didn’t cheap out on their booth designs, with special effects, costumes and elaborate architecture.  It was a great time and well worth the time and train ride downtown.  See you next year!

If you attend any Digital LA events, there will be a good chance you’ll bump into some of us friendly folks from Tuesday.  The most recent session was at the Roosevelt Hotel and centered around representatives across Disney, including Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Disney Interactive Media Group, Disney-ABC Television Group and Walt Disney Studios. The focus of the panel was to discuss Disney’s initiative of franchise development over multiple platforms and how their specific business extends products through channels like online, gaming, mobile, consumer products and theme parks. They openly discussed their challenges and areas that do not make sense to explore even though they are hot items at the moment. For example, Facebook does not make sense when you are targeting children who are not on Facebook. After the discussion, the panel fielded questions for another 45 minutes and talked openly. It was an excellent session and we’re looking forward to attending the next event soon – see you there!

We have quite a few gamers at Tuesday Creative and we’ve been addicted to Activision’s Modern Warefare 2 game since it hit stores last year.  So, 12 of us got together at the office a couple Saturdays ago to connect our PS3’s and have a good old fashion LAN party (that’s Local Area Network for the newbies out there).  We spent the better part of the day showing off our moves on the virtual battlefield, with frequent breaks for pizza and beer.  Andrew “LadyRain” Seles and Chris “SirDukeChristof” Moore were the standout players; I would have played better but my joystick was malfunctioning ;-p.  Stay tuned for coverage of a rematch in the not too-distant future!

Harnessing the power of social networking is a critical component to online marketing strategies.  Quite simply, people like to share things they are passionate about with all their Facebook friends and Twitter followers.  When iVillage.com wanted to boost visibility of the health section of their new website, we developed a sharing tool that allows visitors to quickly share iVillage content on their Facebook and Twitter pages.  Even more, we created a reporting system so iVillage can tell who is coming to their site as a result of a shared link!  It’s a great, low impact method to grow their audience and leverage the massive social network user base.

In 2009, we sent all our senior developers on a field trip up north to learn the ways of TeamSite at the Interwoven training center. After many days of intense training under Interwoven experts, they returned to our office with a better understanding and appreciation of the technology. Almost immediately, we were able to put our training into action with the redesign of Dignity Memorial. After the initial learning curve, we found out that the Interwoven platform lives up to its promise of handling large scale site development with enough flexibility to customize it to specific project requirements.

For those who are unfamiliar with Interwoven, it is a company that is almost synonymous with its flagship CMS product, TeamSite.  Over several years of development and enhancements, Interwoven expanded their line to include several products and technologies to complement TeamSite.  Some of these products were developed at Interwoven, others were created from acquiring other companies’ technologies, and others exist as software as a service (SaaS).

Ironically, one of the first aspects of dipping into their technology is simply to understand which of their products are necessary to drive your project.  For you designers out there, think of it just a little bit like all the different Adobe CS bundles:  Web Premium, Design Premium, Production Premium, etc.   With that example, if you buy Web Premium, it doesn’t come with InDesign…so you’ll find yourself out of luck if you need to do a print project months after purchase.

Interwoven is similar in this way.  TeamSite standing alone is essentially a tool to manage the location of content.  Think of it much like the documents folder on your computer – it’s a way to store your text documents and photos.  TeamSite is like your documents folder on steroids.  Following the same analogy, you can see how your documents folder could not all of a sudden be a beautiful website.  You will need something else to make that happen.  Enter OpenDeploy.

OpenDeploy is the technology that routes through TeamSite file structure, grabs files and puts them where they need to go.  Greatly oversimplifying the process, when a site’s content is assembled together, OpenDeploy says, “take the graphics from this folder, the text documents from this folder, the buttons from this folder and put them all here for microsite #1, put a bunch of different files over there for microsite #2, and so on.”

Next, LiveSite is used to take the files that were gathered by OpenDeploy to draw a web page.  LiveSite brings together the actual content (files) and splices it together with logic of what should go where on a web page, including all the interactive functionality like search, menu functions, hyperlinks, Flash etc.  It also makes the correct localized content appear, for instance if a user has decided to change the language from English to Spanish.

Now TeamSite, Open Deploy and LiveSite have come together to draw a web page, but how do you then update the content of the page?  Well, for that you need SitePublisher.  SitePublisher is the front end tool to make it easy for WYSIWYG style editing of webpages and content…for you Adobe folks out there, it’s a tad like Dreamweaver, if Dreamweaver is a fishing boat and SitePublisher is an aircraft carrier.  With SitePublisher, one can control content on websites on a very large scale (in our case, over a thousand individual sites).  Using this tool, we are able to make global content changes, including automated logic for localization, without having to crack open any Java.

So there you have it – four separate Interwoven products coming together to power an enterprise website.

However, please let me take a moment to underscore that I’m just giving a high level overview of their products and I’ve been hugely oversimplifying the process we went through to build Dignity Memorial.  To make all this happen takes thousands of hours of programming, configuring, customization and testing.  Even more, I didn’t go into any detail on all the non-Interwoven effort behind the project, like design, HTML/CSS and a ton of Java programming to wire in all sorts of custom functionality and logic.  Interwoven certainly provides a framework of tools that brought some significant efficiencies to our process, but it still requires focus, hard work and talent to bring it all together.  I have to hand it to our entire team for a wonderful job and all the late nights they spent on the project.  Thank you everyone for a job very well done!

Contact us today to find out how TeamSite can work for you!

For this month’s Team Tuesday we managed to corner our VP Business Development extraordinaire, Diana Scott.  See what we dug up about Diana when she answered 10 questions …

Title? VP Business Development
What is your most treasured possession? My time, I try to always enjoy it.
Who is your favorite fictional hero? Wonder Woman, I still want to be her!
What is something people would be surprised to know about you? I have many tales to tell. During my NYC days, I was quite the party crasher. Much to the chagrin of the Presidential Security team I made my way into a small private party for President Clinton on his 50th birthday and walked right up to say “Happy Birthday Mr. President” Marilyn Monroe style. Monica Lewinsky was there and she didn’t like it one bit.
What is your favorite TV show of all time? Fantasy Island, Donny & Marie and Rockford Files will always be special to me.
What’s the most embarrassing CD you ever owned? I have eclectic tastes and like to sample it all. I will confess to listening to a John Tesh CD twice before donating it.
Who would win in a fight between a Taco, a Burrito and a Hot Dog? Clearly the Burrito with its sheer power, heft and arsenal of spices and sauces.
Who is your favorite artist? I admire Prince, Madonna and Trent Reznor for all their different takes on ‘art’. Visually, I love Scandinavian design.
What technology most changed your life? Crackberry, it’s a good thing and a bad thing that I am available 24/7.
What is the best advice you have ever received? “Run your own race” from my good friend Kim. Nike’s “Just Do It” is a close second. It’s scary that I am considering well-crafted marketing messages to be advice.    

This month we sat down with Dianna Martinez one of our Senior Programmers to ask her ten silly questions!

Nickname? D, or Dinah according to my niece
Title? Developer
What is your most treasured possession? I guess if I had to run out of the house with one thing, it would be my set of photo albums/books… then my hard drives, laptop, and camera bag
What is something people would be surprised to know about you? I used to have green hair with pink bangs. That reminds me – some people used to call me rainbow head or broccoli head too
What is your favorite candy? Plain M&Ms or Milk Chocolate Bordeaux from Sees
What’s your favorite most embarrassing CD/Album? I have a lot of those… Paula Abdul is the first to come to mind.
Where and when would you travel to in a Time Machine? I’d go back to 1987 and ask Evie how to pause time.
Who is your favorite artist? I see stuff I like but I don’t know names… all the artists here are pretty awesome.
What is your favorite invention? Right now it’s precious metal clay (PMC).
What technology most changed your life? Email. I don’t do the phone.

Despite what you might think, Helvetica and Arial are different! Check out this site and test your font spotting skills.

And – ahem – try to match my score of 20 out of 20. Helvetica rules.

I wanted to take some underwater photos, but it’s something I almost never do, making it even more difficult to justify buying a Canon Powershot D10. Instead, I took an old Canon SD500 and put it in a Ziploc bag. I used a sandwich size freezer style bag which has a slightly thicker plastic and double zippers, put in the camera, squeezed the air out of it, and zipped it up. The flexibility of the bag let me push all the buttons, turn it off and on, switch from video to camera mode and operate the zoom. The quality is fine except for a little haze from the plastic. The camera stayed dry, too! Unless you need pristine quality images, it was a great way to capture some memories and save some cash.

To be safe, I wouldn’t exactly do it with a brand new camera, but it worked surprisingly well. Here’s a test shot I did under less than ideal lighting conditions, and check out those goggles!