Welcome to our site

We get a lot of questions asking what browsers we support or how do we keep track of so many browsers. Truth is, there are too many browsers to support all of them. From AOL to w3m all told there are approximately 30 browsers, not counting mobile. So, how do we pick which browsers to support?

We support A-grade browsers browsers for the following systems:

¹ The most-current non-beta version at that branch level which receives support.

This is taken from the YUI Graded Browser support guide. It is the most straight-forward list of popular and (”/or” is a required addition in the case of Internet Explorer which is not compliant, although IE8 is an improvement toward standards compliance).

This covers over 95 percent of the browser market, with Opera – a standards compliant browser – eating up the majority of the remainder.

It is important to note that IE (in all three of its lovely varieties), while still in the majority, is now on less than two-thirds of the computers viewing the web. So when picking a web design firm, make sure they design for both web standards compliant browsers AND the non-compliant IE.

O.S.U. Federal Credit Union, located in and serving Corvallis, Oregon and the surrounding counties of Benton, Lincoln, Linn, Marion and Polk County, hired us to redesign their website and it gave me a chance to get back to the West Coast and show off my favorite state.

O.S.U. Federal (the O.S.U. is for Oregon State University) graciously hired us despite my alumni status at rival University of Oregon. I refrained from wearing green and yellow. Go Beavs!

We spent a day and a half completely rebuilding the wireframe for the site and came home ready for design work. Our efficient approach allowed us the afternoon to visit the coast. Pictures are here.

Around a year ago, due to the writer’s strike, there was nothing on TV.

Now, between nine and eleven months later, our favorite shows are out of reruns and, Matt, Derrick, myself and our respective wives are all in the parenting business. Which is a business of blood and tears and feces, and, when lightning strikes, hugs and kisses and sleep. It’s rarely glamorous, as we are learning more every day, but it has it’s fulfilling, sweet moments. Like when we all miraculously get an actual night’s rest and get to spend a Saturday morning with our family all piled in bed, cooing and being in love with each other.

We have the blessing of getting to work from home where we can enjoy several little belly-raspberry breaks through the day. Little Gracie Dean and Wesley Spell and Julie Trotter are getting to sit in their daddy’s lap every day watching him do what he’s best at: Development, Development and Booger Jokes, respectively.

So we are pleased to properly announce the arrival of our precious, fat-cheeked, screaming little bundles of tax deductions from youngest to oldest.

Update: Mark brought up some interesting points in his comment (see below), and while the overarching message of this post still stands, I didn’t intend to discourage the use of open source software throughout a credit union. Mark and I will be discussing this issue tomorrow (Friday the 27th) from 3 to 5 EST in the chat with the ceo chat room if you’d like to drop by!

For the past six months our team has been hard at work rewriting the content management system that runs all of the websites we produce. While we still have quite a few improvements in store for our CMS, we’ve launched several sites on it in the past couple of months and are finally ready to wean ourselves off of the Red Bull.

Unfortunately, during the rewrite it became clear that we’re not ready to open source the CMS as we had promised earlier. A few of our clients have raised legitimate concerns about the vulnerability of a system whose source code is exposed to the public, particularly one without the developer base of software such as Linux or MySQL, and we certainly don’t want to put those clients at risk in any way.

While we have decided not to release our source code, we do plan to share snippets of code that we’ve found helpful and perhaps release some plugins that other developers can use in their Rails projects. We’re also happy to answer any Rails questions you may have, either via email at development@trabian.com or in a Campfire chat with your development team.

If you have any questions about this decision, please feel free to email me at matt@trabian.com or meet me in my daily Campfire chat between 3 and 4 pm EST on weekdays.

Thanks for your understanding!

Last year, marketing bloggers Drew McLellen and Gavin Heaton brought 100 marketing bloggers under one book called “The Age of Conversation.” They‚Äôre doing it again, and you can help. Today is the last day to sign up as an author of The Age of Conversation 2.0.

If you want to contribute or vote on the topic, click here and get in touch with Drew.

Now’s the specific call-out time. I’d love to see contributions from: Trey Reeme, William Azaroff, Shari Storm, Tim McAlpine, Terrell Meek, and Ron Shevlin.

Ron wrote in the first Age of Conversation, and just because I enjoyed it a lot, here’s a piece from his essay, “Behavioral Conversations” -

To succeed in the Age of Conversation, it’s not sufficient for marketers to engage customers in verbal conversations on social networking sites. Instead, they must develop a new marketing competency — a sense-and-respond competency — to sense consumer needs and intentions based on their behavior, and to respond with appropriate advice, guidance and offers. And in a broader sense, this capability is about understanding trends and directions about the customer community based on their collective actions and behaviors.

I’m excited to be contributing to the second book. You can order the first book here. All proceeds go to Variety – The Children’s Charity.