Yesterday I got punched in the face and knocked to ground, metaphorically speaking of course. In Round 9 of my daily Fotobout with Michael, his picture Zürich West by Night proved too much for me to handle. The score? Our visitors voted in favor of his photo 44-13, a T.K.O. by anyone's account. You might be asking yourself why I would subject myself and my photography to the agony of defeat on a daily basis and the answer is simple — for the love of making pictures.
Step into the ring
Fotobout.com is a daily competition where I square off with Michael to post the better photograph. And our judges are you, the people. By sharing or simply "FOTE-ing" for your favorite photo, you cast a vote for it to win the round. Every 24 hours a new round begins and the results of the previous are revealed.
Contest rules:
- Each photo must be taken the same day it's posted.
- The identity of the photographer is kept hidden until after the round is over.
- Don't take anything too seriously or too personally, just have fun.
Inception
The idea for Fotobout came to us over dinner when Kathryn suggested that our never-ending accumulation of photo equipment didn't actually yield many pictures. Michael and I agreed we should strive to take more pictures and decided our goal would be one good photo a day. How good? Let the people decide!
You can imagine how eager a group of web developers were to start a pet project, an "Amazee Labs Team Extreme," we called it. A couple of days of design work on my part, some back-end heavy lifting by Michael, and a touch of front-end magic by Kathryn and Fotobout was online in about two weeks time.
Adaptation
Michael won the first round 24-17. He also took round two 12-3. It was obvious my competition was fierce but even more obvious was the fact that we were losing voters. The number of votes cast in rounds two and three were down nearly 65% from round one. Why?
Greg offered an answer, suggesting he wouldn't vote on a daily basis because he didn't want to spam his social media network with Fotobout updates. Danny concurred, adding that sharing every day was too much to ask of our visitors.
The solution to the problem was the FOTE button, a way for users to vote for their favorite entry without posting to social media. The results speak for themselves, a whopping 68 votes cast the day it was implemented.
Lessons learned
Photography aside, Fotobout can teach us a few things about how new ideas make it on the web. Here's a few things I've learned from this project as well as some ideas I've subscribed to in the past.
- Start with a simple idea. Do one thing really well instead of several things just okay. These days people won't tolerate a bad experience and there's no second chance to make a first impression.
- Get it online and in front of your users, the sooner the better. Your audience will be able to tell you more in five minutes than you could assume in five weeks.
- Evolve the product over time. Each new feature is an opportunity to impress your audience all over again and re-engage them for the long term.
Up next
Fotobout was a simple idea that we got online quickly and efficiently. And now we're looking forward to the future. In the coming months, look for Fotobout to adhere to the growing responsive design trend and don't rule out the addition of new photographers. Who knows, maybe we're on our way to becoming a full-fledged community platform. We'll see where the road takes us. Until then, get out there and vote. Ding, ding, ding!
One day a week our team members are free to drop client work, learn, improve their developer skills and contribute to the Drupal community. We call it Jamazee day.
How do we contribute to our companionship? We organize Drupal events, do Drupal consulting, give presentations at Drupal meetings, help in the IRC (live chat), offer our knowledge in the Drupal forums, write patches or maintain Drupal modules. And we bet a fiver that Drupal Santa will be happy with our latest efforts. We haven't just built some wonderful showcases, but also extended modules with new features, contributed one new module, and fixed an obnoxious platoon of module bugs. Here a short overview what we did in the last days:
Maxlength module
Some fields have a maximum length but the user is not informed about this restriction. That is where the Maxlength module jumps in. It informs the user of the remaining characters right below the input field while updating the remaining characters with JavaScript. During the last projects we used the Maxlength version 3 which was still Dev. It didn't quite fulfill our requirements, so we extended it and contributed these functionalities back. At the same time we did a lot of bugfixing and popped a beer: We can now call the Module Beta. We'll need some more testing to call it stable, feel free to help! More on the project page.
CampaignMonitor module
We use CampaignMonitor for our clients' and our own newsletter campaigns. So far there was one important feature missing: update the user email during account updating on Drupal. Vasi jumped in and implemented this feature, which is now committed to the dev version. During our work we found this monstrous bug that was of course instantly exterminated.
Entity External Rating module
One of our clients requires her users to vote for other user's contributions via Twitter or Facebook. Since we couldn't find an appropriate module we build an API called Entity External Rating. We haven't yet integrated it with VotingAPI. Let's see what the future brings.
Views Nodes Split module
Yet another client requirement we couldn't solve with the contributed modules. We had to show the first node of a view in another view mode, then the rest of the nodes. This works with DisplaySuite, but unfortunately not when you want to show more then 20 nodes. So we build a slick module which can handle this: Views nodes split. And this module was featured in the weekly Module Monday from Lullabot, cool.
Want to contribute too? Check this page and get involved in a great community.
Let's keep rocking!
We already told you about some performance and responsive design technologies we used for bundesplatz.srf.ch.
Today we want to show you how we actually built it. Most of the work was done by a small team on a weekend, in 48 hours!
Normally we don't work like this (though we really like it), but because it was a short-term demand from the customer we decided to create the D-R-U-P-A-L Taskforce and build the whole site in a weekend.
Want to see how it looked?
Here you can see us working in 1080p:
The Amazee Labs logo is something we're proud to show off. For example, we've printed it on business cards, silk screened it on T-shirts, and even engraved it on Legos. Let's add a few more to the list, shall we?
Lil Decal Shoppe helped us roll out these flawless decals, that really spruce up our Macbooks, among other things. And the best part is, no backing. It's like a transparent PNG we can hold in our hands!
A big shout out and thanks goes to Gary Sweeney, a local Texas artist that helped us cut this logo out of MDO board for mounting on our office wall. At a whopping five feet wide, this logo really makes an impact.
And finally, in the spirit of All Hallows Eve, we carved this pumpkin. Some painter's tape, a Sharpie, and an hour wielding an X-ACTO knife yielded this branded jack-o'-lantern. Happy Halloween!
Jiiihaaaaaa! We are proud to welcome Andrew McClintock to our UX & design team. Andrew is web designer by trade, and a talented one indeed. After completing his creative advertising degree at the university of Texas he took up the post of creative director at Digett, a San Antonio based web design company. And for the one's who know our peeps a bit better: Kathryn Cornelius' has lost her status as lone star - Andrew's the second Texan to join Amazee Labs. Andrew, we're looking forward to working with you. Meanwhile enjoy the Texan heat - Switzerland's so foggy the bird's are walking.
Bine aţi venit! As of this very day Vasile Chindris is joining our team in Zurich. This is great news since Vasi is not just an intelligent computer scientist but a battle-hardened coder. He has proven his practical talents with several of our client projects working from our development partner epoint in Timisoara, Romania; probably the longest assessment we've done so far. We are excited to have you here for good Vasi - the Raclette and Fondue season is just about to start!
As most of our dear readers already know, Amazee Labs develops based on the unbeatable framework Drupal.
Today was the official start of DrupalCon London, well Croydon actually, where 1,750 Drupalistas are currently gathering for the conference taking place twice a year. Amazee Labs is proud to be a sponsor and on Sunday evening we could sneak a peek of the location and were delighted to discover our brand in pole position:
Six Amazees are currently over to contribute to the event and learn about the next big things to come. And if you happen to be one of our clients, don't worry, we're not just learning. We're using all the spare time (mornings, breaks and nights) for some intense mini-sprints:
Another result of our first early morning session is our new Amazee Lab & Drupal page extension, hope you like it!
You'll hear more from our conference week in London. All work done now. We're off to the official curry night and pub crawl...
Yesterday was the first day to see the Amazee Labs team go on an outing without a work related mission. Very much a chillshop in contrast to our previous work- and sweat-shops.
Despite all archery, slacklining and BBQ we couldn't quite keep our mind off the business and came up with some exciting new ideas. Rumor has it that our next series of projects is going to restore the honor of the most inflationary used expression in agile software development: SPRINT. More to come. In the meantime one more picture from a relaxed day out.
Woohoo, we are happy and proud to announce Victor Künzig as our new team member! Victor is a programmer and will be working in Michael's Tech team. Until recently he had been grinding as a programmer for Winterthur-based firm Die Marketing Manufaktur AG. Great to have you on our ship, we're looking forward to working with you Victor.
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Welcome George Lukas!
0We are proud to announce that the Amazee Labs team has grown by two new members! George Papadongonas and Lukas Abegg will add man power to our tech team.
George, who hails from Greece, isn't a spring chicken on Drupal. He is a registered member on Drupal.org for almost four and a half years and therefore brings a lot of valuable experience to the team.
While Lukas joined to complete the practical part of his information technician apprenticeship with us and seems to have picked up the Drupal flu pretty fast.