yes, we made the internet. yes the internet is "remaking" us… to a degree… but the core understanding by those who "make internet" must still be adaptive to the human condition, consumption habits and expectations, no matter their status.

Internet from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.

Each week, The Columbus Chamber features one member company in their spotlight. This week, they chose dynamIt. Pretty good choice if you ask us! The full feature is available here, and below we’ve posted our response to the question, “Why We’re Members.”

Columbus is a leader in the Midwest. The city can boast a culture of growth and business know-how where people, ideas and capital are coming together. The Chamber is and should be the expression of Columbus’ economic hub. dynamIt is a member, first and foremost, because of the opportunities afforded to participate in the local economy and thinking. In a business era of interdependencies and quickly-dying vertical solutions (regardless of industry), businesses should commit to creating an environment of opportunities for all economic players. dynamIt truly believes that if this city and economy succeed, we will too. Through membership, we also benefit from the programming, events, and connections which the Chamber facilitates.

In case you missed it, dynamIt was also featured recently in two university publications - Xavier Magazine, and the Miami University Farmer School of Business.

Please view this. If we write more words here, it will only be redundant.

WordCamp, a conference surrounding the open source blogging platform WordPress, was held in Columbus this past weekend. I volunteered to speak at the event, and I am really glad that I did choose to participate. I found the conference to be an all-around success, see my personal blog for additional commentary.

I represented dynamIt at the event by giving a talk titled, “WordPress in the Corporate World.” My talk was the presentation of a case study in which we implemented WordPress for Fortune 500 company McGraw-Hill who has a large presence here in Columbus.

Back in January 2009, we, along with partner Sync Creative, launched a microsite for the Glencoe division of McGraw-Hill. Sync brought us to the table to provide web strategy and web development of the site. We recommended and implemented WordPress in order to meet their project goals. The project has had overwhelmingly positive results meeting all success criteria. This same site also earned recognition from the New York Times in March.

Click here to download the complete case study and read more (pdf).

All-in-all, really happy with what I got out of WordCamp and excited by how we can continue to leverage WordPress in the future.

Sorry to bore everyone with yet another developery post, but this does affect you designer types as well. Plus, I think it’s cool so I am going to share.

If you look closely around the web you will rarely see tabs that overlap each other. Usually, each tab is in its own self-contained box. The reason for this is that if two tabs overlap then turning one of those to its activate state requires the swapping of multiple graphics. This makes using sprites much more difficult and less effective (and if you’re still using JavaScript for image rollovers, well, that gets even messier).

So, I am working on the UI for the tabs seen to the right. You’ll notice that not only do they overlap, but each has a drop shadow that covers all the tabs and only those tabs that are “underneath” it. It is literally like we have four tabbed sheets of paper here that we want to be able to stack in any order. In my opinion, this is a pretty silky graphic effect, check it out, the PG. 2 tabs is all the way on the bottom, followed by PG. 1, then PG. 3, with PG. 4 on top.

My solution is to use absolute positioning along with transparent PNGs. Yes, transparent PNGs mean bad news for IE 6, but the solution is otherwise super-easy to work.

Simply cut out each individual tab and keep its alpha-channel transparency by saving as a PNG. Then, absolutely position each tab in its correct place on the page

Now here is the trick. If the server generates the active tab, whichever tab appears last in the HTML code will be on top based on the natural stacking order (i.e. no need to fool with z-index).

If the client-side can alter the active tab, messing with z-index is really not that difficult. I haven’t tried it, but something like the following should work thanks to jQuery.

$(’.tab’).click( function() { $(this).siblings().css(’z-index’, 1).end().css(’z-index’, 2); } );

Oh yeah, if you do need rollovers this method is totally compatible with your traditional CSS sprite.

In cooperation with our friends at Sync Creative, we put together a project for McGraw-Hill that was noticed by the Times. It’s always thrilling to see our work as a part of a bigger picture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/education/22textbook.html?_r=1