Michael Richard Murphy

If the writing here seems spotty or few and far between lately, it’s likely due to scope creep. Also known as ‘Give an inch, take a mile’ or ‘Why can’t I say no?’

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, scope creep is those little extras that seem to sneak into projects (of any size) that manage to make them one or two or more sizes larger than originally intended. I’m sure it has a much more technical definition, but I think that breaks it down just fine for my purposes.

I’ve been working seven days a week lately on a number of projects. As usual, there is work work (what I consider my full time job) and within that there are “volunteer” projects. When I say volunteer, I mean a combination of being a true volunteer and a conscript.

I was asked to put together a registration web site for Take Your Kids to Work Day which somehow. Originally it was supposed to record whether employees were bringing their children or not and how many. Somehow that’s mushroomed into allowing employees to register each of their children for different sessions, closing these sessions when maximum occupancy is reached, and since some sessions are different lengths, disallowing employees from registering children in overlapping sessions. It will also dump registrants into an Excel sheet so that administrators can print out agendas for each employee’s children.

The Corporate Challenge logo is also running into multiple iterations because the different groups represented all want their names to appear first. Hopefully all the time I’ve spent on that will be coming to an end soon and a consesus will be reached.

I’ve also had a bunch of freelance work lately (which is a situation I hope I never complain about) and I’m getting ready for a much needed vacation.

Stay tuned over the next two weeks for those announcements. One will be the unveiling of the Corporate Challenge logo and the other will be a new web site.

I’m pleased to announce that this year I’′ll be designing the shirt worn by the local Citigroup companies in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. This includes local offices of The Student Loan Corporation, Citibank, and Solomon Smith Barney (my apologies if I forgot any group). Check back for an unveiling of the design after final approval by the powers that be.

Check back for at least two major announcements coming with the next few days. Details need to be finalized but I have some great news coming! Stay tuned…

As part of a promotion, I was enrolled in something called a Card Protector Benefit after signing up for a new credit card. The idea is that a percentage of your monthly balance is paid back into a fund like an insurance policy in case you’re ever in a situation where you can’t pay your monthly bill.

I try not to use my card too often and I don’t anticipate losing my job so I wasn’t totally excited about this program. But people get busy and several months went by before I called to cancel it. Naturally the woman on the phone tried to convince me not to leave the program by informing me of its other benefits. It turns out that they pay out for more than just job loss. They pay out for other life changing events such as purchasing a new home, having a child, graduating from college, things like that.

Having purchased a home a little while ago, she convinced me to stick it out at least until I received what I had coming to me for that event. Turns out that’s two months of bill payment (courtesy of the card company) and a refund of those two months of the program fee.

I didn’t intend to give it too much more thought until I had received those benefits (and it was time to cancel again) but for some reason I’ve been thinking about it this morning.

This whole concept is genius for many reasons. Like insurance, the company bets that not everyone they collect from will use the benefits so they make money. They still win when you collect because you’re providing them with valuable personal data that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

For instance, I collected my benefit because I purchased a new home. Since most people don’t purchase homes on credit cards, whether I rent or own would be information they wouldn’t know unless they asked. I’m voluntarily providing them with this information. It just so happens that this credit card company also provides many other services such as mortgages, student loans, auto financing, etc. Now that they know I own a home, how long do you think it will take before I’m bombarded by marketing material asking me to consider refinancing or describing home equity products?

I find this person’s writing and insight so spot on that I would consider going to work for them immediately if:

1. I lived in Silicon Valley
2. I knew who this person was
3. I knew where this person worked

Numbers 2 and 3 are relatively easily solved with a little detective work but it’s just not worth it considering number 1. So for now I think I’ll simply continue to enjoy his writing.

Visit the link above to soak in some ideas on how decisions are made and ideas created. I find I work much the same way. Maybe that’s why I enjoy his articles so much.

The Student Loan Corporation has a new CIO. One of the programs she has carried over from her work at Citigroup is the Top 10 program. Each month the organization honors the top performers in each department.

I am pleased to announce that this past Friday, my boss presented me with the Top 10 award for January after only 8 weeks in my position. Ok, they’re a little behind but that’s not the point. It’s quite an honor to be chosen out of a department of 60 people whose work I respect. It’s also nice to know that my work is having an impact and being noticed.

• I could be your top performer. Download my resume.

Listening to NPR the other day. Diane Rehm was talking to a young woman with a learning disability. She was saying how she had gone to schools specifically tailored for LDs all her life but since no one was going to cut her any slack in the real world, she decided to go to a non-LD college so she’d get used to it. Diane asked her if she liked it. She said yes but she wasn’t sure if she was going to stay. She wasn’t sure what career she wanted to have when she grew up but she knew she wanted to be a super hero. A super hero. They never said what college it was but I’m pretty sure they don’t have a super hero program there.

I want to be a superhero too. I want to be a super hero to my family. I want to be a super hero to my friends. I want to be a super hero to my coworkers and clients. Is that too much to ask?

Luckily the two Andys (Budd and Clarke) have me covered in the web design department with their SXSW presentation, How to be a Web Design Superhero.

Our intranet has tons of documents published by a dozen or so different business groups. A good portion of those documents are web pages that have been thrown together assembled in FrontPage and published. Maintenance of those documents fall on the webmaster so when necessary, I need to go in and update them accordingly. This is a terrible, terrible job.

FrontPage writes some of the most awful code I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It even writes some code I’ve never seen in my entire life, like the <big> tag. Where did that come from? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve only ever seen it in FrontPage code.

The FrontPag- generated documents are usually so bloated that I can’t even do a simple find on the text I’m looking to modify because it’s broken up by nested or empty tags. If just looking at the code doesn’t immediately suck out my will to live and send me into sinking depression, I’ll usually try to clean it up and simplify. It’s so bad that the other day I literally replaced about 900 lines of HTML (yes, HTML) with about 100 lines of semantic, standards-based XHTML and CSS. Yeah me!

That’s why it makes me happy to introduce Expression, the new FrontPage from Microsoft. That’s right, I’ve read that FrontPage is being replaced by Expression which supposedly writes valid Strict and Transitional HTML and XHTML, has better support for CSS, and will even validate accessibility if you so desire (and you should).

I’ve heard that the beta of Internet Explorer 7 has finally been released, so now is the time for developers to step up testing of their work to make sure everything is copacetic.

The good news is that IE will now support transparent PNGs. The bad news (among other things) is that it now parses the comment filter /**/ that is commonly used to hide styles from its older siblings.

I’ve also heard that IE7 isn’t supporting the :after pseudo-element which developers commonly use to clear floats, although that didn’t immediately jump out at me on developer’s checklist provided by Microsoft. Take a look and see what you need to get your sites ready for IE7.

I’m please to announce a new addition to both the client list and the extended family: Jack Van Epps.

My logs indicate that this site was returned in the search results for “interesting facts about Oklahoma” close enough to the top that somebody clicked through on it.

I find that interesting because those are three things that are rarely mentioned on this site:

1. stuff that’s interesting
2. facts
3. Oklahoma

Wonders never cease.

Ajax freaks working in the .Net environment should run right out and download Atlas, a new development framework from Microsoft. I said run.

Atlas integrates client-side script libraries with the server-based services of ASP.NET in order to create some really rich, interactive UIs. I watched a demo in which Microsoftie Scott Guthrie created a simple to-do list with tons of functionality in less than 20 minutes. The mini-application let users sort by task status, insert new tasks, and modify existing tasks all without page refreshes.

Scott also used some new, cool ASP.NET 2.0 methods that make handy things like pagination and alternating row colors super easy. There’s also another new method that makes it easy to display update statuses. As interfaces use page refreshes less and less to fetch data, letting the user know what’s going on becomes more important. Scott demonstrated this new method makes that as simple as drag and drop from the tool palette. Cool.

It’s a good thing that A- and I are good at our chosen careers because we would make terrible, terrible agents or talent managers.

A woman approached us at the garden show this weekend and asked to take our picture for something. We immediately said yes and asked for details afterward. And even though we did ask for details, neither of us is still sure what it was for. We’re either going to be in the Insider (whatever that is), the Weekend section of the paper, or The City Newspaper. We’re not sure which.

I half expect to see our smiling faces gracing an article under a phony headline like the one above.

I was going to complain about how busy I’ve been lately. Working full time, family, side projects, and such. Until I heard about Clarice on NPR this morning.

Clarice cares for her 89 year old sister who is in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s. She also cares for her brother who is 95 and a stroke victim. Sound tough but do-able? Clarice turns 102 this August and has health problems of her own.

Clarice is their sole care giver which means feeding, bathing, doing their laundry, everything. She also has to wake several times during the night to turn her sister who is bed-ridden. She does it all with a positive attitude and thanks God for the ability to do so.

I don’t think I’ll complain today. About anything.

I bit the bullet and bought Visual Studio 2005 Professional. It came today. Now that ’ve literally made the investment in it, hopefully I’ll find the time to sit down and get some .NET experience.

Note: This is a rough, rough draft written over two or three days at well past midnight. The topic is something that comes up quite a bit and that I have a lot to say about. This is an explosion of some of those things. It’s somewhat (dis)organized in some places. In the interest of time (and mostly so I can move on to something else), I’m publishing this as is. There are some gems in here if you have the time. If not, the takeaway is right in the title. You don’t need to read any further than that. On with the show…

This is something I’ve talked about in the past, both here and in person to clients. It was a topic in Sitepoint’s March Newsletter and the basis for some recent converstions I’ve had as well.

Content is king!

I think for people with little knowledge of the Internet outside of recreational use, comprehension of this concept comes in stages or unfortunately, not at all.

1. Let’s assume you have a business. I don’t care if you work for yourself selling homemade pot holders or if you’re the CEO of a 500 employee manufacturing company. At some point somebody has probably told you that you need a web site and that this web site would answer all your (business-related) prayers. At this stage, that’s not only believable but you can’t wait to get that site online and watch the $$$ come rolling in.
2. The site is online, you put your feet up on your desk, and…nothing happens. The big letdown. No bags, piles, or stacks of money. You think you know firsthand why the tech bubble burst and the e-Toys stock you bought to send Johnny to college now won’t even pay for a week of his day care. I digress.
3. Your web site really let you down. But you have money and time invested in it so you’re not entirely ready to give up. Good news! You get an email one day claiming to be able to get you umpteen-million visitors. XYZ Company will get you registered on a million search engines, they’ll get you setup with a pay-per-click campaign, and they have tons of SEO tricks that will land you the #1 spot on Google. Cool. You’re on cloud 9 again.
4. You’re paying hundreds a month in pay-per-click and ongoing SEO fees but you’re not getting any more orders or phone calls or walk-ins or whatever you’d like your site to accomplish for you. ‘The web is just hype’, you think.

I think this is an all too common scenario. It’s not necessarily that the web developer or SEO company is no good. It’s just that they didn’t take the time to truly understand what the goal was and what is required to meet it. There’s the old saying, ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. Some developers just develop.

Simply having a web site is a good start but not necessarily enough. If I never put any work into this site and had only one page, it would contain information about my background, skills, experience, and a way to contact me. That little bit of information would work for me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It would be like giving everyone I see my business card, only it contains way more (useful) information.

That’s the minimum it accomplishes. I don’t do pay-per-click or search engine optimization. I’m not interested in it. Honestly, I don’t really believe in it. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe that paying the highest amount for specific search terms will get a site listed the highest for that those search terms. I also believe that optimizing your web site for a specific search term will get you listed higher for that search term. What I don’t believe in is the benefit of it.

Ok, I should probably clarify that. If you’re not explicitly selling something, I don’t believe that pay-per-click is beneficial. ‘Everybody is selling something’, you say. You’re right, this site pitchs me. I said explicitly, meaning, you’re selling…a widget for $25. If you’re a straight up e-commerce company competing with other companies that have the same service/product/etc. and the only difference is who gets to the consumer first, then have at it. Pay-per-click is your best friend. Buy your way to the top, it’s worth it.

If you’re doing anything else (which encompasses a lot), then I just don’t think it’s a productive use of time or money. Let’s use a familiar example: this site. I can pay hundreds (or more) dollars each month to get this site to the top of Google for web design. If you click through and are greeted by a message that says something like, “This site best viewed with Internet Explorer 4”, or terrible MIDI music, or references to clearly outdated technologies, it’s not going to inspire a lot of confidence and it won’t be long before you’re back at Google resuming your search and my hard-earned money is wasted.

My point is that high rankings don’t mean anything if your site doesn’t appeal to your target market and satiate some desire of theirs. Whether it is to purchase something or obtain some piece of information or whatever. When I search for something on Google and I click through on a result, I give that site an assessment in about 15 seconds. If it’s not readily apparent that it will meet my needs, I hit the back button.

I prefer organic results. That means that my site appears naturally for the search terms that it most closely relates to. In my mind this kills two birds with one stone.

1. I don’t pay for listings but my site still appears. Albeit for fewer, more specific search terms but it’s more relevant to the user. This should make that person happy. Making the user happy is very important.
2. I’ve taken the time to provide quality information so my site because useful. A utility. A tool. People come back, instead of this being a hiccup in their search for what they really want.

You can use pay-per-click campaigns and search engine optimization tricks (both legit and illegit) to get traffic to your site and/or make it more appealing to search engines but ultimately, search engines don’t buy your product or service or visit your office or any of those things. So why would you design specifically for them? That’s like manufacturing a product for one audience but marketing to another.

There is not substitute for useful, relevant, current content. Just in case you didn’t get that. There is no substitute for useful, relevant, current content.

Great site, lotsa’ good info but what happened to the “dailies”? From Feb 23 to March 1 is hardly every day. Give us more!!

That’s a comment recently left here by a visitor. It’s true that I’m averaging a post about once a week lately.

It seems like suddenly I’ve become insanely busy. My recent recognition means more and more people at work work (my day job) are asking me to participate on their projects. I think there may be a queue (sorry, but I love that word).

I’ve also started picking up more freelance work. Most recently working for a musician in Syracuse on a site for his CD release party. I hope to complete that in the next few weeks or so. I also have a number of other projects in mind and various stages of completion. Stay tuned!

Lastly, I keep writing that I want to learn C#. Every few months I talk about it. Unfortunately I still haven’t managed to get past half way through the first chapter of the book I bought.

It’s even more unfortunate because for some reason I now get a phone call or email about every other day from somebody looking for a .NET developer. That tells me that learning C# will pay off like crazy (learning for the sake of learning aside) but I just can’t seem to find the time to focus on it. There’s just too much opportunity for paying work.

The point of all this is: I know I’ve been slacking on posts lately. It’s not because I’ve gotten lazy. Keep coming back and I’ll keep writing. Okay, nevermind, I’ll keep writing regardless.

Although it’s been put on the back burner many times over the last few months years, I’ve committed myself to learning .Net. After talking with quite a few people, I decided that C# would be my best bet.

So I bought myself a book and compiled a list of online resources. The next step would be the IDE. Visual Studio is anywhere between $500 and $2500 depending on the version. Ouch.

I don’t remember how but luckily I stumbled upon the Express area of Microsoft’s web site. As the name suggests, they offer Express (read free) versions of quite a few of Microsoft’s development products such as Visual Studio and SQL Server to name a few. While I’m not sure about SQL Server, the drawback of Visual Studio Express is that only one programming language is supported per version. I’m sure it’s short on other features as well but that seems to be the main difference. There isn’t anything preventing someone from downloading an Express edition for each of the programming languages they develop in but I imagine they’d quickly tire of switching back and forth and pony up for the commercial version which supports all of them under one IDE.

An added bonus (in addition to the free part) is that registering the product grants the developer access to another area of Microsoft’s site where you can download two dozen or so free icons from IconBuffet, about 250 royalty-free images from Corbis, and development related ebooks. Not a bad deal.

I imagine that as I get more into developing in C#, I’ll spend the big bucks for the commercial product. Until then, I intend to post here about my development progress and what I think about Visual C# Express.

Luckily I’ve only looked for a new job a few times in my life. When I did, I read everything there was to read about the topic. Some of it was good advice, some of it was truly terrible advice. There was one thing however that I read over and over again. My dad beat this into my head as well.

Toot your own horn! Nobody else is going to do it for you.

I think those were my dad’s exact words. Tooting my own horn isn’t something I’ve ever been very comfortable with. When I even think about it, my head fills with the faces of all the pretentious windbags I’ve known. I guess there’s a fine line between tooting and bragging and I prefer to err on the side of caution. Anyhow, that brings me to the point of this post.

Today The Student Loan Corporation held their quarterly employee recognition celebration and the web application I’ve written plays a big part in it. Because of all my hard work and the wonderful job I did on the application, I received two awards today.

The first is called The People’s Choice. This award requires approval at the Director level and was presented to me by Mike Reardon, CEO and Chairman of the Board. Only 7 other employees received this award this quarter. I was nominated by the project sponsor and here is the text of the award:

Mike came into our business at a critical time in our project. We gave him our requirements and an aggressive date for implementation. Mike reveiwed the BRD and developed a prototype for the team to review. As we went along some of our requirements changed and became more complex. Mike always remained calm and came back to the team with a quality product. This was all completed within our timeframe to implement. Mike has given 110% to getting Great Performances back up with all of the enhancements. Feedback from our users has been fantastic. They appreciate the ease in using the site and the new reporting functionality. It has been a pleasure working with Mike on Phase 1. I look forward to completing Phase 2.

The other award goes to teams whose projects have had a significant impact on the business and my teammates and myself received this award for our work on the employee recognition program.

Along with certificates and some financial appreciation comes company-wide fame. Not to bad for my first quarter at the company.

There’s no i in team however, so as long as I’m taking credit, I’d like to give some as well. Thanks to everybody on the team for volunteering their time and doing a wonderful job. Especially Jaime who’s attention to detail and organizational skills have kept us on track and JC for being so good at his job. His thorough requirements gathering has made my job easyier.

Now let’s talk about what I can do at your company:

• Get my contact information and resume

I’m no security zealot but I was definitely shocked today when I created an online learning account for work and received a confirmation email that contained my username, password, and detailed instructions on logging in (including the URL of the application). But my recognition application was required to be locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Heaven forbid some some Citibank emblazoned prizes fall into the wrong hands.