Web Development and Technology Blog

Senator Jack Johnson, Tennessee State Senate District 23, is a client of Majority Strategies, aka “my day job”, and we have launched a new version of his campaign web site.

Jack Johnson Web Site Header

Currently, the Tennessee legislature is in session, and Senator Johnson is using the site to keep his constituents informed on the news from the session, his schedule and committee meetings, as well as, solicite feedback from them.  Senator Johnson has also started to Twitter and you can reach his account from the site.

Senator Johnson is up for election in November , 2010 and will continue to use the site as a valuable communications venue to speak directly to the voters in his district.

We have some amazingly talented designers and the site looks incredible. On the back-end it has a custom content management system to easily allow the Senator and his staff to add events, news release and any other information; manage volunteers and send email to his email list.

I look forward to working with candidates around the nation to help them improve their web presence so they can communicate directly with voters.

Feel free to use my contact form if you are interested in getting more info on me or Majority Strategies.

It always seems that maintaining and updating your own personal site is the hardest and most neglected. Ironic, considereing you contastantly tell clients that fresh, relevant content is the most important thing to keep visitors returning and improving search results. However, since I don’t pay myself, paying customers always come first.

So as I was looking at my site to get it up-to-date, adding my new job and such, I realized that I needed to add links to all my social networks. Previously, I only had a link to MySpace, which my wife and kids use. At the time I created that, I never thought I would have so many accounts littered all over the place.

I tried at one point to keep them separate, so that Facebook only had personal friends and LinkedIn had colleagues, but that didn’t work as planned, as some personal friends only had LinkedIn and some colleagues only had Facebook, so I ended up with duplicates. In addition, I now Twitter a fair amount so I am following a cross-section of people there. And finally I am using FriendFeed to aggregate some of the data (you know, because Scoble says everyone will leave Twitter and go to FriendFeed, so hate to be left behind :-p). This is only the tip of the iceberg when you think about all the private social networks going up, I know I belong to one for Red Jumpsuit Apparatus powered by Ning among others.

I think it is a big mess.

I know from each company’s perspective they need the traffic and users to get advertising to keep the platform free, but from the users perspective it is a nightmare to keep up with it all. I hope that Facebook Connect and the Google Friend Connect and the like are a step in the right direction. I think we need interoperability and we need to be able to control our own data. If I want my friends to follow me to Plaxo and FriendFeed and back to Facebook, they are my friends, I should have the options for what info gets shared and by whom and to where. Of course, it will take it a while to iron it all out, but till then feel free to add me/contact me, wherever you find me.

As I recently Twittered, I am excitedly back into doing some web development. Currently, it is a final re-launch of the Pearson Funeral Home web site, that basically was designed 2 years ago, but never got launched, so now I am re-writing the code for it to be more secure and have more functionality, as I have learned a lot in the past 2 years.

Anyway, since Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is out, I thought I would try the trial and see if I thought it was worth the upgrade. The last version I bought was Studio 8 when it was still Macromedia. I hadn’t seen anything big in CS2 and/or CS3 to push me to upgrade the studio, other than the post-merger integration of Fireworks and PhotoShop…but that is another topic.

However, being a Dreamweaver user since version 2, in like 1997?, I wanted to give CS4 a try and see what they had added to make the case to upgrade.

The biggest improvements I wanted to see were better performance, better PHP code completion, CSS suggestion and I wanted to see how the Live View feature would work.

My basis of comparision, besides Dreamweaver 8, was Aptana, that I have been using inside Eclipse. It is NOT WYSIWIG, but has functioned well for code generation, and has a great price point..FREE!