EdgeCloud

It’s interesting how the blogging world leads to a greater self examination, whether it be in what you have to say or how you say it. While twisting Nathan’s arm to start blogging it occurs to me what a difference pair blogging might make here. Nathan started out blogging using drupal as did I, but I’ve been using WordPress for a while as well now and have been blogging pretty solidly (politics, family, life) for a while now. The blog here though brings all that to a different level because now we can “pair blog”, bounce ideas and debate things. Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade have perfected this and we’re not nearly as wicked funny (unless you put a few rounds of Guinness in us) and I can barely do napkin driven design so don’t get me started on how awesome their art work is. Still, the community of ideas are where things are allowed to find themselves and in the midst of individuals who are passionate about their work (as well as the philosophical and psychological underpinnings) you have a situation where the beauty of creativity can thrive. Such is that which we are working to create with EdgeCloud.

And, as you can see Nathan is a nut. His passions extend beyond general computer geekery to mechanical geekery and even sail boating. I look forward to battling wits with him on and offline as EdgeCloud grows and, hopefully, succeeds. Game on!

And if you’re wondering what it is the heck we are doing (besides some general consulting work) then I hope you’ll grab our RSS feed and keep track of our progress as we work towards bringing our internal projects forward.

Addendum: As far as pair blogging or team blogging is concerned I don’t mean to leave out some of the great team blogging that’s going on out there (besides PA). The ThoughtWorks guys, for example, feed off each other very well. And Blue Flavor has a blog where each in their organization takes part. (And of course there are many more great ones out there!) The community aspect of blogging is intriguing, leading to more than a diary…it leads to a dialogue, debate and discovery.

Intuit’s Quickbooks Online Edition has become my most loved and most hated partner in this business. While I’m excited that OE provides a method by which each partner in the business can log in and see real time the current financial status of the company I’m frustrated by what I deem to be a lack of strategy for openness and a little bit of a “nickel and dime ‘em” theme going on.

Tonight, I decided to update the invoices that Quickbook generates for our customers. Luckily, there is a certain amount of flexibility in this. The big feature is the ability to attach your company logo to the invoice and align it as you see fit within the flow of the rest of the document. The problem with this is that there are no specifications whatsoever on how to accomplish this. Intuit’s only guidelines are that it doesn’t exceed 200k and that it be a common image file format. But nowhere does it specify or provide hints as to how it should be measured out so that it flows well with your invoice. I was simply reduced to trial and error. (Add to that the workflow process I had to use because I was photoshopping the file and getting it into my Windows XP install on my MacBook since QBOE only works on Windows/IE — but that’s another post). So there’s not much you can actually get out of this little feature. I’m wondering if my final rendering is even worth it. I might simply go back to plain text (less is more, right?). I’d like to take a fresh look at it again when I have a fresh mind but for now it’ll have to do.

With new projects I usually like to take some aspect of it and utilize a new resource, tool or strategy to implement it. This ensures that I’m able to get the job done and thoroughly review new items/ideas to see if I can integrate them into my usual practices. I recently started on a flyer and thought that I might use Apple’s Pages from it’s iWork ‘06 series. Luckily, a free trial comes with iLife ‘06 (which I just upgraded to) and so I decided to give it a spin. My short review: I don’t pull my hair out nearly as much with pages as I do with Word. And that’s saying a lot. There are plenty of times when Word is simply overkill for doing layout based writing vs content based writing and usually to the detriment (or hair) of the author. I’m not well versed in Quark or InDesign (yet) but I don’t necessarily need those for what I’m trying to achieve, which in this case is a simple flyer.

The templates presented to you on launch are rather nice and elegant but certainly didn’t fit my needs. I could see where they might fit nicely into a number of user categories and fill the needs of mosts but I wanted more control. Undaunted, I started with a blank template (gasp!). I guess the more difficult aspect of this was simply my not knowing how I wanted the flyer to really come out. I was an empty glass ready to be filled. Luckily, Pages is pretty easy to navigate and the controls to do things that you easily want to perform often (font changes, line-height and spacing, shapes, etc.) are readily available and there isn’t the endless insanity of menus and toolbars to rove through. I had no problem navigating any adjustments to my document. Granted, my document ends up being rather tame for a Pages doc but this is my first time out of the gate.

Now, the other aspect of this is the flyer itself. After a long day it’s terribly difficult to find the right words to express your marketing message in a clear and concise (and exciting!) manner. Even for the English degree (yours truly) it can be difficult. So the copy is still in flux but I’m ok with the design (though maybe more vibrant colors would be useful). I really wanted the logo to stand out in the flyer and I didn’t want to put in any stock photos (I’m anti-stock photo unless the marketing message is very clear) in there either. Check it out. Odds are this will change anyway as we start gravitating towards specific market segments. Time will tell.

This blog, hopefully, will serve as a means by which to share our experiences in forming EdgeCloud in the hopes of helping others. Already, I can tell you there is much to share and I am thankful to have learned so much in such a short time. I hope that our adventures here will be enlightening and that they will also provide some insight into who we are as a company and what our intentions are within the next few months. I’ll try to post some background information as well which should provide some context into why this company was founded, where we come from and why we should be the choice for your next project on the web.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. Please bookmark us or grab the feed and keep an eye on us. There are many great things yet to come.

Cheers.