604media blog

We get a lot of calls from clients about the Rich Text Editor we use in our Custom CMS admin area. We’ve stripped down the TinyMCE buttons and options to what we think are the most important, and still there are lots! It can be hard to know what is what.. So here is a visual glossary and explanation of the TinyMCE buttons and plugins, and what they all do! Enjoy:

Here is a link to the Moxiecode site Wiki, with a full list of possible buttons and plugins:

http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Control_reference

While this isn’t necessarily design related, the speakers in our office are in constant use, playing every type and genre of music out there, so I feel it is appropriate to write a music-related post. The following is a list of my top ten songs of all time and with it, a glimpse into the musical taste of Tim Kraumanis. I make no apologies for my taste in music, it is what it is: very eclectic and random!

10. Hung Up – Madonna
9. Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
8. When The Night Feels My Song – Bedouin Soundclash
7. Baba O’Riley – The Who
6. Life – Our Lady Peace
5. Home for a Rest – Spirit of the West
4. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
3. Crush – Dave Matthews Band
2. Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey
1. The General - Dispatch

Click the arrows next to the volume control to watch in full screen!

This video tutorial walks through the process of creating a new email newsletter campaign, selecting the template, and editing the newsetter template using the simple newsletter CMS. Once you’ve entered your content, this tutorial takes you through the basic steps to send out.

In the design is series, I will release wallpapers for your desktop that reflect my ever-changing personal view of the web design community.

In this first release, I chose a topic that has been on my mind lately: originality in modern web design. Is there such thing as original and/or unique design anymore, or is all design recycled from history?

Hope you like it.

1024×768 | 1280×1024 | 1440×900 | 1600×1200

Well it has now been 2 years since we launched our Canadian based web hosting service and I am amazed with the feedback we have received.  Our clients have been extremely happy with the value we offer and the service levels we provide. Our practice for shared hosting is not to overload our servers to ensure the best overall performance. All of our shared hosting packages can be found here.

We offer a number of dedicated server packages which will meet the demands of any SMB. In addition to the packages we offer, we provide custom server configurations (contact us). This month we announced single and dual Xeon server packages (found here), which is an optimal server for load intensive application.

jQuery accordions are a dime a dozen these days; there are dozens of them floating around the jQuery plugin repository, each with its own specialized functionality and purpose. A few projects ago, I was looking for a basic accordion plugin but could not find one simple and lightweight enough to suit the project, so I decided to write my own. It was my perfect foray into jQuery plugins, as the functionality is simple and basic and allowed me to focus on learning how to effectively write plugins.

We have continued to use jQuery.yaa (yet-another-accordion) in most of our projects due to it’s light weight and simple functionality. It functions as a basic accordion menu, and nothing more. I may expand on it later depending on the needs of future projects, but for now, here is jQuery.yaa:

http://604media.com/604js/

With the long awaited launch of osCommerce 3.0, the 604 team has just released the first of many contributions. A robust newsletter management tool these days is very important to measure your penetration rate and to deliver quality, inviting newsletters. Having used a number of different tools, we feel that Campaign Monitor has the best mix of value for dollar for the SMB market.

The developed modifications are simple in nature, but allow for Campaign Monitor integration nonetheless.

You can download this contribution here

Please give us your feedback.

604media has to give a shout out to “activeCollab”, a new project management and collaboration tool we installed in December 2008. We noticed the benefits immediately and I’m sure our clients will agree. Within weeks everyone was fluent in using this new tool.

Who is activeCollab?

activeCollab was developed by a small company, such as ourselves, called a51 development located in Novi Sad, Serbia. There is a lively community using and supporting this product which is no surprise since activeCollab has proven to be extremely useful,  providing essential features in a concise and easy to use format.

Congrats to the a51 team o the well deserved success.

Why did we chose activeCollab?

We looked at a selection of PM tools including: PHProjekt, dotProject and Basecamp. Here is why our research pointed us to activeCollab. For starters we needed a web based portal, without a monthly fee, that could be installed on our own server. This narrowed the field down to three choices: knocking off “Basecamp” which is hosted.

One of our company goals is to support and promote the open source community that is our bread and butter. As such the PHP/MySQL support in activeCollab was a big plus. 604media prefers to maintain control of its essential tools and data so, unlike some of the competition. activeCollab gives us complete control of the source code and a flexible license to develop extensions and modules. On top of this activeCollab takes advantage of the latest technologies to deliver a better interface.

As a must-read in the web design community, Smashing Magazine is a great collection design inspiration, how-to’s, best practices and code examples. Written by a pool of web designers and developers from many different locations and backgrounds, it is a comprehensive resource for web design which I peruse on a regular basis.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

This is pretty crazy.. While it is obviously in prototype phase, the ideas and already existing functionality of this gets the imagination buzzing.