Elias Interactive

We Grow Beautiful Websites

Blog

Quote: The uncreative mind can…

· · Leave a Comment

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions. This is particularly important because of the nature of many corporation proposal-type documents.  I have both written and received a fair number of these myself, and I know that the real skill in writing them lies not in finding a solution to your problem, but in finding a problem to your solution… The skill lies in making it appear that [the solution proposal] are merely the inevitable steps toward the solution of a genuine and pressing problem that concerns the whole department or the whole company.

Source: Antony Jay, Management + Machiavelli

Key concept for those of you who are writing proposals: spend a little more time upfront framing the problem before jumping into the solution. The proposed solution should seem like a natural next step if the correct problem is understood and addressed.

Anyone have a great proposal example? I’ve been spending more time recently thinking about how to make this experience better for our clients at Elias while at the same time balancing demands of project management best practice and time constraints.

Lesson: Why Team Conflict is Good

· · 2 Comments

We recently met with a potential partner who is admittedly clueless about Magento development and has a project that keeps dragging on. He asked us to step in to help.  Being the sales guy that I am, I was ready to jump right in.  Being the responsible developer that he is, Lee was hesitant to even be a part of the discussion.  We both felt some rub with the approach.

The great part about healthy teams is that a foundation of trust and respect makes it easier for conflict to lead to a better outcome than any individual could arrive at on their own.  In our case, Lee’s concern slowed down the conversation and made for a very healthy reality check with the partner .  After a quick conversation with his client, the partner modified the project scope to something more realistic and asked us to throw together an estimate for it.  Not only will we create an immediate benefit for the partner by finishing the project and creating cashflow, we will also built a solid relationship with this partner who likes us and will most likely choose to work with us on future Magento stores.

I am convinced that this type of interaction would not have happened even 2 months ago.  This is the sort of trust and mutual respect that is developed over time.  If you are looking for this type of team to interact with for your Magento store, theme, customization, or module then we would be happy to speak with you.  Just drop us a message on this form and we’ll be in touch.

Integrate InLine Flash FLV Videos with JQuery "Lightbox" Plugin – FancyBox

· · 24 Comments

I recently spend some time integrating an existing Flash FLV video, from a third party, into an existing application using the JQuery “Mac-Style Lighbox” plugin, FancyBox. Within FancyBox, the existing FLV/JavaScript code provided to us worked properly on all browsers that I tested, with the usual exception, IE6. Upon further investigation, I found that it not only did not work on IE6, but IE7 and IE8 as well. While IE6 is to be expected, 7 and 8 were not.

The easy solution would have been to require the third party to re-export the video into a more usable format for our purposes. But I wanted to see what it would take to get the current code to work within our implementation.

I looked over some old code where I had integrated FLV video and found a simple difference. The provided code used JavaScript to embed the Flash object, similar to the following:

<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF(
'player.swf',
{file:'/video.flv',width:'407',height:'320'}
);
</script>

While this code worked fine when embedding the video directly into a page, it did not work in our FancyBox window when viewing with IE.

I am sure there are other solutions, but the quick solution I found was to simply embed the code in the standard Object/Embed method used to embed other video formats, rather than using JavaScript to embed the video file:

<object ...>
<embed
src="player.swf"width="407"
height="320"
wmode="transparent"
flashvars="file=video.flv&autostart=true"/>
</embed>
</object>

FancyBox is a very nice “lightbox” plugin for those using the JQuery library. If your FLV video is not working in IE with your lightbox implementation, try changing the way it is embedded into the page, it may just be as simple as that.

UPDATE:

Here is a little more elaboration on the code I used to get the flash working.

First, make sure you have the “custom.js” file created that makes the function calls for each lightbox that you want to use. In that file you will want a line that looks something like:


$("a.myvideo").fancybox({ params here ]);

Then in the page you want to call the video from, you will have a link that launches the video. Something like

<a class="myvideo" href="#divcontainingvideo">Link</a>.

Below that you will place the hidden <div> layer containing the actual embed source for the flash video.


<div style="display:none" id="divcontainingvideo">
<embed
src="path/to/sourcefile.swf"
width="400"
height="300"
wmode="transparent"
flashvars="file=path/to/sourcfile.flv&autostart=true"
/>
</div>

Blogging, 37Signals, The Food Network, and Magento

· · 5 Comments

I watched a 37signals video yesterday that challenged my thinking a bit.  Jason spoke on the benefits of sharing knowledge and experience in order to create an audience who will buy your stuff.  He likened this concept to the food network, where chefs show you how they cook and even provide the recipes.  Technically someone could take the recipes, go next door, and start a competing restaurant. The reality is that they don’t and the result is fantastic publicity for the chefs + entertainment for the viewer.

Too many businesses fear disclosing some piece of information which might give something away to the competition.  But what happens the next time a potential customer encounters a problem after figuring out the initial challenge which brought them to you in the first place?  By then they will look to you for help again as they get deeper into what they are trying to do.  To apply this to our blogging at Elias: I think we should post on our experiences – both Magento related and start-up in general.

The principle is to allow whatever you learned today to feed your creativity for blogging.  And don’t worry too much about the perfect post.  Most people only read the last couple of posts anyway, so if you feel like one entry isn’t great then you can simply cover it up with a few new posts.

And by the way, a great place to find blogging inspiration is your sent folder, which is where this post originated.