VigeWeekly: We Can’t Stop Talking

We were super busy this past week in our blogs and in the DC scene, too, when we visited Refresh and Tech Cocktail 2 last week.  Plus, we all headed to a ranch -- which included horses, jeeps, and skeet shooting -- to celebrate Viget's birthday last Friday.

Now we're taking a breath just long enough to recap the week in blogs.

VigetAdvance (Strategy)

Kara reviewed several non-profit Facebook applications that allow users to contribute to various charities online in her post, Pennies From Heaven. Then, Steph pulled back the curtain on how we generate personas to guide a web project's development, plus how we'd undergo the same process with unlimited budgets and schedules (wouldn't those be nice!). Finally, Kevin remarked on Launchbox's Sean Greene's comment at RefreshDC that innovating to dramatically improve upon a product is a best bet for success. KV argues otherwise by citing several incremental improvement success stories in his post, "Do You Need to Change the Game to be Successful?"

VigetInspire (Design)

Doug gave Inspire blog readers a window into how we built the new Viget.com in Expression Engine, in this Part I of a series detailing the project. Just like sharing our code helps to facilitate learning internally and externally, I love seeing posts like this about our process that accomplish the same thing.

VigetExtend (Development)

Clinton gave us insight on integrating Git with SVN -- something our developers have been doing here lately -- including tips and tricks they've learned along the way.  Mark reviews Passenger, which was released this month purporting to make Rails application deployments easier than ever.  After remedying a hiccup, he concludes that it works as advertised, but more investigation (and future posts) are coming.  Check out SP's post if you need to maintain lookup data in your Rails application -- something he just re-released as a gem to address.  Later, in "I Have a Pull Request on GitHub, Now What?" Pat describes a scenario -- and a solution -- to the understandably lacking "automatically-pull-and-merge" functionality of GitHub.

VigetEngage (Marketing)

In "CNN Proudly Works with Fans to Promote MSNBC," Ryan praises CNN for attempting to connect to its audience but highlights a fatal flaw -- giving users open access to create content that *might* not be so supportive of the brand.  Later, inspired by feedback on his convergence of product and marketing post, he details how brand experiences called "packets" are creating more tangible user experiences in the online marketing realm today.  Josh discussed how Facebook is making another big push thanks to its recently published whitepaper on how to best leverage its applications and by adding a new chat feature.  Finally, he reviews a new Greasemonkey script released by Juice Analytics that gives some detailed segmentation data in Google Analytics; spoiler alert: he loves it.

Thanks to everyone for a great week of conversation in our blogs and out on the town.