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Google AdSense Adds Contrast

By Jonathan Dingman on October 13, 2011 Leave a Comment

Google’s AdSense product has offered a number of ways to design and customize ad units and styles over the years. Starting with strict HTML embeds of the colors and formats, then moving to a Google-hosted ad unit — allowing you to manage an unit on google.com/adsense.

Google is stepping up the game and allowing publishers to more effectively create ad units that will hopefully convert better — for both publishers and Google.

The ad unit customizer allows you to choose a contrast type, and then customize the colors based on the contrast.

WebdesignLedger.com has some further reading on The Principle of Contrast in Web Design.

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WordPress 3.3 Coming Soon

By Jonathan Dingman on October 12, 2011 Leave a Comment

WordPress 3.3 is coming soon and I couldn’t be anymore excited for it.

Here are a few of the key highlights:

  • Overhauled Menu System (now using floating menus)
  • Overhauled Media Uploader (finally!!)
  • Admin Tool Tips (this is great to help guide users)
  • A Cleaned-up Admin Toolbar

Here is what the new Media Uploader looks like.

Overall, I’m very impressed with what the WordPress team has put out and they are on-track for continuing to build the best open-source blogging and CMS platform available.

What do you love most about WordPress?

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Priceless Google Ad

By Jonathan Dingman on September 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

Today I looked at google.com and noticed a small link in the footer. It’s a link to a Google+ profile for Will.i.am.

But if you think about it, it’s not just a link, it’s really a promotion to help push Google+.

What do you think? Ad? Self-less promotion?

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Steve Jobs Resigns, Names Tim Cook CEO

By Jonathan Dingman on August 25, 2011 Leave a Comment

Today, something very big happened. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, resigned. He has an amazing 35-year career and made some of the most innovative things of today’s world. Tim Cook has been named the now-acting CEO.

I openly admit that I used to be anti-Apple, but in 2007 that all changed. I was given the opportunity to use my first Mac and my life was changed forever. I am now an iPhone-carrying, Macbook Pro using, Macbook Air owning, Apple fanboy.

So much of what I use today has been hand crafted by this man and the world owes so much to him.

Thank you Steve, you’ve been a true example to all of us on how to innovate.

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Awesome Bug Tracking and Project Management

By Jonathan Dingman on August 4, 2011 2 Comments

Over the past five years, I’ve used a number of different bug tracking and project management systems for various projects. Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, Redmine, and now JIRA.

Bugzilla was complex to initially setup and felt a bit clunky while using it, so we didn’t use it for very long. We tried Mantis and it just didn’t have the chops to get it done [for our needs.] Trac is a great application. It’s great for bug tracking, but not that great for project management. It leaves a lot to be desired from a project management point of view. Redmine is also a great application, but again, lacking in the project management side of things.

Hello JIRA.

(pronounced JEEra or jee-rah)

JIRA, by Atlassian, is an amazing application.

Product planning for the future should be part of any company that has a roadmap beyond their current project. As a Product Manager, I’m constantly coming up with ideas and often, they don’t fit into the current sprint of development (in an agile development environment). So where do those ideas go? Create them as tickets and plan them into future product releases.

A release could be next month or next year, it doesn’t matter — it just matters that you’re able to get the ideas down and then plan them later on.

After using the previous bug tracking applications I listed, one thing I noticed about all of them (except JIRA), is that they are very static. Very black and white when it comes to the user interface. One thing that JIRA does a really good job of is not forcing you to refresh the page on every action. While this may seem like a small feature, having an AJAX-like interface, it provides a much more fluid experience when using the application.

One thing I would really like to see JIRA include in future releases is a better way to plan roadmaps for future sprints by theme. For example, if we’re working on the “Maps” project in August and then “Mobile” in September. Right now, there’s no way to really plan by theme, but hopefully they will add that in the near future.

Overall, having used JIRA for the past six months, I’ve been very happy with it. That’s not to say it’s the perfect solution, it certainly has some features which are lacking that I need. But to date, JIRA has solved many problems which other applications couldn’t.

But what about you? What do you use for project management and/or bug tracking? And what have you found to be useful in terms of features?

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