The ideal candidate will be located in the San Diego area, although working onsite is not a requirement (we occasionally have events and/or meetings in San Diego).

Required Skills

• 3-5 years experience building customer-facing web applications
• At least 1-2 years experience with Ruby on Rails
• Proficiency w/ MySQL
• Comfortable w/ DB administration/optimization
• Fluent in Unix environments
• Experience working with XHTML/CSS/Javascript at an intermediate level
• Must have a “test first and frequently” mentality.

Desired Skills

• Interest in and/or some experience with Merb
• Experience with rSpec
• Experience working with XHTML/CSS/Javascript at an advanced level

Get in Touch

If you know your blocks from your procs, and would like to join the team, send your resume as well as any relevant work experience you want to show off to chris@integralimpressions.com. If you’re more the project manager type, be sure to check out Matt’s call for a Rock Star PM to join the team.

About the position

We are seeking a Project Manager with experience managing websites and web applications, facilitating client communications, and managing the development schedules.

The ideal candidate should have the following expertise:

• Experience managing small and large projects to completion.
• Organized and detail oriented.
• Experience with Basecamp project management software a plus
• Familiar with Use Case Scenarios, Creative and Functional Briefs
• Experience leading a team. You need to be able to drive projects to completion working directly with the developers, designers, and high level executives. The deadlines are aggressive and the job needs to be done on time no matter what.
• Minimum 2 years of relevant work experience.

This is an exciting job for a highly motivated and extremely sharp individual. Compensation is competitive including potential stock options.

To apply, send a resume and introduction letter to matt[@]integralimpressions.com. In the subject line, please include: Project Manager.

Since the end of last week, Bill and I have been working on finalizing our schedule. We’ve got all the major and minor milestones laid out, due dates assigned, and responsibilities delegated. We’re double-checking to make sure everyone involved can commit to the schedule. However, it’ll likely change very little if at all. Here it is:

Production Schedule

Looking for a logo

On Friday, I met with Bill and Chris Decatur to go over some initial concepts for our new logo. Chris is one of digital telepathy’s designers, and put together some initial concepts for our the meeting.

• Logo Concepts – Page 1
• Logo Concepts – Page 2

As we went over the concepts, there were two I gravitated towards and felt had real potential.

The Magnet

The magnet concept really played on the idea of us “pulling in” social content. I loved the concept here since this really illustrates the core of what we’re looking to do. Not only that, but using a magnet gives us some really strong direction for the rest of our creative, both visually and in terms of marketing copy.

The biggest thing I want to work on with this one is simplifying it. Logo design is often about taking a complex, or abstract concept and simplifying it visually. The trick is to do this without losing the ability to recognize the initial idea. Chris did a great job with this so far, but we just need to push it a bit further.

The other concern that I had was making sure we didn’t venture too close to Unison’s logo. Especially considering the guys over at Panic love to call out people who can’t seem to come up with their own ideas. I don’t think we have anything to worry about though. To be honest, Bill and Chris didn’t even know what Unison was until I took them to the website.

“The Squiggle”

I wasn’t really called “The Squiggle”. I just needed something short to use for a heading. Just to be clear, this is the concept exploration done in the bottom right of the first page.

What I liked about this direction was the simplicty. I love simplicity, I really do. I felt this mark was elegant, yet bold. What it was lacking was a strong story. It needed a reason other than just being simple for the sake of being simple. The whole “let’s combine the initials of the company” thing is straightforward and common. (Yes, I do know what you’re thinking right now. No, I’m not saying its wrong. Let’s just move on…) However, the act of bringing together, or combining, the “P” and “S” does actually tie in with what we do quite well. I want to see if we can push that angle more with this one and make it a little more apparent.

What do you think?

I put some of my initial feedback out there for a couple reasons. First of all, I think that by hearing my own feedback, it’ll give you some insight into our thought processes around these concepts, and allow you to understand them more than you would if you were to just see them on your screen. I can’t repeat everything we discussed (not that there were any secrets, I just don’t have the time), but hopefully I’ve hit the important points.

Secondly, I want to get the conversation started. We want to hear what you think about the direction we’re going. I think its rare to see these early stages of the design process exposed in this way, but I’d rather hear your opinions now. A couple months from now (or maybe even a couple weeks from now), we’ll be too far along to easily react and adapt to feedback, suggestions, etc. Good or bad, bring it!

Disclaimer: First of all, I’m not going to do this very often, or else I’d be attaching a disclaimer to almost every post I do. In fact, I’ll probably only say this once, so pay attention. Our goal is to share as much as possible with you, unfiltered. This means you’ll see things that are rough, and unfinished. Some of it may not make sense. Some of it may be flat out wrong (Yes, we do get things wrong from time to time. We are also allowed to change our minds on occasion). With any luck, it won’t all just be noise and you’ll actually get something out of it. If you have something to say about it, please do so. That’s the whole idea.

I’m going to walk you through our thought processes, and show you some of the documents we’ve been using to push us forward.

Brand Platform Worksheet

A friend of ours at a traditional PR firm gave us a document they typically work through when coming up with a new brand. Most of it was a bit excessive for our needs, but there were a few questions we answered which really helped us get a clear picture of sort of personality we were after.

Here’s that document.

The document itself is pretty short, but the conversation behind it was heated and lengthy. We gave names to a couple concepts in there that are core to our company. Primarily those are “social content,” and “extreme transparency.” Each one is really its own post, so I’ll need to elaborate on those in the very near future. In the meantime, know that they’re there and just roll with it.

Brand Questionnaire

Bill Bonnefil, from digital telepathy gave us his own version of a brand questionnaire. This one was a little more relevant, and helped us elaborate on some of our initial ideas on concepts.

Here’s Bill’s questionnaire

At the end of all this, Matt and I felt we had a pretty good mental image of our new brand. To test that theory, we jointly came up with an answer to a pretty simple question: “What do you do?” More specifically, we wanted a 10-words-or-less response. Articulating this clearly and concisely was actually a lot more difficult than we thought it would be, but we think we have a pretty good answer for you:

We build websites that favor social content.

We felt pretty good about that, and decided we could move on to the actual name.

Namestorming

Over the past week, Matt and I had independently put together some word lists (those of you that follow @cabad @chrisabad or @mattsurfs probably know this already). This morning we combined our lists, and looked them over to see what we could pull out.

This is our namestorming document

For the most part, this is unorganized chicken-scratch. We worked on this document collaboratively, in real-time, using Google Docs. I considered cleaning it up so you could understand it better, but ultimately decided against it. Showing you the original document gives you a more “raw” view of our process. It’s also less work for me.

This document consists of words that describe the brand’s attitude, the actual services we will offer, and also some industry terminology mixed in for good measure. At the end of it all, here’s the list of potential candidates we had:

• ClearlyWeb
• ClearlyContent
• TransparentWeb
• FranklyVisible
• ClearFavor
• FavorClear
• OpenFavor
• FavorFrank
• NakedFavor
• FavorNaked
• FavorFrank
• FavorVisibility
• Transvisibility
• Clearly – Media / Group / etc
• Exposed Impressions
• Open Impressions
• FavorOpen
• Open Kimono
• Glasshouse Media
• Uppenbar
• Open Tag
• ContentClearly
• Vizable
• Open Ideas
• Open Concepts
• Clearly Media
• ClearlyVisible
• TagClearly
• ClearlyTech
• Visible Type
• Transparent Type
• ClearlyContext
• Clearly Styled
• VisibleNature
• ClearNature
• OpenNature
• ExposedNature
• ClearWire
• WireClearly
• ClearlyType
• TransparentType

Community and Peer Feedback

Our next step is to take these initial ideas and look for some feedback. We’ll be taking these documents to our peers directly to see what they think, but we also encourage all of you to send us feedback in the comments below (if you’re shy, you can send them directly to me at chris[at]integralimpressions[dot]com). We want to know if any of our ideas stand out for you, but we’re also open to brand new ideas not on our list. We believe that by involving a diverse group of people in the process, we’ll hear ideas that we never would have thought of… and that excites us!

We’ve received great feedback so far, as well as fantastic support from some awesome people. Please keep it coming.

GAE comes complete with auto-app-versioning, your choice of runtime environment (Python only for now, but they say there’s more coming) and automatic scaling. In fact, GAE lets us forget all about scaling and reliability: it just works. And that’s the future: complete platforms, not ad-hoc components. Google has definitely hit the nail on the head with GAE and I can’t wait until it’s out of beta. Stay tuned for more on GAE soon.

What’s more, we’ve decided to publish the whole thing out there for all to see. That’s right, we’ve been inspired by some of Ryan Carson’s efforts and decided we love the idea of sharing with the world. That’s what this Internet thing is all about, right? Between blog posts, Tweets, photos, video, and audio, we want to get as much of it out there as possible.

We like to believe there are other people out there who want to see what goes on at a tiny company like ours, behind closed doors. Well, the doors are closed no longer! We’re willing to share our processes with the community. You’ll see our successes as well as our set-backs. What do we want in return? We want active participation and community feedback. We’ll take it all, the acclaims and critiques alike. Whether you want to set us straight, or give us a high five, we want to hear about it.

Why are we doing it?

So why would we do such a crazy thing? We’ve been around for almost 4 years and feel we’ve got a pretty good thing going here. So why throw it all away? First of all, let’s get one thing straight: we’re not just throwing everything away. The best of what we’ve built up we’re keeping around.

The main motivation behind this re-brand is really to give synergy and cohesiveness to the lessons we’ve learned, the theories we’ve formed, and the tools we’ve built over the past few years. We want to take all that, wrap it up in a neat package, and say, “There you have it. This is us.” It’s not about starting over. Its about evolving and refining. We want to create “us, 2.0.”

Something else I’ll point out is that it’s important we not only do this ourselves, but we do it publicly. I don’t want to say much more about that just yet. We will keep as few secrets as possible, but this is one of them. We need to save something for the big “unveiling” at the end. All I can say is, if you enjoy following us on this little adventure, you’ll love some of the announcements we’ll be making once its all said and done.

One other benefit we hope to get out of a public process is accountability. When you’re at a company as small as us, there isn’t a whole lot of “responsibility overlap.” Often times the only person you’re accountable to is yourself. While that’s usually enough for us, there’s something to be said for knowing you have to explain yourself to other people. Rather than having a big company with big expensive meetings in a big expensive conference room, we choose this. We want you to be our ad-hoc team members, and the Internet our conference room.

So What’s Next?

We officially kicked this all off on Friday, so the wheels are already in motion. We’ve also decided we’re going to do this whole thing in 90 days (we feel sleep’s overrated anyways). Considering everything we’re looking to accomplish, we feel a 90-day process is a pretty tall order for a tiny company like us (we do still have client work to keep up on), so we’ve asked our good friends over at digital-telepathy to assist us. They’ve got a really sharp group of people over there, and we think they’ll give us some great feedback along the way.

There are other related tasks behind this (sales, marketing, technology, etc.), but we’re going to allow the creative/branding elements to drive the schedule since this is the area we feel we have the most ground to cover (although we do intend to publish about everything):

• New company name – 2 weeks
• Revised brand identity (including new service offering) – 3 weeks
• Overhaul our online communication platform (i.e. redo the website) – 8 weeks

This is a very high-level overview just to give you an idea of what direction we’re headed and how fast we’ll be running there. We’ll likely publish more granular milestones as we get into it.

We’re Off, and We Want to Take You With Us!

Here we go. We’re not 100% how this is going to work out, but that’s part of the fun right? I can tell you we’re all extremely motivated here, and we’ve got a network of awesome people who are equally excited for us. Those things put together make for an interesting ride at the very least.

As I said earlier, the main thing we’re looking for is community involvement. We’re willing to step outside of a “normal comfort zone” and tell it all. In exchange, we want to hear what you think. Feel free to start right now and comment below.

If you want to stay updated on events along the way, be sure to subscribe to our blog. For more up-to-the minute updates on what we’re up to, follow me, Matt, and Ben on Twitter. Thanks for joining us on this exciting adventure, and wish us luck!

We’d like to get to know you, your business, and shine the spotlight on your latest product or service. Please connect with us before any of these events to schedule an opportunity to talk and get your business some well-deserved free exposure.

The three events we are attending in April are:

PopCrunch2008 – TechCrunch meets PopSugar Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008 Time: 6:30 pm – midnight Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood Tag: PopCrunch2008

Ad:Tech (sf) Dates Attending: 4/16 – 4/17 Time: All day Venue: Moscone Center Tag: adtechSF2008

Web 2.0 Show (sf) Dates Attending: 4/23 – 4/25 Time: All day Venue: Moscone Center Tag: web20sf2008

Some of the tweeps I’ve already scheduled interviews with include:
@jpostman
@americancliche
@arielwaldman

You should follow them, if you are not already. Please @ me on twitter if you’d like to meet up.

There are pictures of the event compliments of @viss and an official Happy Hour 2.0 recap post on MattBrowne.com.

The next event we are hosting is on March 24th, Tuesday for local Bloggers.

For future events, your best bet is to join this Facebook group. You can also check out SDBloggers.com for our monthly blogger meetup. ]]> Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:50:00 -0700 http://integralimpressions.com/sdhappyhour20 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=integralthoughts&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fintegralimpressions.com%2Fsdhappyhour20http://integralimpressions.com/sdhappyhour20 http://feeds.integralimpressions.com/~r/integralthoughts/~3/250775307/happyhour20 We’re taking the San Diego Web 2.0 meet ups to a whole new level this month! Introducing Happy Hour 2.0 – the Web 2.0 community’s mixer. Come join us for cocktails, apps (edible & digital) and networking with some of the brightest in the industry. Hosted by Integral Impressions and digital-telepathy, Happy Hour 2.0 will fuse the geek and party animal in you and give you a reason to be proud of being a part of the San Diego Web 2.0 family. Open bar starts at 7pm on March 19 at Modus Supper Club in Bankers Hill.

About digital-telepathy:

digital-telepathy, Inc. designs online businesses and partners with maverick companies and startups that have remarkable ideas. The combination of tools and principles of Web 2.0 with Internet and business strategy is how dt turns those ideas into real opportunities. By taking advantage of these unique opportunities, dt is able to create and execute profitable business plans and strategies.

“Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology.”

If you are in Austin, give us a shout on Twitter – @mattsurfs & @cabad – we look forward to meeting you.

Thanks to all the San Diego Bloggers that came out and helped make our MeetUp the best yet! We had 20 bloggers get together at Cafe Bassam yesterday for a little caffeine, wine, and conversation.

The location wasn’t conducive to presenting or speaking, as a result we mingled, talked amongst ourselves, and conducted some good ol’ fashion networking.

The purpose of the SD Blogger MeetUp is move the conversation happening online, to a social setting, where people can converse in person. We are all that much more likely to link exchange links, comment on posts, and support each other by ‘putting a face (and personality) with a blog’.

It was a pleasure to meet everyone last night. Again, thank you for your attendance. The next Blogger MeetUp is going to be March 25th, Tuesday at 7pm. The location is set for Cafe Bassam (as of right now), but that might change as the event approaches.

Your feedback is important to me- positive or negative- I welcome your help in creating an invaluable event for local Bloggers. Geoff, Jenn and Carole both took time to review the event on their blogs; special thanks!

If you missed the event last night, here are some of the local bloggers in attendance:

Tony Balsamo
Richie Edquid
Eric Bidwell
Luke Pilon
Jessica McKimmie
Kris Berg
Jennifer Van Grove
Geoff Young
Dan Melson
Deb Anderson
Carole Lane
David Matt Green
Patrick Crowley
Ed O’Connor
Erin O’Connor
Enrique Gutierrez
Dan Tentler
Matt Browne
Gabriel Lawrence
Arlene Doria

We hope to see everyone next month! Our community grows stronger by linking and commenting. Please do your part.

Best,

Matt Browne

One of our first supporters, 37 Signals mentioned Nourish in Signal vs. Noise and the Basecamp product blog. We were also pleased to find ourselves mentioned on Emily Chang’s eHub as well as on Killer Startups. RSS Ray, an Internet radio show with a focus on RSS marketing featured Nourish in an interview with founders Matt Browne and Chris Abad in a recent broadcast. Nourish also received a plug from Smashing Design Magazine in an article on user interface best practices. And of course a special thanks goes out to digital-telepathy for promoting Nourish on it’s blog and throughout their network.

Of the 1,000 users already signed up and making use of Nourish, Homegain Real Estate Blog has already made Nourish an essential part of their marketing strategy . When asked if they would recommend Nourish to other marketers, Jessica, Homegain’s Marketing Communications Manager replied, “Definitely, it eases tasks that I used to have to do manually and lightens my personal work load. It’s automated, done well, has customized functionality, and lets the visitors subscribe to the newsletter.”

With the future of RSS to email communication bright (NBC recently purchased competitor SendMeRSS.com, formerly Rmail), Nourish is poised to be an industry leader in connecting RSS publishers to readers with unprecedented accessibility. Integral Impressions co-founder Chris Abad speculated, “Nourish will be widely known as the quickest and easiest way for bloggers to provide an email newsletter to their readers. It will be the popular standard in the industry for converting an RSS to email.”

In the coming months, as we continue to build on Nourish and expand its possibilities, we hope that we will continue to see the amount of support and enthusiasm we’ve enjoyed with its launch. To that end- you can follow the latest news on Nourish by following our Twitter site.

“v=spf1 include:nouri.sh ?all”

Need more information? There’s an SPF creating wizard here and a rather technical syntax overview here.

If all this technical talk has you bewildered we’re available for consulting, or you can ask in the forum.

UPDATE: we altered the headers in the mailings we send, and there’s now no need for you to add your own SPF records. Mail servers will now just look to make sure that the mail is sent via nouri.sh, and SPF and DomainKeys will always pass.

We also have been reviewed by Smashing Magazine for the Nourish UI design. Check it out

Thanks dt

There is something quick and simple you can do on your end to instantly decrease the likelihood that your email will arrive to your recipient as SPAM. You can setup an SPF Record on any domain you use to send email from, and allow our server smtp1.nouri.sh.

Without getting into all the technical details, you’re basically telling the rest of the Internet that it’s okay for email from your domain to be sent out by our servers.

I quick wizard can be found here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

UPDATE: we altered the headers in the mailings we send, and there’s now no need for you to add your own SPF records. Mail servers will now just look to make sure that the mail is sent via nouri.sh, and SPF and DomainKeys will always pass.

• Negligible overhead. All OpenVZ virtual servers share the same kernel. This makes for such little overhead that it goes unnoticed.
• Flexible resource allocation. We can share resources among our virtual servers much more flexibly than we could with Xen. For example, our Level 3 hosting plan has 1GB RAM. But we don’t really cap it at 1GB, that’s just what we guarantee. In reality, we’re fine with a customer’s virtual server temporarily using more than that. If it becomes permanent, we’ll just ask them to upgrade. Our servers have a ton of RAM, and there’s always GBs to spare, so no sense in letting them go to waste. If we were using Xen, we’d have to cap the customer at 1GB and they’d need to upgrade to increase that, even if only temporarily. The same deal applies to CPU and disk space.
• Extremely quick upgrades and downgrades. We can upgrade or downgrade a customer’s resources in a matter of seconds and usually with zero downtime. How’s that for cool. Even disk quota’s can be altered in seconds – something that’s usually a painful operation with Xen.
• Stability. OpenVZ is the core of a commercial product, Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo has been through several years of production usage, and it’s rock-solid. We’ve not had a single problem with OpenVZ. What’s more, should we ever need commercial support we can always contact Virtuozzo.
• Performance. I can’t provide you with any benchmarks right now, but compared to some of the Xen solutions we’ve used in the past, OpenVZ seems a lot faster. Read into that what you will, but that’s our experience.

If you’ve also used both OpenVZ and Xen, I’d love to hear your experiences. What made the most sense for you? Why?

To get the most out of the filter you need to train it. When using Ticketish, you’ll see some new items in the drop-down for managing multiple tickets: Spam and Train Not Spam. Start by selecting a whole group of tickets that aren’t spam, and train them so. Then, make sure you mark all spam tickets as spam instead of just deleting them. Over time, Ticketish will become very accurate at determining what’s spam and what’s ham.

Every Ticketish account is trained separately. This is important because what’s spam for some might be ham for others. All accounts start with a clean slate, so it’s up to you to train appropriately. We’ve developed the spam filter as a RESTful web service, so expect to see it pop up in our other applications as well.