PixelMEDIA Inc.

Prior to the launch of the re-designed Mass Save website in 2010, a wide range of Massachusetts residential energy efficiency programs were spread out over six separate websites. The programs were sponsored by nine gas and electric utilities and energy services companies serving the state in conjunction with initiatives from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER). Through incentives and education, customers were encouraged to lower their overall energy consumption and, as a result, save money and reduce the demand for fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the environment.

The sponsors and DOER asked PixelMEDIA to consolidate the 6 separate websites into one site and to create a single branded user experience: Mass Save.

Success Factors

Mass Save’s strategic objective was straightforward: to encourage residents and businesses to be energy efficient through increased awareness and through direct energy-saving incentives offered by the Mass Save sponsors. PixelMEDIA identified three key project initiatives to achieve this goal: Read More…

Distracted driving has been called a “deadly epidemic” by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

According to the Department of Transportation, 5,500 people in the United States were killed and another half a million were injured in accidents related to distracted driving in 2009.

“It only takes a moment of distraction to cause a tragedy,” said Jim Guest, president of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “No text or call is worth a life.”

Now a Portsmouth, N.H.-based company has launched a mobile phone application that will let others know when someone is unavailable to text.

Download at www.bzzyapp.com

“Bzzy” is being offered as a free download in April during National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. Bzzy automatically responds to texts using either a pre-set or customized message.

Activate the application and incoming texters will be sent a response: “I am driving,” “I am viewing (a movie)” or a custom message.  All texts received are still available on the phone once the person is ready to respond.

“It’s about staying focused, on whatever you are doing, but especially on driving when your life and others on the road are at risk,” said Erik Dodier, CEO of PixelMEDIA. “Bzzy will remove the urgency we feel to reply back right away, and instead let those who are trying to reach us know we are unavailable.”

The goal is to allow people to focus on what they’re doing, whether it’s driving or even watching a movie or playing with their kids, without being distracted by texts.

“There’s something about a text that seems so instantaneous,” Dodier said. “But we all know there are times we should just let others know we’re temporarily unavailable.”

Dodier said 10 percent of any future proceeds from the product will be donated to efforts aimed at increasing the awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

Bzzy is currently available on Android phones only, however, PixelMEDIA  is looking at offering Bzzy for iPhones in the future.

“Take a step toward driving safer, download Bzzy for free through April 30^th at www.Bzzyapp.com,” Dodier said. “It will allow a driver’s focus to stay where it should be, on the road.”

For the majority of my career I’ve worked on and around e-commerce sites, and I’ve seen a broad range of database designs and site architectures. Within that broad range I’ve seen many good and bad practices, and one of the worst is to design an e-commerce site that can’t scale to meet the business’s future needs. These sites tend to be havens for odd bugs and are likely to become maintenance nightmares. Read More…

Will 2010 finally be the year that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) loses enough market share that developers no longer need to support it?  I know I speak for not only myself but for many of my developer colleagues when I say, “one can hope!”  IE6 will be 9 years old this year and yet there is still a column for it on our QA checklist.   Windows has come out with two newer (and better) browsers within the last 9 years that we also support; yet developers typically code for the most recent version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.  So why do we need to support a version of IE that in today’s technology space is equivalent to a fossil? Read More…

As new plugins become available to developers every day, jQuery is quickly becoming one of the most popular javascript libraries.  jQuery is an easy solution for interactive development and a remarkable alternative to traditional flash-based components.  In fact, the versatility of jQuery is truly astounding and in many ways, makes it a much better alternative to Flash. 

Although jQuery isn’t known to be the best solution for 3-D and vector-based graphics, there are several other areas in which jQuery out-performs Flash. Read More…

Last month, our Director of Engineering landed a few Google Wave invites and shared them with the team.  When I started playing with mine, I wasn’t even interested in talking with other people: I wanted to start playing with bots.  Google Wave is a terrific environment for bots and other automated tools, and with Google, they’re easy to code and deploy.

“Bot” is a term for any piece of software that can run tasks on the Internet.  Chatbots or chatterbots can carry on simple conversations or relay information to you; spyware bots can hack into your computer and plague your hard drive.  Used properly and legally, bots are convenient and helpful devices that can look up or process information for you.  Or they can just tell bad jokes. Read More…

This entry is a slightly updated re-post of an article found on my personal blog.

Recently we had a site that was getting ready to go live, hosted on a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 (IIS7). I won’t bore you with all the details of all the issues we worked through but we had one nasty issue that, as soon as it occurred it brought the server down; 100% CPU usage by the w3wp.exe process and memory usage steadily climbing. Our error logger was catching primarily one xml argument exception (but with a few variations).

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I was recently working on coding a design that included a simple type of faux select element. It was basically an unordered list that expanded and collapsed when you clicked a link. As it was styled similar to a select element, the JavaScript behaviors were similar as well. Clicking the link expanded the list underneath it, and you could then choose a link inside the list and navigate away from the page, or click the original link to close the list again.

The client, however, found this a bit confusing Read More…

At PixelMEDIA, we’re starting to see more of our clients inquiring about how to get started on the mobile web. I thought I’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned. These are five things to keep in mind when starting a new mobile project.

1) Decide which content to put on your mobile site

One of the first challenges when starting a new mobile project is deciding exactly what content to offer your mobile visitors. There are a few differing opinions in the industry right now; some people strongly believe in the One Web, while others believe that the experience should be re-shaped for the medium. This could mean a new website, new content, and a new information architecture as well as a design optimized for mobile.

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Recently, we had a situation that required us to pull in some content from one server to another using an iframe. Generally, this is something we would try to avoid, but we needed to pull some data from a new .NET application into a legacy ColdFusion application.

Unfortunately, the height of the page being pulled in would vary wildly. This led to a fairly disappointing experience where the page was either far too long, or content in the iframe was cut off and the user had to scroll within the iframe to see everything.

We came up with what we thought might be an interesting solution. If the page loading inside of the iframe (the child page) could calculate its height, and somehow let the parent page know, the parent page should be able to reset the height of the iframe.

Read More…