Due to the popularity of our post on how we helped the Association of Military Comptrollers with their awards program management, we decided to invest considerable resources and launch a stand-alone awards management application.  We just launched AwardsCMS - a one-stop platform to let associations collect submissions, coordinate with judges, and tabulate scores for their awards programs, scholarship programs, and grant offerings. AwardsCMS, backed by the vOfficeware development team, has the quality one would expect from a top grade app.  Between a drag and drop form builder, an intuitive web site, and a built in content management system, it is easy to see why most consider AwardsCMS best in class. Visit our product site today to see for yourself!

What the heck is this HTML5 business after all? As a team of web engineers I'm pretty embarrassed to say we could not truthfully answer this question. This week, I set out to put the question to rest once and for all, and in turn help educate the rest of the team. A special thanks goes out to Mark Pilgrim who wrote Dive into HTML5 which is available in at Amazon*. For those without the patience to view the slides, HTML5 is an ever evolving standard. It constitutes of many features which are supported in part or whole by new devices and web browsers. Those features make life easier for the developer while making the web more engaging. Introduction to HTML5 View more presentations from Kunal Johar. *We used Mark's Amazon referrer id -- so if you are going to buy the book use that link and he'll make a few extra nickels!

When I was about seven or eight years old, my grandfather gave me a math problem that took me many hours to solve. The problem is this: A movie theater made a total of 1 dollar (100 cents). The men cost 5 cents each, the women cost 2 cents each, and the children cost 1 cent for every 10 that were there. There were a total of 100 people in the movie theater. How many men were there? Women? Children? Read the problem carefully. There is only one solution to this problem. Now if you want to try and solve it, go ahead, before continuing on with the rest of this blog post. This problem has intrigued me ever since my grandfather challenged me many years ago. More specifically, I was curious to know if there is an algorithm that can solve this problem without trying every possible combination, or using some other brute force method. Regardless, I wrote a naive algorithm that solves it in O(n^3) time, which can be found here, written in Python. I then went to Reddit.com with my algorit

In the last couple of years, there has been a surge in popularity for what is known as NoSQL databases. NoSQL, also referred to as Schema-less or Document-based, is a scalable, flexible, and high performance database. Programmers have found that traditional, relational style databases such as MySQL may not be the optimal solution for many of today’s data storage challenges. In a NoSQL environment, data is stored as a “Document”. Documents are independent of each other, and contain any kind of information so long as it contains a primary key. There are no restrictions from document to document. Documents map one-to-one with associative data structures such as PHP arrays, Python dictionaries, and Ruby hashes. NoSQL scales “horizontally”, making it efficient and convenient to use in cloud and cluster environments. They are highly scalable and are apt for big data solutions. In MySQL, “Joins” are considered extremely slow, requiring the programmer to result in caching d

Websites that aggregate information is nothing new. Since the dawn of the internet thousands of sites make a living by compressing the vast resources the web has to offer. Recently a new website that assists with finding Washington DC hotels near the metro launched and caught our eye. The website follows the path of Google usability and design. There are not like me buttons, follow us on Twitter buttons, or really a variety of images. The bland design makes it easy to quickly identify hotels near DC metro stations and then read a summary about the hotel’s hundreds of online. The website also pays attention to putting together a checklist about every hotel’s internet connection, parking fees, what type of gym is available, if breakfast is served plus more. There are articles profiling the pros and cons to staying near certain metro stations. This site is a good usability case study for all websites because it identifies a problem, and then builds out a narrowly defined content

Our Non-profit Website Design team has done it again!  Often our clients have complained that "Pasting from Word" does not really happen nicely.  Tables get mangled, images get destroyed, and the whole process is just an ugly mess. Well - our new Paste from Word plugin fixes this calamity.  There is still no replacement for good XHTML/CSS coding, however this plugin should help save much of the hassle. Let us know what you think!

Our Nonprofit WordPress team has resolved a minor bug that has come up with the Simple Crumbs plugin.  Upgrading to WordPress 3.1 caused an issue where the Simple Crumbs plugin would stop working. Take a look and download an upgraded plugin: Simple Crumbs Invalid Header Fix