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Choosing Fonts for the Web

Typography is a huge and critical component of the Web. So what do you need to know about web fonts for your site? Designer Michellanne Li goes into the details.
TRANSCRIPT
AM: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run smoother.
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from one of our designers Michellanne Li, who is going to talk about web fonts.
ML: Hello, my name is Michellanne, and I am a designer here at Palantir. Today, I am going to talk to you about web fonts: what are they, and why do you need them? How do you select fonts and implement them on your website?
In the early days of the internet, browsers could only render a handful of typefaces, 5 of which became commonly used. Over time, however, browsers and font files have developed so that we literally have thousands of options when we look to select a typeface for a website.
But, first of all what exactly is a web font? According to CreativePro.com: “A webfont is a font file downloaded from a Web server and used by the browser to render HTML text.” The desktop fonts that you use in Word or Photoshop are specifically encoded to be rendered by a computer. Desktop fonts come in the following file types: TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType. However, web fonts are created to be read by browsers. Web fonts come in: TrueType, WOFF, EOT, and SVG.
So, from a technical standpoint, you need web fonts if you are building a website because they are specifically encoded for the web. But from a design standpoint, good web fonts have features that make them particularly suited to being read on a screen. For instance, they may have wider letter spacing, heavier strokes, or taller x-heights (which are the relative heights of the lower case characters). All of these result in greater readability on a screen. Users don’t spend a lot of time on each web page, so making smart design decisions is critical in ensuring that your content reaches it audience.
According to the User Experience experts at Nielson Norman Group, “the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past.”
Now that we know what web fonts are and why you need them, let’s talk about the financial and technical considerations behind selecting the right fonts. The following are some guidelines to keep in mind:
Free fonts are great! . . . sort of. In 2010, Google launched Google fonts, making hundreds of web fonts available to the public free of charge. To do this, Google has collaborated with designers in exchange for a flat fee and the promise of exposure. Google fonts can be a great option if you are on a really tight budget. However, the following are risks to consider:
Unfortunately, Google fonts are not held to any external standards, both from an aesthetic and technical standpoint. Before choosing one, it’s wise to verify if it works in all major browsers.
Unlike commercial fonts, many Google fonts do not come in a range of weights or styles, such as italics.
Due to the Chinese government’s censorship of Google, Google fonts do not work in China. If you have an audience in China, this is important. Websites with Google fonts not only load slowly, they may appear “broken.” Although workarounds exist, they all come down to finding a different source for fonts. Some of the latest sources are Chinese services that host Google’s fonts on their own servers. Although this probably is not illegal, I would not recommend that clients use a fonts platform that did not pay for its fonts. It is, to say the least, poor form.
Free fonts, including but not limited to Google fonts, get enormous mileage both in print and on the web. When it comes to simple classic typefaces, that’s not a bad thing. They are like the little black dresses of typography. But, if you’re looking for a high impact display font to differentiate your website, selecting the same free font that everyone else has already used to the point of exhaustion will have the opposite effect.All of this being said, Google fonts has some real gems and is a solid, budget-friendly option. So, why bother shelling out money for a commercial font? You should purchase a commercial font when the following are your priorities:
Quality: Commercial fonts are held to high technical and aesthetic standards. The best typeface foundries put an incredible amount of thought and detail into their work and can answer questions about browser compatibility, usage scenarios, and the history behind each typeface.
Brand consistency: If you have an existing brand that includes typefaces for print materials, it’s worth it to purchase the corresponding web fonts. In the event that you are just starting to establish your brand, now is a good time to ask if the typefaces you like have print and web equivalents and to determine how well these potential typefaces work in both kinds of media. When purchasing a commercial font, it is important to read the licensing agreement. Font designers and retailers place constraints on the scope of a font’s usage in order to protect the value of their product.
So, at this point, you’ve picked your fonts, and you’re ready to start using them on your website. How does that work? One option is to use a hosting service for your fonts, which means that your font files will reside on the server of the company from which you obtained them, and your website will load those files. For commercial fonts, hosting is a subscription-based service. The advantages of this are:
Implementing the fonts on your website is as easy as adding a single line of code.
Web fonts get updated as the internet changes and grows. With a hosting service, your provider can push the latest versions of the font files to the cloud server, and they will be automatically loaded onto your website.
You don’t need to keep track of the font files.
Hosting services offer some great bargains. For instance, Typekit is a hosting service that is bundled into the Adobe Creative Cloud package. For no additional cost, this includes unlimited web font usage for up to 500,000 page views. All of that being said, Typekit isn’t really a bargain if you don’t need Adobe Creative Cloud to begin with.Self-hosting is another option. Self-hosting means that the font files exist on your server. The main advantage of self-hosting is the ability to subset fonts. This means editing the files to remove unneeded characters. Subsetting results in smaller files sizes, speeding up the load time of your website.
In summation, web fonts are an important component in creating a website because they are specifically designed and encoded for the web. In selecting fonts, both financial and technical considerations should be taken into account. Once you’ve determined your fonts, you can choose to use a hosting service or to self-host.
Even when we’re not conscious of it, typography is a huge part of the web. I hope this talk will contribute to making the web a more beautiful and user-friendly place!
AM: Thanks for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great knowledge, visit our website at palantir.net, or follow us on twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

Selecting the Right Image Type to Improve Site Performance

It’s hard to know which type of image will best help you optimize your site’s performance. Front-end Developer Patrick Weston breaks down four different image types and assesses the function and benefits of each kind.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi and welcome back to this week’s Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run a little bit better.
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today’s advice comes from front-end developer Patrick Weston, who has some thoughts about dealing with images on the web.
Patrick Weston [PW]: Hi, I’m Patrick, and I’m going to be talking about images on the web.
The web is really progressing forward and evolving, and as developers we tend to take data and speed for granted. We normally work at businesses and offices with really fast broadband connections, but that might not always be the case for all users. Responsive web design has really focused on mobile first, and a lot of times these mobile users are data capped or have their data limited. And they can also be in remote locations on slow connections.
Images are often the largest asset on web pages. So if you make improvements with images, you can really make large improvements with your site speed and performance.
I’m going to talk about different types of images, when to use which, and some general tips for improving your site with regard to images.
First, I’m going to cover two different types of categories. There are:
Lossless vs. lossy compression
Lossless as the name implies, is no loss of data. So these are images where the source feed is the exact same as the outcome.
But lossy compression allows you to lose some quality at the sake of file size.
There are also vector graphics vs. raster graphics
Vector graphics are defined mathematically. For example, a line starts here, and ends here 10 pixels over.
But Raster is defined pixel by pixel, so you can think of it as kind of a 2D grid with different colors at each pixel.So now I’m going to talk about the different types of images that there are. There are four main types:
PNGs
JPEGs
Gifs
and SVGsI’m going to go through each one and kind of talk about their strengths and weaknesses, and then I’ll recap about when to use each type.
PNGs are the first type I’m going to talk about. They are a lossless file format, so you don’t lose any quality. And they are also raster, so they are defined pixel by pixel. But the benefit with PNGs is that they have what’s called an alpha channel, so this allows for transparency. If you’re using transparency on the web, it’s likely a PNG. And this alpha channel is a scale of transparency, so it can have different values of how transparent the image actually is.
The next are JPEGs. These are kind of the workhorse. This is one of the most common file formats, and it’s a lossy file format, so you can have some loss of quality, but also save image size at the same time. They are raster, so they have a 2D grid of pixels, and they don’t have an alpha channel, so there’s no transparency.
The next type are GIFs. They are also lossless and raster. They do support transparency, but it’s  kind of an on/off switch, so the pixel is either transparent, or not transparent. So you do lose some quality here with the transparency. But the main thing that makes them famous on the web is that they support animation. So if you’re looking for kind of a simple animation, GIFs are a good way to go.
Last you have kind of a newer file format that’s beginning to be more popular on the web , and that’s SVGs. They are vector graphics, so they are defined mathematically. You have shapes and sizes, different line widths, thicknesses, colors . . . they’re really versatile.
These four file formats are kind of confusing, and there are different approaches to when you want to use each of them. So the real key is to kind of figure out what image is best for you.
If you need any sort of animation, GIF is the only option. It’s the only one that provides animation without using a video format.
If you need any sort of transparency, PNG is probably your best bet because it gives you that alpha channel for transparency that is a nice scale rather than just an on/off like GIF provides.
But if you have an image that’s a photo or a scene, a JPEG is probably your best choice. And JPEGs are probably your best choice just by default (unless you don’t want to lose image quality, in which case a PNG is also a great choice). The great thing about JPEGs is that you can set the quality.
If you have something that needs to scale well . . . a logo, or something with simple shapes and colors . . . then go with an SVG, because they can have really small file sizes.
Other alternatives that you can use include CSS. A lot of times you can do gradients or background images, and you can avoid images all together. Or if you have a logo you can use text or a web font.
And there are also some great approaches that are starting to come out, and become more popular, for responsive images. One is called  “Srcset.” It allows you to define different images depending on the width of your browser. There’s also the picture element. And Drupal also has a great responsive image module that’s new in Drupal 8. You set up different images sizes and styles, and then tell Drupal when to apply each.
But all of these really depend on having a really good source image to begin with. You can do all sorts of responsive tricks and things. But if your source image isn’t the right type and isn’t optimized, it’s not going to be a good result.
There are lots of types of images out there. But with a little thought, and with the help of some new best practices and automation (like Drupal’s new responsive image module), you can create a great, fast-loading site for all users regardless of screen size or internet speed.
AM: Thank you Patrick. That’s it for this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great one.
Helpful links
Image types and when to use them:
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization?hl=en
Configuring Drupal's new responsive image module:
https://www.advomatic.com/blog/adding-responsive-images-to-your-drupal-8-site

How to Write a Better RFP

Writing a Request for Proposal (or RFP, for short) is no easy task. You want it to be as detailed as possible, as to ensure you get the right kind of proposal from the right kind of vendor, but general enough since you're not entirely sure what you need – and the expertise of the vendor will help articulate some of that, ironically.
So how can you write a better RFP given these circumstances? Our Account Manager Allison Manley has seen hundreds of RFPs come through the door, and shares some thoughts on how to streamline your process and ask the right kinds of questions to get what you need, and make it easier for vendors you actually want to submit a proposal.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast, just a couple minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and I’m the one offering today’s advice, which is about how to craft an RFP (which stands for Request for Proposal) in order to attract really good responses from firms like Palantir. 
RFPs are hard to craft, no doubt. You have to be concise, you likely have to insert a ton of legal jargon, but you want to create an appealing proposal that will attract the right firm for the job.
Over the years we have looked at a lot of RFPs, and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. We thought it would be helpful to share our experience from the responder's side.
I’m going to outline the main five things you should consider. There are many more things to consider, and actually I outlined 15 of them in a blog post from March 2016 that is up at Palantir.net. But here are the key five things I think you need to know. 
1. Be specific about your desired outcomes and goals
When outlining your goals, get as specific as possible. Even if you need just a general upgrade because your site is outdated in both the look and the technology, there must be a reason you’re frustrated with the old site: is it now too slow for back-end users to update? Does it need to be mobile-friendly? Do you want to increase traffic for a specific reason or conversion? Why do you want those things? What will they do for you that your current site can’t?
Try to also avoid generalities such as: "We want a website that incorporates social media,“ or “We want more traffic,” and “The site needs to convey our message and mission.” Because guess what: everyone wants those things, and they don’t give us enough information. When outlining projects, make sure to tie outcomes back to specific goals.
2. Give us a budget
From a bidder’s perspective, there’s probably nothing more frustrating than asking for a budget, only to be told “we don’t know. We’re trying to figure out how much this should cost.”
Let’s face it: there’s a number in your head. I know this because once I hear the basic parameters of the project, I’m going to respond with a range. And based on your reaction, I can get a sense of budget. I’ve had a lot of potential clients describe their needs, to which I’ll respond, “a similar project we did cost in the low six figures.” This is usually followed by a client saying, “oh, that’s fine” or “we don’t have more than mid-five figures to spend.”
See, you did have a number in mind! Even if it was your maximum cap.
Don’t ask for all the bells and whistles of a Porche-sized project if you know you only have the budget for a small Kia, or some similar car. Giving a budget upfront allows each firm bidding to tell you what they can offer you for your money. Then you can compare expertise and the value offered for your budget, which gains for you a more complete picture of what you're buying.
3. Be specific about constraints and exclusions
Are there certain key dates by which you would need your project completed? Are there brand and identity standards that we have to adhere to? What about third-party integrations that need to be considered? Giving us parameters helps us focus on what we can deliver for you.
Exclusions help define a project as well. What items will the bidders not be responsible for? Will someone else be in charge of photography and/or content creation? What about hosting and migration? Letting us know what not to bid on will ensure we don’t account for it as an unknown in our estimate.
4. Realize you are buying the process, not just the end product
Palantir didn't always work for healthcare clients. It took the trust and vision of our first healthcare client to give us the project to prove that we could. Consider responsive design: prior to 2011, nobody had ever heard of responsive design, let alone build anything for all devices, it just wasn’t done. But the smart firms all made a smooth transition to responsive.
Don't necessarily discount a firm because they've never done a project exactly like yours. Instead look for proof that they have related experience, are effective problem solvers, and have the creative and/or technical range required to complete your project successfully.
Conversely, the firm that does nothing but your particular type of project is unlikely to give you a solution much different than the one they produced for your competitor last year. Make sure you are dealing with firms that can effectively translate your message to your audience and not a production house offering cookie-cutter solutions.
5. Do not ever ask for spec work
Spec work is asking for work done prior to engagement with a client in anticipation of being paid. Never ask for examples of solutions as part of the RFP process. For one thing, professionals are paid for their ideas. Let’s face it: our ideas cost money. But more importantly, any quick solutions that a candidate would come up with before doing the proper in-depth research about your organization's culture and goals would simply be ill-informed and incomplete. Having strategic thinking guide your message is a much better bet than the "throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks so we can get the job" approach. Who wants to hope for a happy accident?
In conclusion
Writing a good RFP is not easy, I’m not gonna lie. It isn’t! It’s tough to get everything you want distilled down to a few pages (and in some cases impossible, since your organization may require many pages of legal attachments that need to be there).
The bottom line: make sure you are clear about what you need and why. Give us some solid parameters from which to work. Tell us what will make the project successful for you. This helps us suggest the best solutions to fit your needs. And leave the possibility open for a conversation with the bidders so they can ask follow up questions in case you missed anything.
And if you need assistance defining your project and writing your RFP, call us. We’d be happy to help show you a better way.
So that’s it for this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great week, everybody!

Consulting engagements that work: a case study with Rhodes College

Welcome to a new episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. In this episode Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our client Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. Allison caught up with Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal, how we worked together, and how it’s been going since.
We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next month, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5.
I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today my guest is a client of ours named Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. I caught Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal and how it’s been going.
I am here with Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. How are you?
Justin McGregor [JM]: Doing well, doing well. 
AM: We’re in the last legs of DrupalCon 2016, and we’re in the busy lobby of the conference hall in New Orleans. So there’s a little bit of noise behind us, but we will plow through. So tell me a bit about Rhodes College.
JM: Who we are and what we do? We are a small liberal arts college nestled right in the middle of Memphis, Tennessee. If you look at a map of Memphis from above, there’s a big ring road that runs at the side, and if you throw a pin in the middle, that’s us [laughs]. We are 2000 students, roughly, 300-odd employees, traditional liberal arts curriculum covering everything from pre-law, pre-med, that sort of thing, all the way down to the study of the classics. We have a Greek and Roman studies department, and right across the quad we have people that are doing pediatric oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So it’s literally all over the map. And I get to support them all [laughs].
AM: Wow. So your college is on Drupal. How did you come to choose Drupal in the beginning? 
JM: I’ve personally been an open-source advocate for a very long time. I’ve been in higher ed web work for going on 16 years now, and I’ve worked with a lot of different CMSs, none of which I could really ever evangelize for. They were really good for what they were, but, you know. At my last school I had evaluated Drupal 6 early on, but our CTO was very anti-open source. But I kind of fell in love with it then, and I’m like, one day I’m going to come back, I’m going to be in the right position at the right school to do this, Years elapsed and D7 had come to be a really mature solution, and I got the job at Rhodes. We were coming off of an aged open-text solution and also Sharepoint 2010 pointing internally. Both solutions were long in the tooth and needed to be replaced, and when I came on board, I’m like, yeah, cool, let’s do this thing, but one of my caveats was, we have to give serious consideration to open source and to Drupal specifically. And so during our CMS roadshow we looked at the two leading proprietary higher ed solutions and also to Drupal vendors for hosting and DevOps. And it became clear really early on that for our use case, Drupal was the only solution.
AM: Well, great. Thank you for choosing Drupal!
JM: I’m glad to be here, believe me.
AM: So what does your internal team look like? What’s the composition?
JM: It’s largely me. I am the only developer on staff. I work in the communications department, which actually reports to the dean of admission. So from a business perspective I work for our sales team. That being said, I do have an interactive technology manager, who is my liaison to our external services alumni and development departments. And while he’s not a Drupalist, he’s in the guts of the thing every day, doing work on the site in one capacity or another. I’m also lucky enough to have a handful of student workers, including one third-year computer science student, and while they’re contractually limited to only ten hours a week they are a massive help. And also I found out just before I left to come here that one of our vacant positions may be reclassified as a developer. If anyone’s looking for a Drupal development position in Memphis, Tennessee – just saying it’s a possibility [laughs].
AM: So you did hire Palantir, just to be transparent about things. You hired us for consulting a few times a week to support your team. What was it that you needed from us? What was it you needed to complete the project?
JM: Okay, there were two projects. Let’s do them chronologically. The first one was, we’re relaunching our flagship .edu, and while I’ve been in web work for a long time, I was new to the practice of building a Drupal site. And so I knew what I wanted to accomplish, but I would go to Contrib and, here’s all the modules that are available, I could go do this by modifying a template file, or any number of things. But I needed best practices, I needed best solutions. And you can go watch training videos all day long, but they’re around the piece of technology or the specific use case that may or may not actually be the use case you’re dealing with at the time. So having somebody – the structure that I loved was, we would start the week with ‘here’s the problem of the week’. Here’s the piece of functionality that I’m going to be building. Let’s talk through all the possibilities for how this problem could be solved, and arrive at what the best practice is for this use case. And then I’d take a couple of days, get in there, work on it, build it out, and at the end of the week – nine times out of ten, it was done, but if it wasn’t, we could come back and say, here’s the specific problems I ran into, how do we work through that? The metaphor I kept using was, we ate the elephant one bite at a time [laughs]. I had six content types, a whole ton of media assets, and, ooh, I think we ended up moving about 7000 pages, a piece at a time. We took this fairly massive implementation over the course of a couple of months, and built out the framework to handle it all, and just started shovelling in the content.
AM: And what was the second project?
JM: So I said a minute ago that we had the open-text that was the CMS for the public-facing part of our site at the time, and also an internal SharePoint 2010 set of publishing sites. So support for that is going away, and we needed a solution, and I’m like, you know what, I’m not standing up another CMS for this, let’s just go multi-site and do it all in Drupal. But then we have the challenge of standing up branded sites in a hurry for every little department, grant, professor, whatever, that had had a SharePoint 2010 publishing site before this. And so what we worked through was, first of all, building a road-specific installation profile of Drupal, so that out of the box, all of my content types were there, all of the branding was there – there’s the branding they can change and the branding they can’t change, as a site owner. And also the mechanism for site ownership and how that’s going to work. And the second part of that was to automate a good chunk of the deployment, so I can do from the handful of things that I have to do in my DevOps environment to a functioning Drupal site. The last one I set up took me about five minutes, which is not a bad way to go.
AM: I don’t know if I’ll have time to do that today, boss, it took me five whole minutes [laughs]. So what were your goals for your site?
JM: To drive recruitment, more than anything. We need students. More than that, though, higher ed is generally in the position of having – as much as we say that the mantra of the site is to drive recruitment, and we say that over and over, we have parents, we have alumni, we have the colleagues of our tenured faculty, on and on. Researchers that are coming because of the disciplines we teach and the research that we do. Researchers from around the country want to come see the research that’s being done here, to be able to collaborate, all of this stuff. So ease of discoverability of whatever piece of content that’s relevant to that audience – now that we’ve been in Drupal and been in production for a year and change, we’re really starting to look seriously at personalization. It’s sort of the standard higher ed model to have the audience navigation across the top – you’re a parent, you’re an alumni, you’re a current student, yada yadda yadda. But once you’re in the guts of the site, that just starts to bleed away, you know? And so being able to contextualize information based on what we know about the person coming in is steadily going to become more and more important to us. Part of that to be handled through Drupal and part of that through CRM integrations, with both Salesforce and an admissions-specific product called Slate. 
AM: So personalization is next down the road. Excellent. So what was your working relationship with Palantir? What did it look like on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis?
JM: So both of the consulting setups were more or less the same. We identified an hour early in the week where we could, you know, bang around what this week’s problem was, and then an hour later in the week, how did it go, staging for next week’s problems, or if something didn’t get done because I had a roadblock or whatever. Both of the guys I worked with were fantastic. Even if we weren’t on a call I could send them an email any time I wanted to, and hear back pretty darn quickly. But a lot of times I would save stuff for the call because it’s just something you need to talk through, or screen share or something. It was nice to have somebody who’s done a lot of Drupal deployments, at the front of the week, to say ‘this is what, given your current level of expertise, you can reasonably expect to get done this week without just absolutely killing yourself’. And to do that knowledge transfer early in the week that says, okay, here’s what you’re going to need to know, if you’re not hip to this, go read this, go watch these YouTube videos, whatever. Then set to the task and we’ll wrap up on the back end. Having somebody who was really expert in these sorts of Drupal deployments helping set your agenda, because I know my goals, I know my organization, but I need to know what is really realistic to do in the product in a given span of time, you know?
AM: All right, so let’s start with the bad stuff, the obstacles. What roadblocks did you run into during the course of the project, and how were we able to help you remove those roadblocks?
JM: I’m not new to development, I’ve been doing web work for a while, but there are sort of Drupal-specific things that, when you read through the documentation, or at least when I read through the documentation, like the hook system – they seem to work fine in the documentation, but then when you get into the guts of the system, you think, that doesn’t seem like what I just read, or doesn’t behave in the expected way. I had done a lot of front-end development prior to coming to Rhodes, and the Drupal templating system is something wholly different from anything I’d encountered before. I knew how I needed the site to behave, I knew what I needed it to look like, I knew how I needed it to respond, and all of that, but figuring out, do I do this from stacking a bunch of modules in order to handle fences, for example, which I ended up relying on a lot, to sort of get the markup back down to something reasonable and something I can work with and go from there. Or do I just dive off into the PHP and let’s make template files for everything, and that way I’m programmatically controlling markup. We had to come up with a strategy pretty early on and say, okay, for the sake of anybody who ever has to follow in my footsteps, let’s find a solution we like, and move forward with, that’s how we’re going to work.
AM: So what was the biggest win over the duration of the project? I don’t know if you have one win per project, or…
JM: So many. Seriously, I say that about the theming as a roadblock, but overall, both of these projects from an institutional perspective have been a resounding success. For academics not to complain about something is actually fairly rare [laughs]. That’s not to say that there weren’t people who take exception to, say, font choices, or, is that really the institutional red, it needs to be a little richer – you know, that sort of nitpicky ‘I don’t like this element of the design so I don’t like all of the design’. Overall, oh gosh, as of last week I think we’re 16 sites in, that we’ve launched so far. And yeah, all the designers have been very very happy with the end product, with the authoring experience. I’ve had some requests for new features and I like that my users are passionate enough to say, hey, this is great but here’s how we could make it even better, and to work through these things with me. I’ve got a handful of new content types that people have suggested – as I’ve been rolling out these little multi-site instances, I think that every last one of them could be used across the enterprise. And it’s great to have people that are willing to work with me on this sort of stuff, to come up with these ideas – not just for them. Probably one of the nicer things about being in a small liberal arts college is that they are mindful of the impact any change can have all the way across the organization, because they eat lunch with these people every day, you know? [laughs] So they’ve all been really successful.
AM: Fantastic. So the next step you’ve mentioned for yourself, because you don’t really have a team [laughs], moving forward is the personalization piece. Anything else?
JM: Well, part of the reason we selected Drupal to begin with was that it allowed us the flexibility to not deploy a site and then sort of be stuck with it forever. I mean, unlike some of the proprietaries, you get the tools that come out of the box and that’s kind of the end of it. You take one of their templates, you skin it your way, and you’re done. We’re looking at some design improvements. We did a complete redesign, this wasn’t just a move of an old design, we started from scratch and rebuilt. So there were design elements that have really worked well for us, and some things that, to use the industry jargon, aren’t converting the way we’d like them to. We’re not getting the traffic draw for some of the elements that the real estate they’re on deserves. So we’re going to take some time with the design team this summer and look at redesigning certain elements, and – I love that my templating architecture is flexible enough that there’s going to be no problem to just drop in there and, it’s all the same entities, it’s all the same data, we’re just presenting it differently. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly painless process.
Also, since we’re at DrupalCon, I’m going to mention this. I’ve been at several sessions about paragraphs over the course of the last couple of days, and when I was at DrupalCon LA I went to a session and I was like, hmm, neat idea, maybe when it matures a little bit more – well, apparently it has matured a lot over the course of the last year. Because some of the things I’ve seen people do with paragraphs here are really impressive. So I’m sort of starting to daydream about some of the tools that I may be able to give my content creators, to do a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting things than they are now. There are certain things, the demand of the site and the demand of the brand, that will require us to leave some things static, but I want to give them as much creativity and as much flexibility as I can, to really make their content sing. 
AM: Are you going to be able to add to your staff?
JM: We’re trying to get a position for another developer, which hopefully will allow me to pull out and do a little more high-level stuff. We’ve also been steadily training more and more of our communications staff to work directly in the CMS and not rely on me or Nick or the student workers to do the layouts and content for them. And again, so far that’s gone really well. Like I said, the reason that I liked what I was seeing of paragraphs and a few of the other sessions is that, as much as I’m worried about user experience for our audience, I’m also worried about user experience for my content creators. I want them to want to work in the CMS, you know? And anything I can do to improve that situation for them – out of the box Drupal’s a great CMS to work with, but there are always ways to make it better. I’m always on the lookout for tools to help make their work better.
AM: Isn’t that the thing about the Web, though – you can always make it better. Tomorrow’s another day [laughs].
JM: Exactly.
AM: Well, thank you, Justin. I appreciate you taking the time, I know you’re fried – we’re all fried on the last day of DrupalCon – and there’s been a lot of knowledge and alcohol shared [laughs]. So I know everyone’s ready to relax a bit.
JM: Next stop for me is the streetcar, I’m going to go to the other end of the French Market and start tchotchke shopping for the kids and hit three or four bars on the way back to the hotel, that sort of thing [laughs].
AM: Well, hopefully you’ll join us tonight at trivia night, and then at sprints tomorrow.
JM: Don’t know, I have family here in town so I have some obligations there. But I’d like to put in a hour or so at the sprints and see how it goes. 
AM: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time.
JM: Thank you!
AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!

Why It’s Important to Deploy Early and Often

Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Senior Engineer and Team Lead Bec White who has some thoughts regarding deployment, and why it's so important to do so early and often not only for your internal process but also to help bring a site to life for your clients.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast with a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Bec White, Senior Engineer and Team Lead, who has some thoughts regarding deployment.
Bec White [BW]: My name is Bec White, and I want to talk about deploying early and often
On a project, I feel It's important to get deployments running as early as possible. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but my two favorites are not solving problems at the last minute, and bringing the site to life for clients.
I mean, number one, I'm not a firefighter. I don't want to solve problems under pressure, I want to solve problems beforehand and then have my team look like wizards later.
There's this idea that with Drupal that you don't have to know the target environment, that you just make a drupal site and then you can put it anywhere.
But in practice, though, there's always something about the environment that always affects the build: whether it’s the php versions, whether it’s setting up http redirects (on apache vs nginx), whether it’s your single sign on integration, search servers, varnish config, just to name a few. And for the Drupal-specific hosts, there are other things, like how the settings.php file is managed, and where the Drupal root lives in the repository.
So always when you run a project on a new environment, there is *something*. You can make as big a launch checklist as you want, but we all know how painful it is to find out these things when you're rolling up on a deadline.
But at the beginning of a project, the deadlines are just thin wisps on the horizon. And under a blue sky, it's not so catastrophic, so stressful when drupal barfs errors all over the destination environment where the client can see them.
Ok, so at the beginning of a project, maybe we have a "sprint zero" and we get a repository set up, and Drupal is installed, and hey — we put it on the staging environment. Then there's a plain Drupal up there: it has a druplicon and has the bartik theme. And you definitely . . . the project isn’t ending there. Just looking at it, we know that we're going to have to deploy again… and again, and again. 
As an engineer, I love systems, and I love repeatable workflows. So at this point if I can put together a workflow that my whole team can use, that my junior developers can use to deploy when I’m out on vacation, something that’s going to be robust across the lifespan of the project — that's going to be really gratifying. And the goal is to make things less error-prone — to run everybody's code through the same tests, to manage the dependencies consistently so they are present on all environments, even to prevent development code from being deployed to production environments. Once we've ironed out the wrinkles in the sprint zero deployment, we can evolve the deployment script as the project continues and there are additional requirements that get added to the build.
This is pretty powerful because at this point we have a repeatable deployment. Everything that goes up into this environment, any content and configuration, that anybody does on that staging environment, that little sprint 0 deployment, anything will get wiped away. You can't break anything as a user on this little sprint 0 site.
And when you deploy the sprint 1 work, you're bringing the site to life. Clients can go in and take a poke at their new site, and you know what? The sooner we'll get the feedback that is so crucial to aligning our work with our clients' needs, the better. This is why we do agile!
This is the part where I get really excited. What’s better than having someone look at your work and say, "oh boy, this is going to be great for us." Or even better, "This field isn't working the way I expected" or "this page has a bug".
That sounds like negative feedback, but really the sooner we get that information, the better. Getting that stuff right is foundational for the work we do. Whether we need to explain what we were thinking, fix some code, or reorganize a user interface, it's always easier to incorporate these kinds of fixes earlier in a project. And the only way we’re going to get that kind of feedback is if it’s real to them: if they see it, they can use it, they can interact with it. And production is where it’s going to be real. 
I especially love it when a client, someone who is playing the "product owner" role on a project, says, "ooh, let me show this to my marketing director/content author/intern". What this shows me is someone who is invested in the work my team is doing. Someone who recognizes that this project is going to affect the way their organization works. And as an engineer, the only thing better than systems and repeatable workflows is someone who is invested in my work.
So, deploying early and often not only lets us avoid doing high-pressure, last minute, environment-related bug fixing, but it also fosters that feedback cycle that lets us respond to clients. 
AM: Thank you, Bec. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!

How to Make Sense of Human Resources and Operations

Running a 30-person team is no small feat, and is absolutely a group effort to ensure everyone is happy and healthy. Sometimes those helping hands come in the form of a service rather than a person however. Our Director of Operations Colleen Carroll talks about one such tool, and the positive impact it's had on our company and culture, in this week's Secret Sauce podcast.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast, up to 10 minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Colleen Carroll, our who is going to talk about a tool we use in human resources called Bamboo HR.
Colleen Carroll [CC]: Hi, I’m Colleen Carroll, the Director of Operations here at Palantir, and today I’m going to talk about Bamboo HR.
It’s important to me, as the Director of Operations, to develop a culture within the team where the team is informed, where they feel independent, and they feel empowered. And one of the areas that I think is overlooked quite often in companies is the employee resources side of things. And quite honestly the term is “people operations” or “employee engagement “ . . . there’s a lot of terms for it . . . but all the resources and things that relate to being an employee of a company.
In my past, I’ve experienced first-hand what it is to be an employee and be in the dark. The things that often times you’re in the dark about are, “what was that 401k percentage that I had put on my check that doesn’t show up on my check stub?” and, “what are all the things that I can elect to take advantage of, the benefits that the company offers me,” “what does the company think my PTO [paid time off] balance is?” It’s little things, but it’s things that when you’re in the dark about them you start to worry, or anticipate, that something might be wrong, and you don’t know who to talk to about it. And again, having working for a large institution in the past, it wasn’t clear what those services and resources were, and you didn’t know who to talk to, and yet it could be easily answered in a five minute question.
So at Palantir I made it my job to be that resource. And it was easy to do for a very long time because we were a small team. And I felt it was important that people could reach out to me and say, “hey, what benefits are available to me, and why is this a good benefit?” But as the company grew, it got harder to be that centralized resource. I didn’t always have the answer right away, which I always liked to do. But more importantly it became a situation where it was inefficient. The amount of time that was needed on my side, as well as the employee side, to understand the benefits before we could even get to a point of asking specific questions . . . and through my little bit of research I realized that there were tools out there that do this. They often call them HRIS systems. APD is a payroll-related system that also does some of this. But all of them felt too big, too large, and didn’t really meet the culture of Palantir. 
And one day I came across Bamboo HR. And it’s mission statement, or it’s promise I should say, was that, ‘if you’re in people operations and you have a bazillion spreadsheets out there, then Bamboo HR is the right thing for you.’ And that caught my attention right away, because I had at least 20 spreadsheets to help me manage all the things that related to the employees here at Palantir. 
But then there was the big gotcha, and it was, “do you need help managing PTO balances and communicating that to your team?” So I looked into it and, sure enough, that was exactly what Bamboo was able to offer us. And that was the hook! I took on Bamboo to help us manage paid time off (PTO) and to be able to put that information in the hands of our staff so that they didn’t have to come to me. So that in real time, when they were ready, when they had a question, they could find that information themselves. 
And what happened after we got Bamboo installed and set up, was that it had a lot more things to offer, a lot of really great things. Stuff that was even more cryptic to find, I think, in a lot of institutions. For instance, what has your salary history been the entire time you’ve been at the company? Or how much am I contributing to these different benefits for my salary, and what does the company contribute?
Some other services that Bamboo was able to offer us was a phone directory. The phone directory created an opportunity for individual employees to update their personal information on their own. So it wasn’t on me to make sure that I always had the most current home address, emergency contact, personal phone number for everybody. 
Then when it comes to much more secure information, personally identifiable information like social security and birthdate, I never had a really secure way to do that except for the payroll system. But I don’t really want to be logging into the payroll system to figure out when people’s birthday are so I can send them a birthday card! Well Bamboo lets me do all these things in a really easy way, and I can’t tell you how much easier it’s made my job, and I think how much happier it’s made the team here at Palantir, because they can now come to me and say, “hey I’ve been looking over this benefit package,” or, “I’ve been looking over this information and have a couple of questions for you.“ So our conversations are much more informed, they’re much more efficient . . . I’m not wasting their time, and they’re not eating up too much of my time either, and we can get to the specifics and I can be a better resource to them. 
But probably one of my more favorite items — well, I should say there are two new favorite items in Bamboo that I take advantage of — one of them is the Job Board. It’s an applicant tracking system for handling people who apply for jobs at Palantir. No longer do I have to go to Palantir.net and log into the system and maintain different job postings. I have a whole dashboard within Bamboo that tracks people who’ve applied for the position, how long I leave it open. It broadcasts it out to different resources out there, whether it be LinkedIn or other things. It allows me to see how we’re faring, how many people have actually looked at the job posting, and how many of them are actually transitioning or converting into applicants, which is awesome. Then I can roll that applicant once we’ve hired them right into the system. 
So administratively — at least ten less spreadsheets! Which is pretty great. 
But then the real exciting feature that comes with Bamboo has to do with reporting. This is again where a lot of the spreadsheets come in. For tax reasons, for census-related reasons, for different benefit packages . . . there are a lot of forms you have to report back about how many employees do you have, and where do they physically live, and in our case we have people in different states. So what states do we have employes in? How many people are taking advantage of your benefit systems? 
And so as we move towards becoming a more diverse company, it’s important that I have patterns and statistics — historical patterns and statistics to look at — to see how are we faring. What did our metrics look like on applicants who applied and came into Palantir and where can we do better? Where can we knock down some of those unbiased . . . sorry, unconscious biases . . . so we can help drive diversity at Palantir? And Bamboo helps me do that quite easily. 
In summary, Bamboo has pretty much saved my life, made me be a better Director of Operations, have a better grasp around all of the things that involve being an employee at Palantir, to help the staff become more informed, and it fits very much to our culture here. And being a distributed company, and one that focuses on being a remote-first culture, I can put this information at the fingertips of the team. And then they can reach out to me and ask more specific questions so that I can have a more thoughtful and informed conversation from my side. 
AM: Thank you, Colleen. As an employee of Palantir using Bamboo, I have to say it’s pretty great, so kudos to Colleen for the implementation and choice there. For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!

Typography on the Web

Welcome to the Secret Sauce, our short podcast that is typically around 10 minutes long and offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our peer Jason Pamental, the Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera in Massachusetts. Jason shares his thoughts about typography on the web, and how he got into it in the first place.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast, up to 10 minutes, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes to us from Jason Pamental, the Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera in Massachusetts. I caught up with Jason at DrupalCon, and he wanted to share with you his thoughts on typography on the web. 
Jason Pamental [JP]: Hi, I’m Jason Pamental, I work at Isovera, a Drupal shop right outside Boston, Massachusetts, and I’m here to talk about web typography, and kind of how I got into it. Which, interestingly enough to me . . . I think about it when I’m here . . . I actually got into it because of people I talked to at DrupalCon.
I started writing about web fonts when TypeKit came out in 2009. Studying graphic design many years ago, I always loved type, but couldn’t ever really do that much with it online. When TypeKit launched, I had already started using Drupal, and I was using TypeKit, and there were no modules. I found somebody had started one and I just got involved in that: I became the co-maintainer. And that was one of my first forays into using, actually getting into the contrib space. 
But then it opened up into talking with a bunch of core developers at DrupalCon in Chicago. It was Al Stephan and Matt Tucker, and a couple other people, in a bar of course, at two in the morning. And I figured if I could convince them that web fonts were actually worth implementing, then I should really do something with that. Since then I’ve spoken about at DrupalCons on three different continents, and written a book about it, and absolutely love the way the sort-of art and science of using fonts fits with that same way that Drupal can kind of tie into how an organization works, and how you create websites, and that same sense of . . . that blend of strategy, and design, and technology all kind of in this one big platform. It’s been perfect. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to implement it, and teaching people how to do it and use web fonts and now I get to kind of spread that around with the rest of the technical team at Isovera too, which has been a lot of fun. 
One of the things that actually struck me in how to use web fonts well was actually . . . one of the guys from Vox Media was talking about it in a session yesterday . . . he was talking about image performance, and font performance, and ads. One of the things he started talking about with font performance was something that I had actually written about a while ago: it was a way to balance that flash of unstyled text or unseen text when things are loading. 
And that actually ties into a great way that Drupal 8 allows you to control the loading of Javascript. So it really comes down to when you’re loading the web fonts, the first thing that happens is the browser sees the listing for the web font in the CSS, and it has to think about whether or not that web font has loaded. Most of the time it hasn’t yet, so the browser default behavior is to not show anything. That’s actually how all the browsers behave now. The problem is that when you have all these other things going on in the loading process of a page from Drupal, if you’re also then waiting for a web font to load, you’re creating a pretty big delay, and it could be a significant delay in actually seeing any content show up on the page. 
So the trick is to actually use something called the Web Font Loader, or something like it that will inject a class into the page. You set the font loading to be asynchronous using Javascript, and that’s something you can easily do now in Drupal 8 to control where the font, the script is executing. And in doing so, you get the unstyled text on the page right away by tapping the CSS into this web font loading class. Then you can style that fallback: you can set the line height, the font size, the letter spacing, all through CSS that is sort of scoped to the presence of that WF inactive class in the loading pattern. 
And this is something that the guy from Vox was talking about using on The Verge, on the Vox Media site itself . . . it’s a loading technique that is the easiest thing in the world to set up. I actually have it built into a couple of frameworks and a theme that I maintain on Drupal.org called Beep Edition that will give you some pretty simple hooks to try this stuff out for yourself. 
So that loading process  . . . getting the text on the screen right away . . . is another one of those ways to achieve better perceived performance and minimize the difference for people when they are loading stuff. 
So if you’re interested in checking that stuff out, if you look at the theme that I have up for D7 and D8 on Drupal.org, Beep Edition, it has a lot of that stuff built in. 
AM: Thank you, Jason, and so nice to meet you at DrupalCon New Orleans! For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a wonderful day!
 
 

The Best of DrupalCon New Orleans

Account Manager and Podcaster extraordinaire chatted with dozens of folks at DrupalCon in New Orleans last week to get a sense of what made the show special for them. This week's Secret Sauce is a collection of those highlights. Some shared specifics on something they learned at a session they attended, otherwise talked about the community or trends in the Drupal marketplace, and much more.
With DrupalCon last week, we missed our long-form, but stay tuned for that and more short-form podcasts in the weeks to come. And as always, thanks for listening!
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is our short weekly podcast where we offer a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 
But . . . today we’re going to switch up a little bit. Last week, a number of us from Palantir and a larger number of all of us from the Drupal community were in New Orleans last week for DrupalCon 2016. So we decided to go around the room and ask everyone that they thought the best takeaway or the best thing from DrupalCon 2016 was for them. So this is a compilation of all the people I ran into randomly and got them to tell me what they thought was the best thing about DrupalCon 2016
Allison Manley [AM]: Alright, Justin McGregor of Rhodes College . . . what is your favorite thing about this year’s DrupalCon?
Justin McGregor: Oh my goodness. I was actually just in a wonderful session on personalization, about an hour ago. Personalization in Drupal, and specifically they covered a lot of modules in Drupal 7. And that’s been a goal for us early on was to work some content personalization into the site. But the great thing about a Con like this as opposed to some of the other conferences I’ve been to is just how approachable the speakers are after the fact. People go up, grab somebody as they’re coming off stage, or see them at the booth later, and really talk through the implications of some of what I’m working on . . . because everybody’s use case is different, right? And so to be able to talk through with somebody a problem like that based on a presentation you’ve just heard . . . it’s a fantastic thing to be able to do, and not all conferences allow you to do that. 
Dave: My name’s Dave from Glendale Community College in Arizona. And my favorite thing about DrupalCon so far is I like interacting with all the vendors, and getting to meet all the cool people, and see all the neat things that they offer.
David: I’m David from Pantheon. My favorite thing about DrupalCon this year was all the amazing people, and the amazing parties The Pantheon party was amazing. I’m saying amazing a lot, and I’m aware of that. But that’s amazing too. 
Shelley Hutchins: My name is Shelley Hutchins from MediaCurrent. My favorite thing about DrupalCon is just being on the exhibition floor and getting to talk to so many members of the Drupal community.
Chaz Chumley: Chaz Chumley, Technical Architect for ForumOne, author for Packt Publishing “Drupal 8 Theming with Twig” book. My favorite thing is this gentleman right here, who is one of the most awesome pre-keynote putter-together singers, dancers, and who looks really sexy in lamé and tights and whatever else he decides to put on for the keynote. 
Campbell Vertesi: I don’t know whether to be flattered or feel awkward about that [laughs]. But I’ll be in the bar later. 
My name is Campbell Vertesi “ohthehugemanatee,” and every DrupalCon I get to get up and sing, and dance and wear gold lamé. So that one’s not special about this DrupalCon, I think my favorite thing about this DrupalCon is how much more visible the Indian community is. Because the Indian Drupal community are “jump in with both feet” kind of people . . . if there’s a party, if there is a dance, if there is something to code, if there is a totally new API . . . every single one of them that I’ve met will just leap in with both feet and try it out. And it is so much fun. 
Stephen Lucero: My name is Stephen Lucero, Solutions Architect with Media Current. “Slucero” is my tag. My favorite part has been getting to meet up with the community, meeting up with people that I didn’t realize I needed to reconnect with. So it’s been great to be able to do so, and then be able to meet up with them and go and see a giant float burn with a flamethrower. That was pretty awesome. 
Adam Erickson: Adam Erickson with August Ash. I’m a Lead Developer. Favorite thing about DrupalCon would be the community, and how everybody gets together. It’s extremely impressive and motivating. That’s the thing I love about it most. 
Shawn Haukaas: My name’s Shawn Haukaas, I’m President of August Ash. We do Drupal development in Minneapolis. And I’m always impressed by the passion of the people that come. So wheher you’re a site builder, a developer, a designer, or a project manager, or an owner . . . at any level there’s passion for Drupal, which is something that’s pretty impressive. I work in a lot of different platforms and things within the business community around, and it’s very rare to see what we see in Drupal.
Kevin: Hi, I’m Kevin. I’m from Dallas, Texas. I work for a company called [audio issue] as a web developer. The best thing about DrupalCon is getting to interact with other guys and other developers, and learning about what’s new in Drupal 8. It’s been a good experience so far. 
Sunny: Hi my name is Sunny Shah, I’m from Dallas too. I’m the president of a company called Voltage Net, we are a start-up. I’ve been coming here since . . . this is my third time at DrupalCon. It’s just great to meet all the people working on Drupal, learn about what’s happening in Drupal 8 and what’s coming next, and just to communicate and collaborate with everyone. I think that’s the main reason.
Erik Paxton: I’m Erik Paxton. I’m with ThinkShout, and my favorite thing about DrupalCon so far has been the front-end sessions so far, I think. It’s nice to see the direction of the decoupled Drupal, and where that’s going.
Mike Shaver: My name is Mike Shaver. I work for ThinkShout as well. I think my favorite thing has been connecting with other developers and other folks in the Drupal community that I’ve been in contact with over the years.
Edward Pritchard: My name is Edward Pritchard. I’m with the Maricopa Corporate College. And the best thing I like about DrupalCon is being able to run the front-end track and learn all about front-end design, which I’m gearing towards.
Scott Worthington: Hi my name is Scott Worthington. I work at Estrella Mountain Community College in Phoenix, and my favorite thing about DrupalCon is catching up with all my fellow Drupalistas. 
Valery Chen: Hi my name is Valery, and my favorite thing about DrupalCon is learning all the new skills out there, and meeting people.
Kristoff Van Tomme: This is Kristoff Van Tomme from Pronovix. And this DrupalCon was really different because of the city. New Orleans is simply really amazing. The food is very different from usual US fare. Yeah. It’s interesting. Good con.
Joe Purcell: I’m Joe Purcell. I work at Digital Bridge in Chicago. And my favorite thing about DrupalCon 2016 is seeing lots of familiar faces, and there are lots of exciting things happening in Drupal 8. 
Dwayne McDaniel: My name is Dwayne McDaniel. I am with Pantheon. My favorite thing about DrupalCon New Orleans 2016 It think is just the positive energy about this show. This is my fourth DrupalCon, and the DriesNote kicked things off in such a wonderful light, and every conversation i have is filled with this excitement about what we’re going to do next, not “when will it happen.” That positivity has flowed through everything: through all the parties, the dinners, all the conversations, the sessions I’ve attended. If I’d say there’s one word that sums this thing up it’s positivity, and it’s the best DrupalCon yet. 
Nancy Flowers-Mangs: Nancy Flowers-Mangs, and I’m from Yale University, and my favorite thing about DrupalCon is the networking. 
Jason Pamental: Hi, I’m Jason Pamentel. I’m the Senior Director of Design and Technical Strategy at Isovera in Waltham, Massachusetts. And so far my favorite thing about DrupalCon New Orleans was Sara [Wachter-Boettcher]’s keynote yesterday. Absolutely blew me away in every possible way. Fantastic. 
Tasha Cherry: Tasha Cherry, and I’m from the University of Virginia. And I think one of the coolest things that I’m hearing from the conference is just how accessibility is going to be so much easier using Drupal 8. That’s what I’m excited about. Because we’re implementing more accessibility into our designs and things like that, and it’s more crucial to just our operations now. So that will help a whole lot. So things will be automatically built in as opposed to trying to convince people to do it right away. 
Sam Boyer: I’m Sam Boyer from Tag1 Consulting. My favorite thing about DrupalCon 2016 is shrimp and grits. 
Larry Garfield: I’m Larry Garfield with Platform.sh. Best part of this DrupalCon was Dries laying out actual plans that make sense, and might actually be achievable, which is great!
Seth Brown: I’m Seth from Lullabot, and my favorite part of DrupalCon New Orleans has been the renewed vigor and energy now that Drupal 8 is actually out. I feel like our team is thrilled with the sessions. Everybody is kind of excited to dive back in It feels like Drupal, you know, around circa Chicago, everybody is excited again. So I think it’s a huge win for us to have Drupal 8 out. 
Morton DK: Hi. Morton DK here, out of Copenhagen, Denmark. I work for Geek Royale and Tag1 Consulting. My favorite about this DrupalCon in NOLA has been to see the front end community and back end developers coming together on a simple alignment so we can push our code forward and make a pretty amazing product in Drupal 8. 
Michelle Krejci: My name’s Michelle Krejci from Pantheon. The best thing about DrupalCon was just conversations with everyone. 
Roy: My name is Roy. I’m from the Netherlands. I’m a user experience designer. And the best thing I saw at DrupalCon New Orleans was that from the DriesNote to the different core conversations we had, I can see that people are not burned out on Drupal 8, but people are seeing the opportunities for Drupal 8 moving forward, and that was really inspiring. UX is a big part of that, and I’m hoping to do more and more of that in the coming months.
[Sounds from Trivia Night, with Jeff Eaton hosting]
Todd Jamieson: My name is Todd Jamieson, I’m from Boston. I work at MIT. I support web development and project management for our internet presence at MIT for Career Services. And my favorite thing at Drupalcon . . . oh there was a lot. I think it was a use case by the Sierra Club. I was very skeptical going in, and by the end of the presentation it totally nailed exactly some of the things I’m dealing with at my office. I loved it. 
Erik Peterson: My name is Erik Peterson. I work for RiffTrax in San Diego, from the guys that brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000. My favorite part of DrupalCon 2016 in New Orleans was . . . besides Emeril’s Restaurant . . . has to have been the Drupal 8 Kickstart panel, and the deluge of information that gave me what I needed to know to get started developing for D8. 
Drew Gorton: My name is Drew Gorton. The best thing about DrupalCon 2016 is the people.
Jeff Eaton: Hi, my name is Jeff Eaton. I’m a Digital Strategist for Lullabot, and I think one of the best things about DrupalCon for me this year was the number of people that I was able to talk to and meet who talked about how much of an impact Drupal has had on their lives and their careers over the past decade. As Drupal has aged and grown, the number of people in our community who have really impressive stories about what it’s meant to them has grown with it. And I think that’s really encouraging, and really really really exciting.
AM: It really really really is! And since it was my first DrupalCon, I thought it was terrific. And we will be back next week with our usual Secret Sauce, but I hoped you enjoyed this little special edition. To find out more about Palantir, you can go to palantir.net, or you can follow us on Twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency

CEO and Founder George DeMet shares a continuation of ideas presented at DrupalCon Barcelona with his new talk on the benefits of running a company according to a set of clearly defined principles, which he's presenting next week at DrupalCon New Orleans. It's called Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency.
Want to learn more? We have built Palantir over the last 20 years with you in mind, and are confident that our approach can enhance everything you have planned for the web.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce by Palantir.net. This is our short podcast that gives quick tips on small things you can do to make your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from George DeMet, our Founder and CEO, who as a small business owner knows a thing or two about how to run a company based on clearly defined principles. 
George DeMet [GD]: My name is George DeMet, and I’m here today to talk about the benefits of running a company according to a set of clearly defined principles. What follows is taken from a session that I presented last fall at DrupalCon Barcelona on Architecting Companies that are Built to Last. 
At the upcoming DrupalCon New Orleans in mid-May, I’ll be continuing this conversation in an all- new session called Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency. If you’re able to attend Drupalcon New Orleans, I hope you’ll check it out.
Some time back I came across an article from the early 1970s about my grandfather, who was also named George DeMet. He was a Greek immigrant who spent more than 60 years running several candy stores, soda fountains, and restaurants in Chicago. While the DeMet’s candy and restaurant business were sold decades ago, the brand survives to this day and you can still buy DeMet’s Turtles in many grocery stores.
I never really got to know my grandfather, who died when I was 7 years old, but I have heard many of the stories that were passed down by my grandmother, my father, and other members of the family.
And from those stories, I’ve gotten a glimpse into some of the principles and values that helped make that business so successful for so long. Simple things, like honesty, being open to new ideas, listening to good ideas from other people, and so forth. 
And as I was thinking about those things, I started doing some research into the values that so-called family businesses have in general, and that some of the oldest companies in history have in particular. 
The longest lasting company in history was Kongo Gumi, a Japanese Buddhist temple builder that was founded in the year 578 and lasted until 2006. At the time that Kongo Gumi was founded, Europe was in the middle of the dark ages following the fall of the Roman Empire, the prophet Muhammed was just a child, the Mayan Empire was at its peak in Central America, and the Chinese had just invented matches. 
At some point in the 18th century the company’s leadership documented a series of principles that were used by succeeding generations to help guide the company. 
This included advice that’s still relevant to many companies today, like: 
Always use common senseConcentrate on your core businessEnsure long-term stability for employeesMaintain balance between work and familyListen to your customers and treat them with respectSubmit the cheapest and most honest estimateDrink only in moderation
Even though the Buddhist temple construction and repair business is a pretty stable one, they still had to contend with a lot of changes over their 1,400 year history. Part of what helped was that they had unusually flexible succession planning; even though the company technically was in the same family for 40 generations, control of the company didn’t automatically go to the eldest son; it went to the person in the family who was deemed the most competent, and sometimes that person was someone who was related by marriage.  
Kongo Gumi not only only built temples that were designed to last centuries, but they also built relationships with their customers that lasted for centuries.
In the 20th century, Kongo Gumi branched out into private and commercial construction, which helped compensate for the decline in the temple business. They also didn’t shy away from changes in technology; they were the first in Japan to combine traditional wooden construction with concrete, and the first to use CAD software to design temples. 
And while Kongo Gumi’s business had declined as they entered the 21st century, what ultimately did them in were speculative investments that they had made in the 80’s and early 90s in the Japanese real estate bubble. 
Even though they were still earning more than $65 million a year in revenue in the mid-2000s, Kongo Gumi was massively over-leveraged and unable to service the more than $343 million in debt they had accumulated since the collapse of the bubble, and they ended up being absorbed by a larger construction firm. 
Principles are designed to help answer the question of *how* a company does things, and what criteria they should use to make decisions. In the end, Kongo Gumi was no longer able to survive as an independent entity after 1,400 years in business not because of economic upheaval or changes in technology, but because they strayed from their core principles, stopped taking the long view, and went for the quick cash.
Companies that want to be successful in the long run need to identify their core principles and stick to them, even when doing so means passing up potentially lucrative opportunities in the short term.
Regardless of whether the business involves building Buddhist temples, making chocolate-covered pecans, or building websites, a focus on sustainability over growth encourages companies to put customers and employees first, instead of shareholders and investors. These kinds of companies are uniquely positioned to learn from their failures, build on success, and learn how to thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.
AM: Thank you George! George will be presenting his session, Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency at DrupalCon New Orleans on Wednesday, May 11. You can find out more on our website at palantir.net and in the notes for this particular podcast episode. 
If you want to see George’s presentation from DrupalCon Barcelona last year on Architecting Drupal Businesses that are Built to Last, you can also find that link in the notes for this episode as well. 
For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!

Understanding Content Ecosystems

How do you build a variety well-rounded content for your site? And is it all working toward a common goal? If it seems disparate, maybe it's time to look at your content development, writing, and publishing as an ecosystem where all parts – big and small alike – have their place and are working together to support that ecosystem. But how does it work? Marketing and Communications Lead Shawn Smith shares his thoughts and provides a framework in this week's Secret Sauce.
TRANSCRIPT
Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an account manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Shawn Smith who is going to talk about how content ecosystems can work for you.
Shawn Smith [SS]: Hi I'm Shawn Smith, Marketing and Communications Lead here at Palantir.net. Today I'm going to talk to you about the concept of a content ecosystem, and why it might be the right choice for your team and organization with regard to content creation, publishing, and how it dovetails with your overall marketing strategy.
This is a big topic, of course, so I'm going to do my best to give you a high level overview of how it could work, without getting too far into the weeds. Think of it as a general framework, with which you can begin to understand how you could use it, and also how to think about the development of your content (including but not limited to content verticals).
It also has to deal with your sales and marketing goals, customer personas, and other important considerations, so the assumption going in is that you have some of this articulated.
With that in mind, let's start at the beginning: an ecosystem. In biological terms, an ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment, or, in general use, a complex network or interconnected system.
The important terms here are community, interaction, network or system, and interconnectedness. And health, but we'll get into that later.
I think this concept is particularly useful if you are part of a small marketing team. Here at Palantir, the team is quite small… in other words, it’s just me. I have some help from our account managers, our sales folks, and others. BUT there is a big caveat here regardless of marketing team size, and that is the opportunity for team-sourced content. After all, we have about 25 different people working at different disciplines in the company. 
Given that content publishing is hugely important for a service-based company like Palantir for sales purposes, we *must* have a variety of different content types to attract and keep engaged our various audience types (and ultimately lead them to choosing us for projects, of course).
We create content about the kind work we do, share insights on new technology, details on events at which we're speaking, how our company operates culturally, job openings, our client's projects, and many other types.
And while we work in a variety of disciplines, some, like development and supporting technologies, are quite technical in nature. So we'll use something technical as an example for developing content as part of an effective content ecosystem.
But before we talk about content, let's start with the 20,000 ft view of this content ecosystem framework to understand how it operates: It's important to think holistically, and build upon some sort of overarching goal your organization has.
What is the goal upon which we can build a foundation for our marketing plan and strategy? We value collaboration and transparency both internally and with our clients at Palantir. And with our 20th Anniversary around the corner, we're focusing on allowing our company values to surface throughout the content we generate. That's a great goal to use an anchor.
From there, we think of a supporting theme for the quarter (or any length of time that may work for your organization). This theme could be one of your marketing campaigns.
For example, we know that our strategy services in all their forms are incredibly important for our client projects, and can vastly increase the success rate. We'll use this as our supporting theme for the quarter, focusing on strategy services.
From here, you can get as granular as you wish. I like to then take the quarterly theme, and break it down monthly and overlay with other targets we want to hit due to an event coming up, a conference, client project launching, or some other kind of happening. You can go further down this rabbit hole, too, breaking down by week or even by day should there be a particularly important sales and marketing opportunity coming up.
Now that we have a basic framework, let's get back to content. Earlier we decided to go with something somewhat technical in nature… so how about Drupal 8 as a platform choice for our client projects?
It's a big topic, and can inspire content big and small in nature, and that's perfect because every bit of content in the ecosystem has its place; it could be small and fun and, say, community facing, or technical and epic, or somewhere between.
Now, let's take a look at Drupal 8 as a content generation concept, with strategy as a theme, and collaboration and transparency as our overarching goal. What content can we develop around this?
We could talk about Drupal 8's new features that make it easier for content editors to publish content. That is likely strategically important for our almost all of our clients. But how does this work in Drupal 8? This could be a blog post, a webinar, a downloadable how-to, a podcast, and certainly supported via social channels to point people to this various content.
We could also talk about something much more technical in Drupal 8, like how it has REST baked in, or how it plays nice with a suite of PHP technologies out of the box. The question here then becomes: who are we targeting with this content, and where does it fit into our content ecosystem during this time? More specifically, how does it work with our theme? And further, does it hit our target goals? It could, so long as we tailor that content to do so. REST being baked into Drupal 8, not to mention it playing nice with PHP technologies, provides our clients a variety of interesting ways to surface data and interact with external data sources to offer the kind of content and information their audience wants. So we can talk about that generally, or offer a technical whitepaper. We could host a webinar that explains this in a non-technical way to be more transparent about technology. Any many other content types, all appropriate for our theme, working toward our goals.
The examples could continue, but the important thing is that it sets you up with a framework to both make sense of what content you could publish, but more important WHY you're publishing it. It's also important to make this concept your own. It shouldn't be overly rigid, it’s not prescriptive, nor should it be too soft… instead it should be… well, squishy. After all, stuff is going to come up and you'll have to pivot and scramble to get some sort of content online that may not entirely jive with your theme or goals exactly.
To review:
Establish your company goals, whatever they may be
You then develop a quarterly theme based on some targets or other happenings occurring during that time
You determine your preferred level of granularity, be it monthly, weekly, or even daily
You then create content that both supports your theme and goals, making sure you look at it through these important lenses
Then you make sure you have a variety of content, whether small and fun or technical and epic, or something between
If you're interested in introducing this for your company, and you're in charge of marketing and/or content generation, you'll need to own it and act as the product owner, really. And if you have a team from which content can be developed, their buy-in is going to be key to your success. While this approach may be rooted in generating leads and driving sales, it's also about highlighting all of the things that make your company and your team amazing. Revenue generation is a nice byproduct of that.
If you utilize this method, and make it work for your organization, I'm confident that in time you'll have a healthy content ecosystem. And as an aside, if you use the inbound methodology, this is a fantastic compliment to that as well.
I'll go into greater detail with a downloadable template next month on our blog, so sign up to our newsletter to be informed. In the meantime, thanks for listening, and email me at smith@palantir.net should you want to discuss content ecosystems or other concepts presented today.
AM: For more great tips, follow us on Twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!