We also got the opportunity to play around with the IDX integration piece offered by GreenStreet’s MLS listings vendor, and are happy to report it was smooth sailing. The listings appear in various places throughout the site, and can be searched from the sidebar widget. Clicking a property listing brings the user to GreenStreet’s results page which is actually external to the website, an integration that looks seamless to the user.

Our content department (Erin, Nicole, and for layout, Rachel) contributed extensively to this project as well, with support including social media set-up, research and copywriting. And, there’s more to come! Stay posted for more exciting project updates…

You know the staff. Now, what is the process? How do we approach your project?

The term “applied” in the name of the company is no accident. A cumulative thirty years experience in software and web development speaks volumes on behalf of the partners, and is directly applied to every project we produce, problem we approach, and product we deliver. The process behind your website or web application development is not piecemeal or made up as we go along.

Consult, research, facilitate, plan (and plan and plan some more), design, develop, test, adjust. Rinse and repeat. Every time, for every project. It doesn’t matter the size or the complexity of the project at hand, we spend the time at the beginning on analysis of your company, research, and planning. In fact, if you have already been through an estimating and proposal process with us, you know we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you before we’ve ever even won you as a client.

Think every shop that advertises their easy and cheap WordPress package, or their hosted solution you dial right into, does that on your behalf? They don’t. Believe us, because we hear time and again from clients who tried out the competition first because of a really attractive price point, and since have realized they didn’t need a cookie-cutter approach. Or they went with a big media and advertising agency and were shoehorned into marketing decisions based on what the agency was “really good at,” and how it wanted to promote themselves as a full interactive shop.

Well, that strayed from the topic a bit, but the point is, at Trinity Applied Internet you get specialized, considerate, and tailored service that addresses your needs specifically. If you are a marketing department working with some IT constraints, we plan for that. If you are a small organization with one paid staff member and no time for teaching yourself website administration, we plan for that when we design your project, rather than discovering it at the end (or not at all.)

The adage about “prior planning prevents…” at best catastrophe and at worse any number of irritating little hassles. We take it to heart, to the extent that we are researching, discussing, and planning your project before you have even officially engaged us.

Keith Anderson of Trinity Applied Internet Working at the Hackathon

First, a giant thank you to Reno Collective and The City of Reno for putting on this incredible event – we look forward to participating again next year. And, we were blown away by the talent of all the teams, but want to give a special congratulations to our friend Dawson Loudon of Sapphire, who took Best in Show for GoOutsi.de.

We created EventSmash: a mobile-friendly, area-wide events calendar website. Anyone can post an event, but only registered users can vote on these events. Users can sort events by category, including: art, training, music, nightlife, and more. All posted events are geo-located, so users will only see events that are relevant to their location. Fields to be published for each event include event title, description, date, category and place.  Also, the map icons change based on the type of event. Users can sign in through Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Some of the technology behind the app:

• consumes and publishes events via RSS and iCal
• allows developers to integrate EventSmash with their own website or application using a publishing API
• built on Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku

Keith and Patrick Anderson at Reno Collective for a Hackathon Mixer

We are honored to have won Best Social Application, and will be fine tuning and updating the app for full use very soon. Check back or keep in touch through our Facebook and  Twitter updates!

One way to get ideas is to go and look at what data is available. The City of Reno provides several data sets to the public, and the Hack4Reno organizers have put up a Reno is Artown.

Our advice is this – consider whether the data you’re showcasing encourages repeat viewers. Raw statistics, such as crime data, while being a curiosity, usually lead to something people check once and never revisit. And if you’re planning on integrating social media, having something offer not just this weekend, but a month, two months or a year from now is an important consideration. People want to share new things with their friends, not data from six months ago.

Happy Hacking!

If you haven’t heard yet, The City of Reno and Reno Collective are organizing the first ever Hack4Reno – a 24-hour ‘hackathon‘ which is a team competition where apps are to be built to benefit the community. Apps can be anything from serious and potentially life changing to something fun and light hearted.

Why are we participating?

We want to help get the community involved in giving back with their mad designer and developer skills to the city (and region) and to promote the openness of platforms and data.

We are not only forming a team (Go Trinity!) but we are also sponsoring the kick off luncheon for participating teams on Saturday at noon, and coffee for participants later in the evening.

Perhaps it is not for the faint of heart: let’s remember that this is October in Reno and the competition is being held outside (out in the open – like the open public data), but it will be 24 hours of having a great time with fellow developers and giving back to the community.

Come root on the Hack4Reno teams this Saturday, October 15th at noon at the Pioneer Center for the kick off and if you are really excited you can join us and stay all night! Or come back on Sunday, October 16th at 2:30pm for the announcement of the winning team!

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.

Recent Launches

www.tmcworkingsolutions.org — A hardworking, non-profit microlender in the Bay Area, TMC Working Solutions needed a more professional look and a much more robust content management system.  Content Gadget and a simple CSS template did the trick.

www.kps3.com — Our long time agency partners, KPS|3 Marketing, have completely revamped their website, incorporating some whimsical Flash (created by 9MM Media), tons of great content, multimedia elements, and our very own Content Gadget.  Their blog is really outstanding, too.

Coming Soon

Trinity Applied Internet — It isn’t just a rumor, we have a new site on the way.  Our problem is, we keep focusing on our clients’ work while our own is relegated to the back burner.   We suppose that’s certainly not a problem from our clients’ perspective (in fact we call that “by design”) — so we don’t apologize.

Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media — On the heels of the UNR Reynolds School of Journalism, its sister organization will be unveiling their new site this month. We loved the name of their last conference, by the way: “FYI, LOL or OMG? – Technology’s Impact on the Courts and Media”

Server Technology — This locally based company is a global leader in manufacturing power distribution management equipment, and their home page redesign is going to reflect their success, stature and service.

Exciting New Starts

We are proud to announce that Trinity Applied Internet has been contracted by Gnomon, Inc. to fulfill the graphic design and custom Joomla/Google Maps components for a new State Historic Preservation Office site.  Watch this space for more information on a really fun project that promotes historical tourism here in our Silver State.

Estipona Group has selected Trinity Applied Internet to build the new Arts 4 Nevada website, incorporating their vibrant and expansive new design with Content Gadget and custom calendar management, e-mail push, and other database-driven applications.

Buzz you later –

Keith and Erin

The graphic design was provided by the Estipona Group, and numerous members of the faculty provided strategy, review, and feedback along the way.  This project also owes a special thank-you to Professor Donica Mensing, who managed the complete refresh of all their content and populated data into all the new applications.

The website features our Content Gadget content management system, and five substantial custom database applications that manage everything from News and Events, to Faculty Pages, Scholarship Applications and the semester Course Schedule.  Prospective Students, Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Alumni and Parents each have sections of content organized and tailored directly to them.  Perhaps most importantly, the School has ample area on the site to publish student work.  The development was crafted to allow for fluid expansion and to be completely supported by staff members.

Projects like these don’t happen without a great committee. Trinity Applied Internet would like to express our sincere appreciation to everyone at the Reynolds School, including Dean Jerry Ceppos, Director of Alumni Relations Kristin Ghiggeri-Burgarello, and Professors Rosemary McCarthy, Bob Felten, Larry Dailey, Donica Mensing and Howard Goldbaum.   The committee was a pleasure to work with, and we wish them the best as they roll into 2009 with a new online presence.

The organization makes very good use of a small number of staff, so manually updating their comprehensive website content in HTML was at best time-prohibitive, and at worst, a real pain.  Board member Edward Estipona had already provided them with a solid visual design, but keeping up with the large volume of information, applications, forms and documents, events, and new video and other media, was becoming very difficult.  Trinity Applied Internet took the existing site design and wrapped it around our Content Gadget content management system, installing tools that would allow their staff to manage documents, publish events, and even load photography into their jQuery banner, all from a secure online administrative interface.

We hope Nevada Humanities is as happy with their new website engine as we were to be working with such an esteemed organization.  Thank you, Nevada Humanities!

ImmunizeNevada.org features the new version of our Content Gadget content management system. (2.0), as well as a suite of custom tools that operate News, Events, Newsletters and Publications, among other items. The organization, which provides education, resources and advocacy about immunzations for patients and medical professionals, has been working with Trinity Applied Internet since 2005.

Extra kudos are due to NIC for establishing their own Facebook page and joining the social networking community. To join their Facebook group and help provide awareness and consistent immunizations for Nevada children and adults, visit the www.immunizenevada.org website and click through the Facebook link on the right hand side.