From Dial-up To Web Standards

Aaron Bacon — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:14:00 GMT

By 1996 the Internet was common knowledge. I remember the first time I “connected”. It was my brother’s custom PC that surpassed it’s time (one could tell by the monochrome monitor). I sat down at his desk, a table that he “borrowed” from some business establishment that he worked for and a patio chair. After waiting a few minutes for Windows 3.1 to boot I created my first America Online account using my brother’s checkbook. I was well on my way to discovering the joys or easy access of the World Wide Web. After several minutes, I was defeated; unsuccessfully connecting to anything beyond reading my welcome email from AOL. I disconnected. That was the first of many heartaches that would come from dial-up.

All was not lost, however. Through the help of a print-out that I grabbed at earlier that day from the Norwood Library success was celebrated when I completed a TELNET connection. It was bliss. The black and white screen painted beautiful Courier Font in 24 pixels. My attention faltered after only being able to read the library's contact information and hours (I hear the real money is an “Upcoming Events” section which was Under Construction at the time).

I am typing the obvious cliché that the Internet has “come a long way” since that fateful day at my brother’s studio apartment on Cincinnati’s Northeast side. Today Tom, ***, and Sherry have nearly unlimited resources to produce their own space whether riding the backs of Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress or taking control of their own domain. It is still easy for anyone to become lost, misguided, or ill-informed when it comes to design, posting content, or simply defining a tag line.

I came on board with eTapestry in January of 2005. I was an intern and wet behind the ears. I was also fortunate to start in a young department. Most people in my field start their career fresh out of school and as book smart as we can be (well, some of us). Then, one quickly realizes the importance of “real world” experience. From communication with customers and fellow employees to knowing what was proper and good when it came to website design and development.

As the internet changes and takes on new dimensions the continuous education and deployment to meet and succeed at all levels is a must to stay competitive in the market. We call this standardizing the web. eTapestry’s Web Services maintains this through all of our web solutions while being accessible, user-friendly, and affordable as well as secure and reliable.

All though we still maintain one of the smallest departments at eTapestry, I am confident in the knowledge base that we represent. Over the past year our department has strive to not only learn and implement today’s standards for web development but also focused on educating our fellow employees and customers of the importance of standardization.

Well, here we go...again.

Mike Rusche — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Let me introduce you to "The Thread". This is the official blog site for the eTapestry product. Here at eTapestry we like to be cutting edge, however it would appear that we are getting a late start into this blogging world. While this is a new blogging site for eTapestry, I can only hope it turns out better than the last one we tried.

Back in the day (some nine years ago), we thought it would be cool to let our customers interact with each other on what was then called a "list serve". After getting it all set up, what lives in the Annals of eTapestry lore happened next. I sent it out to ALL of our customers on a Friday evening, thus automatically opting them into membership to what we thought would be one of our greatest tools in communication with our customers. A can't miss foray into social networking, which happened to be called "Threads". I went home that night dreaming of the wonderful interaction and posts between eTapestry customers and their love of the eTapestry product.

Wow, somebody wake me up!

Reality hit the next day (Saturday) as our only sales person at the time called to let me know that our list serve was running out of control. There were plenty of posts, but none like I had hoped for. Some folks who did not appreciate their automatic inclusion to membership had some rather harsh things to say, which then went to EVERY customer, who then responded with their own thoughts back to EVERY customer, who then....well you get the picture. Before I could frantically get Threads turned off, I had turned off every one of our customers from using the darn thing. A few months later, it was re-launched (without the auto membership feature and a new moderator feature) but it never took off. People joined but just sat on the sidelines and never contributed to it, and it finally faded away into the sunset.

So, here we go again, which I guess you know since you are here reading this. It is now called "The Thread" and we really want you to join in the discussions we have here and not just sit on the sidelines waiting for someone else to join the conversation. We hope to post things such as product stuff, how to's, new feature information, marketplace gossip, storytelling, info on fun eTapestry events, show/conference recaps and much more. We hope you will learn from them, discuss them and let us know what you think of them. We want this to be a growing, thriving community of eTapestry users and fans, who let us know what they are thinking.

So, check back here often to see what is new and we look forward to hearing from you.

The Thread : Thread

From Dial-up To Web Standards

Well, here we go...again.