Yes, I am still alive. Barely.

After 70 hour weeks at work it’s finally over and the new Pontiac site that I have been slaving on for a few months has finally shipped on time. I could not have done it without the fantastic Pontiac team and I would be an incredible ass (a-hole) if I didn’t call out and personally thank Meili, The Shallman, Li Li, Howard, Gower, Walker, Schroeder, Heather, Chris Langway, Carolyn and Lisa.

They should be thanked for the late nights, creative ideas and putting up with my really shitty jokes at 11:30. Without them the new Pontiac site would just be a glint binary code stuck in virtual memory purgatory. Howard should also be thanked (or not depending on how you see it) for keeping me from hurling myself off the 23rd floor during some of the more stressful nights.

Of course I can’t thank everyone I should, but there is just no way I could have done this without their help. Thank you all.

Well what did we do? -- Just create what I think is the best damn website that Digitas has ever produced for a client. Seriously.

This sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need… wait … wrong project.

It’s a totally (almost) valid site built using XHTML/CSS in all of its new hotness glory. But we also tried to ride the bleeding edge of technology to make this site as fast and accessible as possible. One of our other goals was to streamline maintenance and to have it produce fantastic buffalo chicken nachos. We failed on the nachos .. but we got everything else right.

Hold on fellas .. this ride is about to get really geeky.

SEO is the new black
To achieve full blown Search Engine Optimization we went 100% table less CSS and semantic html. Replacing images as often as possible with headlines and CSS backgrounds and we should see this puppy climb the ranks of Google rankings rather quickly. We also took all of the data we had hidden in flash and we wanted to represent that data in the HTML so that all search engines could easily read the text without special plugins or hackery. That’s where the next part comes in ..

SIFR is your friend
We (the team) decided that flash is not going away any time soon. And because of this and the fact that the Pontiac site was 45% flash and growing .. we decided to suppe up Mike Industries SIFR script and to use it to pass in all the XHTML content from a div and pump it into flash using JavaScript. This really helps out our search engine optimization and also we now get to edit the content in one place and its also much faster than having flash connect to an external XML source. Barring a little “flicker” that we can solve with some CSS.

The Missing Levenshtein Algorithm
Users will see errors. Users will get lost. No matter how much Q/A, user testing and testing shampoo on monkeys you do .. users will see 404 pages (Page not found).

After reading 37 Signals “Defensive Design for the Web” I realized how important 404 error pages were. Therefore we (Martin) developed a script that allowed us to create a glossary of pages. On an 404 error the site takes the error URL and then parses through that info using the Levenshtein word distance algorithm to calculate the distance between the URL you were looking for and then provide you the closes matches from the glossary of pages

Other Modifications
There were lots of them .. nothing incredibly special other than making internal processes much easier and trying to make maintenance easier. But they are incredibly useful and will make my job easier going forward (for however long that is)

That’s enough for now and again I am sorry for being MIA ... I know I have some projects I need to tend to and I’ll get to you .. but first I have about 1 month worth of sleep to catch up on.