Posted by admin on Oct 22, 2009 in
General I follow Liz Ryan through an email list and LinkedIn Group. Ask Liz Ryan is the think tank, consultancy and online community home of workplace expert Liz Ryan, the voice of the new-millennium workplace. On a regular basis, I am amazed and gratified at her articles, advice and commentary on the workplace situation and job-hunting woes.
Below is a very good article she has recently published.
Why Talented People Don’t Get Hired
Posted by Liz Ryan • October 21st, 2009
Employers call me and wail, “So many job candidates, and no one to fill my job.” They say that the recent economic woes haven’t made it much easier for them to hire talent. “We get flooded with applications,” they tell me, “and most of them are dreck.”
Your applications are dreck? That’s a shock. Gee, all you’re doing is asking every single person who would throw his hat in the ring for a job in your company to:
-
-
- Waste 45 minutes filling out a cumbersome, 1999-vintage online application form;
- Recall and convey every hiring date (year AND month) and departure date (ditto) for every job a job-seeker has ever held; AND remember every salary and every supervisor’s name;
- Agree to an upfront background check, credit check, and reference check before the applicant has received so much as the courtesy of a return email message; and
- Send all this personal information into the void, on the off chance that the employer might stoop to respond with a phone call, an email message or an off-handed auto-responder that says “Don’t call us; we’ll call you – or else we won’t.”
Job application processes are insulting. And employers wonder why they can’t fill jobs?
What self-respecting person is willing to put up with this demeaning routine? If employers can’t show more respect to the talented people applying for work in their companies, why would any job seeker with other options sign up for this galley-slave treatment?
Read the full story here >>>
Posted by admin on Oct 1, 2009 in
Design & Development,
Mutiny Designs,
News We received this testimonial from Joe Venuto:
Mobile Consulting, Inc. and MIGEW.com
“Mobile Consulting needed to reinvent our website and Michigan’s Global Entrepreneurship Week needed to develop one. Merlee and Chris of MutinyWare exceeded my expectations with their work on MobileConsultingInc.com and MIGEW.com. Both sites secured everything we were looking for. Working with their team was a pleasure. They are professional, knowledgeable, efficient, informative, creative, and completed the projects ahead of schedule. I look forward to developing my professional portfolios with MutinyWare. Thanks Merlee and Chris!”
Joseph Venuto
Mobile Consulting Inc.
Michigan Global Entrepreneurship Week
Tags: design, development, Mutiny Designs, testimonials, website
Posted by mbos on Sep 29, 2009 in
Design & Development,
Mutiny Designs,
News 
Michigan Global Entrepreneurship Week
We just completed the site design and development for the Michigan Global Entrepreneurship Week initiative.
We met Joe, the owner and founder, at an Ann Arbor Spark meeting. We had worked on his company website for Mobile Consulting, Inc, and he asked us to setup a site for MIGEW as well.
Joe had already had a design layout for migew.com, and we discussed how best to set up a website on short notice. After some consideration and discussion, we recommended that the site for migew.com be a WordPress blog. This would enable the site to be setup quickly, would allow for quick and easy updates, and also automatically incorporate a content management system. By customizing a WordPress template to match the originally desired design, we got the look that Joe was hoping for. Also, by utilizing some WordPress plugins, we were able to gain the functionality that he was looking for as well.
Please feel free to check out MIGEW.com and see how you can participate! Also take a peek at our design services and portfolio at Mutiny Designs.
Tags: design, development, Mutiny Designs, website, wordpress
Posted by mbos on Sep 23, 2009 in
Design & Development,
Mutiny Designs,
News 
Mobile Consulting Inc.
We just completed the site design and development for Mobile Consulting Inc. Mobile Consulting is a company that provides a service to help you lower your cell phone costs. By negotiating ethically with your current carrier, Mobile Consulting can lower your monthly cell phone bill, as well as save you money on device and plan upgrades. Mobile Consulting offers a 100% money back guarantee with their services 
We met Joe, the owner and founder, at an Ann Arbor Spark meeting. We got to talking, and matched up our needs, resulting in MutinyWare being selected to complete the design and development of the website.
When coming up with the design for mobileconsultinginc.com, we wanted the site to be bright, bold, friendly and welcoming. By utilizing fresh, bold colors and graphics, we have achieved this goal. We also customized their blog to match the site, and reworked their logo slightly to co-ordinate as well.
Please feel free to check out Mobile Consulting and their services. You can save money on your cell phone bill as well! Also, don’t forget to visit Mutiny Designs to see some of our work, and what we could possibly do to boost your online presence.
Tags: design, development, launch, Mutiny Designs, website, wordpress
Posted by mbos on Aug 5, 2009 in
CrowsNest,
News,
Products
Sir Chrisalot and the Reports Dragon
This is the story of the brave knight Sir Chrisalot who vanquished the foul and vile dragon called Reports from the land of Mutiny!
The Queen of the land, the fairest of them all, our beloved Queen Merleesa summoned our hero to her palace. Upon arrival, the court marveled at the astutefulness, intelligence, and utter heroism of our knight Chrisalot. The Queen, upon beholding our hero knight, lost all sense of mind and could not think of what to say – and promptly ordered his head chopped off. Fortuitous for all, she soon regained her composure and remembered why she had summoned the knight and saved us from a rather short and abrupt ending.
She then spoke… “Sir Chrisalot wilt thou heretofore vanquish the evil and foul dragon Reports from our beloved land of Mutiny?”
Our hero Sir Chrisalot did thus kneel and swear to his Queen that he would utterly vanquish and dispose of the dragon Reports. Oh what a joyous day it was when our hero did thus defeat the vile dragon and bring peace, harmony and prosperity to the land.
Tags: CrowsNest, development, Products, story
Posted by mbos on Aug 2, 2009 in
Design & Development,
News,
Products 
Relaxing Summer - someday!
Decisions, decisions. Trying to manage and formulate the best strategy for domains, names, sites and so forth for multiple products can be a challenging one.
We have decided to use sub-domains of the mutinyware.com primary domain to setup our products’ website and application on. After some debate and research, we came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. One is integration. We plan on having all of our apps be capable of complete integration with the others, and can easily foresee a future where clients may be subscribing to more than one app. Having all of these under a single domain makes this a little less painful. The second consideration was branding and SEO. By keeping all of our products under the MutinyWare umbrella, we are better able to consolidate branding efforts, as well as SEO.
Previously, we had setup individual product domains, such as mw-crowsnest.com and mw-quartermaster.com. We have now transitioned these to crowsnest.mutinyware.com and quartermaster.mutinyware.com. Hopefully this will make things easier both for us in administration and branding, and also for our customers. This should make our SEO efforts and rankings more relevant to all, instead of to a single product.
If anyone has any feedback on this conclusion, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
PS – what do the feet have to do with this post? Nothing really, I just like the feeling and the photo 
Tags: domains, sites
Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General,
Recommendations 
SupportDetails.com
I was directed to this site from a newsletter I get from SitePoint.com (@sitepointdotcom). It really is a simple and fantastic resource for getting the browser details from your customers/clients. Whenever they report a problem with viewing a website or an online application, this website makes it ridiculously simple to gather critical customer data about their O/S and browser.
The screenshot on the left shows the type of information you will be able to gather. Click the image to view full size.
I know that this will be a very helpful resource to us, and should be to all designers/developers out there who need a quick way to gather this information. It sure beats guiding an individual over the phone or email on how to check for all of this!
Check them out at SupportDetails.com
Tags: recommend, stats, support
Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General,
News I went to Google Apps today to set up an account for one of our products. To my surprise, the free version of Google Apps no longer seemed to exist. We have been using Google Apps to host our domain email for years. Now, when you visit Google Apps you only have the option to sign up for their Premier service, at $50 per user per year. There was no mention made at all for the standard edition option that we are currently using.
After doing a specific search for “google apps standard edition”, I did find the following page where you can still sign up for the free “Standard” version of Google Apps. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
I am a bit concerned however, about this change. How will Google go forward in the future in regards to existing free users? Will there come a point where they will simply force users to upgrade to the paid “Premier” version? Unfortunately, many of us have become extremely dependent upon using Google services in many areas of our business. Google did put out a blog post in January regarding the limitations now imposed on the Standard version: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/serving-businesses-better-with-google.html
Now, obviously I don’t have a problem with paying for certain web services. We charge for our products after all. The issue I have here, is that they are misleading people into believing that no free version exists. On the main Google Apps sign up page, there is no option for the Standard version, and nowhere do they say there is a version for acounts with <50 users. This is deceptive, and incredibly unfair. Better that they just came out and honestly say that they no longer want to provide a free service.
Tags: gmail, google, google apps
Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General I have a bad habit of tinkering with my blog here and there. Adding in new features, checking out new plugins and so forth. Well, last week, this came back to bite me.
I had input some code that would make “related” posts appear on each post page. All of a sudden, the entire blog went blank. I couldn’t access the admin panel, nor view the blog at all! To compound matters, this occured at the precise moment when our database servers suffered some response issues. So all of our sites were down for a few minutes.
Of course, finding out the the servers were having issues, I assumed that was the problem. A few minutes later, after the server issue was resolved and all of our sites were back up and running, I went back in to continue work on the blog. Everything for the blog was still blank! I tried re-updating, uploading all of the files from the source again, to no avail.
I went into our theme folder under wp-content/theme/ and removed the code I had input from the functions.php file, and the blog returned. So did the admin panel. Then today, I came in to write a post, and found that my admin panel had disappeared again! Doing another quick search, I found that if your functions.php page has any empty lines at top or bottom, this will occur. I went in to check the file, and sure enough there was a blank line at the end of it. I removed the offending line, uploaded and voila! The admin panel returned.
Now, luckily this was a relatively easy fix for us, because we are pretty comfortable in modifying php files. However, how would this impact a user who has no clue about how to do this, or even what any of this means? It seems to me there should be some code somewhere in WP that tells the system to ignore empty lines….seeing that it causes such a problem.
Tags: blank page, disappeared, empty page, wordpress
Posted by mbos on Jun 23, 2009 in
General,
News This is a brilliant article that is sure to give you a giggle if not an outright chuckle.
Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles
PALO ALTO, CA—A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles. Read full article here.
