We're Nine!
Nine years ago today we started nonfiction studios inc. out of the ashes of an insolvent previous employer.
Myself, Robb and the team took this day to get the (new) office ready, cutting apart doors to make desks, hooking up computers and servers, and getting ready for the next workday - Monday.
Monday morning we were dressed up in suits, pounding the pavement, talking to all of our customers and re-assuring them that:
- Their projects would continue on.
- They would be on time.
- They would be on budget.
We kept those promises and still have most of those customers from nine years ago.
Thanks to our customers for nine great years.
Thanks to our great staff who have believed in us through thick and thin and worked incredibly hard on the work we’ve been entrusted with.
It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been rewarding, challenging, frustrating and life-changing - we’re looking forward to what the next nine years bring!
Robb and Darron
Posted on 16 November 2011.Our Creative Director is having an art show.
Our own creative director, Edwin, along with some of his studio mates, are having a show at the EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts. The show runs from July 1st to September 25, with an opening reception on August 4th, at the Ledge Gallery (across from the Max Bell Theatre upstairs).
Take the short stroll through the building in the direction of 9th Ave (past the Baraka Cafe). You will be able to see some specially created artworks for the display windows, as well as some unique Amigurumi (knitted stuff toys). Go find out what an amigurumi is, and amaze your friends with your knowledge of japanese pop culture at the next dinner party!…
Here’s an excerpt from the Epcor’s website:
EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts is thrilled to present Burnt Toast Studio’s Brad Snyder, Edwin Herrenschmidt, Alden Alfon, Shannon MacKinnon and James Jensen, exhibiting print, design and text, over the summer months in its Window Galleries. These five artists explore screen printing, relief printing, mixed media, papermaking, painting, sculpture and were selected for their artistic quality and appeal to all ages, promoting artistic dialogue within our city.
Burnt Toast Studio, founded in 2000, is a nonprofit independent artist collective in the Highland Park district of North Calgary. The six original members first met in 1993 while studying printmaking at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Burnt Toast Studio strives towards the continuation of an atmosphere in which the members can be part of something larger than themselves.
Posted on 19 July 2011.Calgary Stampede website hosting challenges
For the last 9 years, nonfiction has hosted almost all of the websites for the Calgary Stampede.
One thing that’s different about their website usage is this - their premier event is a 10 day rodeo that happens every July - and their website traffic mirrors this.
This has given us a great opportunity to experiment with how to handle the incredible load changes - from 1,000 visitors per day to 60,000 visitors per day. At the peak, those visitors will look at approximately 350,000 pages each day which translates to more than 10 million hits each day.
For the first few years, the visitors were nowhere near the level they are now, so we were able to handle the traffic using the dedicated servers at Rackspace. That worked great for a while, but there were a few limitations near the end of this time:
- There were a few days where changes to the site needed to be avoided. Changes could introduce some major performance issues if they happened at peak times.
- Big crushes of traffic had the potential to do just that - crush the server.
- There wasn’t a lot of room for error and we didn’t like that.
So we started looking at options to:
- Make sure our other clients weren’t affected.
- Keep the sites responsive so the Calgary Stampede visitors weren’t impacted negatively.
- Allow us to keep the flexibility we enjoyed with respect to making changes during the event.
Some of the first items we had done and continued looking at were:
- Making sure the content management system was as efficient as possible. That involved tuning the database, the commands used to build pages, etc., etc.
- Making sure the images on the website are compressed down to the proper sizes.
- Making sure we were as efficient as possible when programming the site using HTML and CSS.
But that still wasn’t enough - so we started looking at “content distribution networks” or CDN’s. You can think of a CDN as a bunch of computers placed all around the world - they are closer to a website’s visitors so they’re able to deliver certain parts of the website very quickly.
It works like this when you visit a website:
- You type in “www.google.com” to your web browser.
- You computer requests that page from the web server - and the web server delivers it.
- Then all of the images and related linked items are downloaded - 2 at a time.
It’s during step #3 that the CDN can help tremendously - they place copies of your website content around the world, and your information doesn’t have to travel as far.
We finally settled on Cachefly to help us serve the Calgary Stampede’s sites. They have servers all around the world - and they serve all of the “dumb” content for the site - quickly and easily.
That helped a ton with making the site responsive, but there was still one major issue - we needed to speed up the HTML for the site - #2 in the list above.
During certain days of the event, there are so many people requesting pages, that the site is heavily loaded and could be slow. We needed a “content accelerator” to help to:
- Serve web pages very quickly.
- Refresh those pages as they change.
- Protect the content management system from one of the most popular sites on the internet - at least for a few days.
After some research and testing, we started using Varnish and we fell in love with it. Varnish is an amazing piece of technology - it helps with what’s called the “thundering herd problem” and it can make almost any website very fast in a short period of time.
We used this combination of Varnish and the Cachefly CDN last year (along with efficent programming techniques) - and it was a resounding success. We are able to handle a lot of website visitors with this combination - with a lot of capacity to grow if needed.
This year, we have a number of Varnish servers in a ring around the main websites, with the content distribution taking up the front line all around the world - and we anticipate being able to handle even larger traffic volumes without any issues.
Delivering web operations at this large scale for our clients is lots of fun for nonfiction - it continually presents us with unique challenges. In order to provide high quality service, our team keeps our hosting technology automated, up-to-date and lean. We leverage powerful open source technologies first, whenever we can. We are not opposed to using paid software and for services either (such as Cachefly) yet we remain neutral to any software vendor. We’ve been doing this way for over 10 years and it works.
We are seeing the overall trend of hosting towards this way of doing things. What kind of challenges do your sites face? Is your site fast, and its hosting automated, and up-to-date? We may be able to help you.
Posted on 27 June 2011.Working to earn your trust.
Was thinking about how I interact with car mechanics lately - since I’m due for another oil change. Most of the time, I decline their offers for additional services reflexively. This isn’t because I know that my vehicle doesn’t need the service - it’s just because I don’t trust their motivations and have been burned in the past. Being burned in the oil change business isn’t very expensive, I think the last time I got hooked, it was $129 for service I didn’t really need. I now second guess everything that those people say - often just long enough to say: No thanks.
The main reason I don’t trust mechanics is that I do not understand how it all works. It is a mystery to me - so that makes me skeptical of their suggestions.
That triggered a more recent understanding for me: That’s a lot like web design and programming for normal people - not web geeks like me. Since it’s not very well understood, that can create mistrust and skepticism that we need to work to correct.
We’ve been building websites as nonfiction studios inc. for 8 and a half years now. Many of our clients were with us when we started out of the ashes of another studio. We’ve kept most of them for this entire time and they’ve developed a trust in us that we’ve worked hard to keep.
When we do work with those clients - our long term partners - we are able to do much better work for them. We don’t have to fight about simple decisions - they trust we have their best interests in mind. And we trust that they know their business and that we don’t - we rely on them for information about their company and clients.
nonfiction wants to get all of our clients into that position - a position where they will trust us - and allow us to do our best work.
We have a large client that we do a ton of work for - from all sorts of departments. Some of those departments trust us - and we do our best work for them. They have a problem, we discuss the problem and then come up with solutions - they give input from their perspective as business experts - and we give input from a design and development perspective. In the end, we have a great product - delivered on time and on budget with minimal drama and maximum impact.
We have some other departments at that client that we don’t have the same trust dynamic with. We’re constantly being second guessed until the project is a barely recognizable shell of what we designed and planned for. We’re constantly having to re-do and re-work something that will never actually deliver because we didn’t work together as a team.
It all comes down to trust. We work hard to earn and develop our client’s trust- so that we can do better and make you look like a hero.
We think one way to improve that trust with clients, is to remove some of the mysteries around design and development. One of the purposes for this blog is to share some of the inner workings of our Studio’s process. We hope this can build even more trust with our fantastic clients. Trust is the foundation for great work.
What are some web mysteries that we can address with you? Let us know in the comments or via email.
Posted on 20 June 2011.