Yesterday, I was contacted by a local company that provides environmentally-friendly web hosting. They want us to consider referring our clients to them. They look like a great business, and while most of our hosting is already “green,” I’m always interested in learning more about local businesses.

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We’ve just collaborated with Andaluz Waterbirth Center here in Portland to redesign their website. The website focuses on stunning photography taken at the center, is based on designs by owners Jennifer and Fernando (with a touch of Needmore fit’n'finish), and is easily updatable. We were excited about the opportunity to work with Andaluz as we’ve spent much time in their Portland center; our daughter Zoë was born at Andaluz in April of this year.

We’ve just worked with the folks at Anson Mills to produce their Late Summer Newsletter. During the process, we were struck by the sheer amount of love put into each and every one of their newsletters. For this production, not only did Anson Mills launch two new products, but owner Kay perfected a number of new recipes. We’re so curious about Grits Praline Ice Cream and our mouths are watering over their Neapolitan Style Pizza. You’ve got to give these delights a try.

Over the passage of time, you learn a lot from running a project. While we’ve run a business for six or so years now, no single project has probably been as much of a learning experience as Gone Raw was. Maybe others, but certainly no “internal” project. Community sites are a lot of work.

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Congratulations to Sujean on the release of her first children’s book, Birdie’s Big Girl Shoes. We cannot wait to read this to our little one.

Remember when we started Gone Raw? It seem like just yesterday that we were lamenting the lack of resources for raw, vegan recipes. Well, our little website has been steadily growing over the last couple years with over 1,500 users and over 4,000 recipes. And, folks appear to be having a good time on the site, too.

Really awesome job with this site. Thank you. I was really surprised to find such a useful, well-designed site for raw vegan recipes, of all niches. This is, honestly, the first recipe site I’ve ever *enjoyed using*. Looks like there’s a great community here as well. (source)

We’d love to have you stop by and try a recipe or two, check us out on Twitter, or subscribe to our recipe RSS.

QuickTime is awesome. It’s been an integral part of the Mac experience for a long time. It would be most regrettable if something were to happen to my favorite media player.

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We’ve been customers of 37signals - users of their fine Basecamp project management system - for almost four years, which is almost as long as it’s been around. One thing I’ve always liked about Basecamp, and a big part of why I’ve been willing to pay fifty bucks a month for so long now, is the fact that they don’t market to my clients. I like using an unbranded URL, in my case needmore.clientsection.com. And I like the fact that nowhere on the screen is a pitch for their product. This is very important to me, because I don’t want my clients to be distracted by anything while getting a project done.

Unfortunately, this all changed out of the blue a few days ago. With no notice, 37signals announced that they were changing their policy, and that over time all plans would use the same branded URL, and as far as I could tell, they were going to advertise their product in my page footer. In fact, until this change, there was a reassuring message in the footer, beside the link to their product, informing me that this footer would not be shown to my clients. That message is now gone.

Here is some of the reasoning behind this change, according to 37signals.

Initially we thought it would be important to hide the Basecamp brand name because, at the time, we (37signals) were still primarily a web design company. Basecamp was just a side project back then. We worried that competing web design firms would hesitate to use our Basecamp product if they thought their clients could easily trace Basecamp back to 37signals — a company that also designed web sites.

Would these web design companies think we’d use Basecamp as a conduit to pitch their clients on our own web design services? We’d never do that, and never did, but we wanted to do everything we could to assure them we weren’t interested in selling their clients on competing web development services. Hiding the “Basecamp” brand name and basecamphq.com domain name was the best way we could think of to shield 37signals from their clients.

They also sneak in a confession of what I had suspected right away:

...the brand name “Basecamp” will appear in a few places it didn’t before. A small Basecamp logo will also be visible to all users at the bottom of the screen.

While I appreciate an explanation, I respectfully disagree. In fact, it had never occurred to me that 37signals would try to steal our clients, not at all. Rather, I appreciated that since I was willing to pay for this service, they were willing to forego advertising to my clients in any way at all. It’s not about their design services, it’s about the impression that our customers were using software that was running on our server (though it wasn’t), provided by and supported by us (which it was). If one of our clients has a problem with Basecamp, they don’t go to 37signals, they come to us.

Over the years, we’ve spent a hell of a lot of time explaining why they couldn’t respond by email to a message, for example, while 37signals insisted that this wasn’t a problem. It was, it was a huge problem (since remedied, after years of pestering by their users), but 37signals didn’t know how bad the situation was because they don’t support the product, as far as our clients are concerned.

That is why we resent this change in policy. Basecamp is the type of system that you invest lots of time and effort in, over time. It runs on someone else’s servers, so you trust them to behave in a reasonable manner, and hopefully keep the general direction and policy of the service intact. This strikes me as a fairly big change in that direction and policy. I understand that things change, but not only were customers provided no advance notice, but none of their blogs nor help forums mention the change. It is only a notice that was shown to me when I logged in one day, and now it’s gone. While writing this post, I had difficulty even finding their original information to reference. I think this betrays the fact that they realize this isn’t a very cool thing to do, and they feel a bit guilty.

If 37signals really did care what their users thought about this change, they would have posted the message on their blog, or on their forum. They would invite discussion, rather than simply provide an email address for comments. They might have suggested the change beforehand, and asked for feedback from their loyal customers. They did none of these things, and I suspect it’s because they know people are going to be unhappy about it.

This is no way to treat your customers.

A few years ago, we started working with Hoyle and Company as our accountants. We came to them after some rather frustrating experiences and have been ever so impressed with their work. So much so that we consistently tell other business folks about them. We’ve recommended them enough that we joke about wallpapering our office with their delightful thank-you cards (they send one each time someone we recommend gets in touch with them). Today, out of the blue, we received a gorgeously wrapped package with these cute as a button silver baby spoons from our accountants.

Thanks, Lynn and Shannon. You two are the best!

I’ve been using RSS news readers for quite a long time. And I’ve probably tried at least a dozen different pieces of software for this task. And like many folks these days, I eventually settled on Google Reader.

I did not, at first, think that I would like Reader. It’s not-very-pretty, in the typical Google fashion, and until you learn some keyboard shortcuts it can be a bit clunky. Given the choice between a desktop app and a web-based app, I’ll often prefer the native Mac OS X desktop app because it’s typically faster, better designed, and integrates well with the rest of my setup. But Reader has solved virtually all of those problems for me. And while I haven’t seen any numbers, it seems to me that it went from obscurity to market dominance with almost no fanfare at all.

There are many features in Reader that would be difficult or impossible with a desktop application. I can share articles with Kandace or other friends, find out what she recommends that I read, and of course it doesn’t matter what computer I’m at - everything stays in sync automatically. And I really like their Featured Reading Lists, which let you see what other prominent writers and thinkers are reading, and subscribe to them yourself.

Finally, it has a great iPhone interface. You can do pretty much everything with your iPhone, and they keep it simple and well-designed, not to mention that it stays in sync. I personally also use an iPhone app called Newsstand, which integrates perfectly with Reader and adds its own twist to the interface, but that’s just me. I’m a sucker for those cute iPhone apps.

If you read a lot on the web, I recommend giving Google Reader a try, if you haven’t already.