Supporting The Nonprofit Community's Web Presence

Due to limited funds and technical skill, many nonprofit organizations have no websites or the websites they do have are outdated. However, maintaining an updated web presence is an important tool for fundraising, outreach and awareness. Concentric Sky recently completed a charity initiative in the Silicon Shire to help eight nonprofit organizations establish or improve their web presence. In an effort to give back to t...

Within a few years, most web searches will be on mobile devices (tablets, mobile phones, etc.) -- in fact, we've already passed the point of no return. However, the web hasn't been designed over the last 50 years to (elegantly) fit in your pocket. Small screens, slow wireless connections, and non-optimized interfaces -- remember the time before "pinch to zoom" became commonplace? -- are several of the main problems. Or, opportunities for improvement. If you are going to deliver content to mobile devices, it has to be able to work on a variety of devices -- with varying display resolutions, processors, and bandwidth.

This is an intermediate article on Compass & Sass. Sass is a Ruby meta-language on top of CSS that makes CSS more like a programming language and less like a static markup language. Compass is a library and utility that leverages Sass with @mixin functions. @mixin functions do a lot of calculations and browser-specific prefixes for you.

Since Compass and Sass were released (and other similar tools), Web design has changed for the better. Compass and Sass have made mockup-le...

I’m excited to announce the 1.0 release of Sky Visitor, a library we’ve been developing for the past year to make all-things-registration related easier in Django.

Think of Sky Visitor as a utility belt that django.contrib.auth wears out on the job. With the release of Django 1.5, auth includes the long-awaited functionality to create a custom user model. Sky Visitor works great with a standard or custom user model.

My last blog post tried to explain the reasons behind explicitely declaring self in instance methods. It showed the mechanics of instancemethod – the object used to bind classes and class instances to functions – but I didn't explain how this occurs or why it is desirable. 

Forty-­two? How am I supposed to reach forty-­two students and give them the individualized education they need? I’m not sure they’ll even fit in my classroom, I remember thinking when I saw my class lists for the first time. Like most teachers nowadays, I had to adapt and think of creative ways to reach as many students as possible with the tools available to me. 

Python’s self argument drives some people crazy. For one, you must explicitly define it in every class method. It then rudely injects itself in places it’s not wanted.

class Foo(object):
    x = 9
    def __init__(self,x):
        self.x = x

    def bar(self,y):
        return self.x + y

If you come from a C++, Java, or similar background, self in __init__ and bar seems redundant. Python brags about simple and elegant code, so what gives?

Khan Academy, with over 3,900 educational videos, offers world-class educational content to anyone (for free!) through their collection of online videos. We partnered with Khan Academy to create the Viewer for Khan Academy.

"Our roots are in the education technology space, and we believe strongly in what the team at Khan Academy is trying to accomplish. Building Viewer for Khan Academy was our way of supporting Khan Academy and saying thanks.” -Cale Bruckner

Cale Bruckner, Concentric Sky’s Vice President, on why Concentric Sky pursued development of the Viewer for Khan Academy app for Android.

On February 4th, Jeremy Keith wrote a post on Google's "Download Chrome" button being broken:

"By all means add all the JavaScript whizzbangery to your site that you want. But please make sure you’re adding it on a solid base of working markup. Progressive enhancement is your friend."

Google is hoping to track downloads using Javascript, but when that fails, it prevents users from successfully downloading Google Chrome. We can assume that Google would rather everyo...

I had a conversation with Concentric Sky’s Design Team about their thoughts on the Do’s and Don’ts of web design, with an eye toward 2013. Below, they've shared their knowledge about how to best approach software design in the New Year.