Jotham Sederstrom’s public reaction to being fired cold by the New York Daily News for appearing to publish plagiarized content is remarkable in its candor and its acceptance of blame but belies the pressing issue at hand for those of us who build news websites. Jotham would still be toiling away for his teetering employer if not for a harebrained Content Management System…
The latest from Alley’s team of experts.
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A couple of weeks ago, I attended Clarity Conference in San Francisco—a conference focusing on design systems and style guides. Design systems are useful for any company with multiple people working on a single project, but at an agency like Alley, a design system proves particularly useful and effective.
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Since its inception, the online media industry has been forced to adapt and reinvent itself based on the whims of fast-moving technologies. For publishers, the problem is that if they don’t adapt, readers might go somewhere else that will. However, even — especially! — for major publishing incumbents, the path to adaption has often been…
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In a complex application, many components will need to manage both data access and internal state. Where it really gets tricky is when we need to know something about components that are nested in the tree or data needs to persist across components or states. For example, we may want to make our router aware…
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If you’re interested in barbecues, hunting, or any other carnivorous activity, then the newest Alley-built site is for you. Last week Zero Point Zero productions launched the redesigned and rebuilt TheMeatEater.com to add to its showcase of food-focused sites like Food Republic and Mind of a Chef, and Alley was proud to bring the site to life.
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A few months ago, this Hacker News item sparked a lively and—fittingly, for a discussion about this topic—asynchronous discussion about the role of group chat systems in open source projects and distributed companies. At Alley, we use Slack. We’re very happy with it, and it’s a really important venue for expressing our company culture. However, I should…
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The redesigned Twincities.com, the website of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, launched last week, and Alley Interactive is proud to have played a part. Through strategy, design, and development, we worked closely with Pioneer Press’s parent company Digital First Media to build a forward-thinking site that improved the online experience for Twincities.com’s audience, editors, and…
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As software developers, we routinely must maintain code that we did not build in the first place. Maybe the original developers left the company, or maybe they were consultants whose contracts ended. Our tendency is to blame these developers for whatever we dislike about their code to deflect criticism, apologize for defects, and gain permission…
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Alley Interactive developers have come up with a simple SEO solution for WordPress sites: The WP SEO plugin, now approved for WordPress VIP and available for anyone to use. We asked Alley’s David Herrera to explain the power of this plugin.
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Let your readers get news on the go. The 1.0.0 version of the Apple News plugin is now available for download for any WordPress or WordPress VIP site. Now any publisher can push their WordPress content directly into the Apple News platform with a few simple actions.
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Analytics powerhouse Parse.ly announced their Agency Alliance program last week and all of us at Alley Interactive are excited to be one its inaugural members. Parse.ly is one of the leaders in real-time analytics for digital publishers and many of our clients find its platform invaluable for discovering information about their audience.
