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I recently read an article that covers the emerging paradigm of responsive web and the mobile first approach. What I really took from this was the content strategy used in designing digital experiences often neglects determining the importance of individual pieces of content. Prioritizing this content goes a long way to defining your entire web experience.

The mobile first approach considers that your smallest medium of information consumption in today’s world is through mobile devices, iPhone + Android, etc. Taking this approach means your screen real-estate needs to be better utilized by providing only the most important content for the user within the smallest viewport.

The reason this really translates well into web design as a whole, is that traditionally designers have faced a desktop screen approach to fitting in all relevant information, instead of narrowing down each content elements’ importance. Not only does this focus help drive the web design, but really helps organizations understand their own internal content hierarchy and how it affects their customers.

Using content as your driving user relevance benchmark, it's becomes  apparent as to where the focus should be and as you scale up your content you can see the priority of content unfolding to fit the canvas, with your central focal point always being around the most relevant user content.

Checkout this great article and critique of the Starbucks new responsive web website by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Image by purpleslog via Flickr

We still live in an age where security is too much an afterthought, it doesn't *sparkle* enough – but lack thereof quickly removes any product sheen you ever had when exposed.

Inspiring to see young minds challenging the status-quo in Information Security, like this young girl at Defcon19.

PcWorld -10yr old outs security flaw

This is only a game break  - the scary thing is, you’ll never even hear of the majority of security breaches your Government and Banks experience on a daily basis.

Image via Wikipedia

I like a good paradigm challenge, so when I stumbled upon this series post by Jeffrey Palermo on software architecture using an Onion layered analogy as opposed to the traditional Stacked layer analogy approach of separating concerns, I was hooked. He talks about something I’ve been battling to put my finger on for years.

The traditional, stacked, layered approach to software architecture was intended to create loose coupling has always had that noble goal – to separate concerns to a level of total layer autonomy. All the projects I’ve worked on follow this principle, yet every time it comes to an architecture overhaul it becomes clear just how tightly coupled these layers have become.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of MVC3 work lately and I like the way the .Net framework is heading, the little things like Convention over Configuration for dependency injection just make programming that much easier and step closer to purer loose coupling. This is where I stumbled onto this view of looking at dependent layers.

I believe focusing  on Domain Driven Design and development is the right approach to creating an agile project that can adapt the users needs readily. That's why I like the Onion Architecture, It focuses on the clear restraint – the Business domain’s needs, no solution can un-couple from it’s requirements – otherwise it becomes something it was never intended for.

The Onion approach builds dependencies outwards from this absolute constraint and approaches projects more realistically. Read the three part series below, Jeffrey does a great job of explaining the thought process.

Jeffrey Palermo on Onion Architecture:  http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/

Image by courtneyBolton via Flickr

I read about Sitecore’s upcoming presentation at Dreamcore of Tableau using Sitecore Analytics. It sounded quite interesting so I decided to check it out.

Sitecore reports are a bit cumbersome for my liking and the thought of plugging in the Analytics database directly into a reporting tool that generated it’s own reports sounded perfect.

From the look of the screencast it looks quite powerful:  http://www.screenr.com/V2i

I’ve downloaded the trial and am going to start playing asap.

Checkout their website: http://www.tableausoftware.com