If you can’t say something constructive…

For the last 6 months I've been contributing to the TinyMCE forums. In this time I've noticed a couple of disturbing trends, one of which became quite evident in a recent members post to a very old thread.

From time to time people will ask questions about how to make TinyMCE do something that it's not really designed to do. This is mostly to output non-standard HTML and is usually due to the "client requirements". The most common one is the use of <BR> tags instead of <P> tags.

I'm not going to join into the argument of using <P> tags as a good friend and colleague posted a great round up of the importance of P tags already. What I'm interested in, is the way people respond both in terms of the initial question, and the followup responses.

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Preparation is the Key

I know, it seems obvious, but preparation is definitely crucial to the success of your presentation/demo.

The other day I watched a presentation by Jesse Desjardins called "You Suck at Powerpoint – 5 Shocking Design Mistakes You Need to Avoid".

Along with many useful design mistakes, he made an interesting observation that

Most experts say: An outstanding 1-hour presentation takes 30 hours or more of prep time.

— Slide 39

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Good customer service isn’t hard

I was catching up on some blogs recently when I came across the article "Now that’s what I call service!" by Mike Taylor. Mike received some outstanding service from his local pub when he mistakenly left change behind. As an exponent of the Fish! Philosophy I can related to the idea that a business would want to "delight its customers" in this way.

His story reminded me of the differences in service I experienced earlier this year during the migration of our two phone lines when we moved offices.

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First Impressions

We recently had two new businesses move into the offices next door. Looking through the doors highlighted to me how important the first impression of an office is to the energy you bring when you walk in the door.

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Personal Connections

Ephox is 10 years old and to celebrate we flew everyone in from our US and UK offices to where it all began … Brisbane.

The celebrations kicked off with a party on Thursday followed by a weekend away at the Hyatt Coolum for employee’s and their partners.

While the weekend away did provide an opportunity to talk shop, it was the personal conversations that I feel pay the biggest dividend.

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