Posts by Clay Reinken

If there’s anything I dislike more than Internet Explorer, it would probably be arriving at my car only to find a big pink envelope under my wiper blade. Parking tickets are probably the worst thing ever. They have a high probability of ruining my day, especially when I could’ve saved myself a $20 fine with only a nickel. And it doesn’t help that this $20 fine is 100% my fault… or should be 100% my fault. Until recently, I would have taken complete accountability for my tardiness or inability to divide an hour into 60 minutes, but a new parking system implemented earlier this year has unnecessarily complicated a very straightforward task.

Headlines were made this Spring when ParkIndy signed a 50 year lease with the City of…

Starting today, you can now subscribe to receive KA+A blog updates directly in your inbox. Simply sign up using the form to the right, and you’ll start receiving customized emails with our latest blog content.

Hooking RSS into email is nothing new. But until recently, the simplest way to send automated RSS updates was by using a feed service such as FeedBurner or FeedBlitz. Unfortunately, these solutions only provide very limited font and color customization of the email. And that’s about it.

FeedBurner’s RSS to Email Preview

After some quick research for FeedBurner alternatives, MailChimp’s RSS-to-email feature is pretty much a no-brainer. Using your…

On Saturday night, Formstack co-hosted the Big Party for Small Business at The Highball. Highlights from the evening included a school bus ride; great food and drinks; endless tables full of swag from some of our favorite online tools such as Harvest and MailChimp; meeting the co-founder of Alltop.com, Guy Kawasaki, at his Enchantment book signing table; and last but not least, Janneane, Joe, and I dominating the bowling lanes. Continue reading to see more photos from the party.

This year we had another very successful turnout at our 4th annual SXSW Indy Invasion Crawfish Boil at the Boiling Pot, more than doubling last year’s attendance. Continue reading for more photos from the night.

The KA+A SXSW Crew

Continue reading to see more photos from Day 1 at SXSW 2011.

SXSW 2010 : KA+A in Austin

For the past five years the KA+A crew has made its way to Austin, Texas for SXSW, the largest and fastest growing event in design, UX, and all things interactive. Every year we boost our level of involvement and 2011 is no exception. This year we’re excited to have the opportunity to share some of our own ideas at My Prototype Beat Up Your Business Plan – KA+A’s inaugural SXSW panel. We’re also excited to represent TinderBox, KA+A’s first product, which launched shortly after last year’s event.

While these are reasons enough to be eager for our return to Austin, I can’t overlook what the biggest take-away will be…

Don’t get me wrong, the favicon is still important, but it can often be overlooked as the only icon necessary when designing a website. Two others that are quite essential to every website or blog are the Apple Touch and Facebook Share icons.

The Favicon

If you are new to this Internet business, the favicon is a 16×16 icon used to distinguish a website in the URL or tab of your browser. The favicon has been around for a while, but is still worth mentioning if only to clarify which browsers support which filetypes. Or should I say, which browser doesn’t support image icons. I’ll give you one guess. Internet Exploder only recognizes the .ico file type, which…

It’s a funny thing to think how quickly technology changes, and how quickly formats become obsolete. Take for instance this website, which uses sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) to replace headers with a custom font. A few years ago, there were only a few routes you could take if you wanted to use custom fonts without dealing with the dreaded image replacement. Turns out, the sIFR route is a dead end only a year after our implementation. Not only does is slow page loading time, but it becomes increasingly unreliable with the popularity of ad (Flash) blockers to speed up browser load times (because nothing will ever be fast enough).

Subscription based font services seem…

Every year, as we arrive in Austin, we usually head immediately to our favorite spot, The Boiling Pot, for some spicy crawfish and Shiner Bock. And every year, our guest list continues to grow. We didn’t have any trouble finding Hoosiers in Austin this year as we were pleased to have over 40 of our friends join us to kick off what ended up being a very memorable and engaging week. With everyone’s hands and eyes cemented to their iPhones for the remainder of the conference, the menu at The Boiling Pot seemed the appropriate choice to start it off, forcing us to put down our phones for some real socializing and interaction.

Joining us this year was the Formstack

Surprise, surprise. IE6 is back in the news. After hackers exploiting a weakness in IE6 launched an attack on Google and at least twenty other companies in China last week, Microsoft has issued a “critical” patch for it’s dated web browser. Actually, this isn’t so much news or a surprise really. When is Microsoft not fixing vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6? We can probably expect this sort of thing to happen for the next 4 years, until Microsoft stops supporting its abomination in 2014

The reason this specific incident is making headlines this week is because French and German officials are now making recommendations to not use Internet Explorer anymore, regardless of the version. Bravo…