camworld

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
171
Submissions
47
Member since
Jun 2
http://cameronbarrett.com http://about.me/cam http://k12presser.com

I design and build private online communities. I've recently worked for the World Economic Forum, Teach for America, and am now leading the redesign and redevelopment of all web-based properties at Newark Public Schools.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 11 years ago
This is not, I repeat, this is not my old CamWorld (pioneering blog) site from the late 1990s. :-)
Comment · 11 years ago
Drupal is a great platform as well. I work with K-12 school districts every day and the majority are not choosing Drupal because the support and custom Drupal development needed is too expensive. Instead, they are choosing WordPress.

The exception is the higher education market (colleges and universities), who are choosing Drupal over WordPress.

Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
This is a really smart acquisition. WordPress continues to dominate the CMS market. With the upcoming REST API, it's only going to get better. I'm watching niche CMS industry after niche CMS industry crumble under the continual migration to WordPress.

The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much money (your U.S. taxpayer dollars!) for barely functional CMS's. The FCC voted recently to prohibit spending federal money on these solutions, a practice that basically created the market, so now every school district in the U.S. (14,000+) are looking around for cheaper and better solutions. A large percentage of them are migrating to WordPress.

Comment · 12 years ago
Newark, CA and Newark, NJ are different places.

Newark, CA --> Newark Unified School District

Newark, NJ --> Newark Public Schools

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
This is great, if....the school software vendors adopt it as a standard and allow their systems to be Clever-enabled.

I work for a large school district and a large majority of our vendor solutions come with their own proprietary, locked-down technologies. When queried, some of these vendors see the writing on the wall and say they are working on integrating with Clever while others keep their heads stuck in the sand while counting their millions of taxpayer dollars spent on overly-complex, un-flexible and un-interoperable solutions.

Comment · 13 years ago
I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names, addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and most do. Private schools do not have this issue.
Comment · 13 years ago
I'm not sure I see the fucking point of using fucking swear words.
Comment · 13 years ago
This guy rationalized his own suicide. I read a few of this essays. He's cuckoo as a clock.
Comment · 13 years ago
Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.

The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.

Comment · 13 years ago
This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.

I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.

What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.

Comment · 13 years ago
Congratulations to LayerVault on their biggest day of traffic ever. Whether this brew-ha-ha was intentional or not, a lot more people are now aware of them than before today.

I like browsing their Designer News links on a daily basis, but I would think twice about signing up for a service run by people with questionable character and morals, which is the feeling I am coming away with after reading through this thread.

This whole thing could have been handled a lot better and with far more professionalism.

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