A christmas present: The website of Kuhn, Kammann & Kuhn
What did you get for christmas?
We already made ourselves a first christmas present two weeks ago: the new website of Kuhn, Kammann & Kuhn – a Cologne-based business communication agency. Well, more precisely: the guys from Kuhn, Kammann & Kuhn made theirselves a first christmas present, but nevertheless it's also a great pleasure for us to see this jewel (ruby!) of a website working and growing in public.
Back in october, when Wendelin from KKK asked us to build their new agency website, we thought "well, usually we're building complex web apps, rarely corporate websites", but then their way to deal with both editorial and aggregated social media content in a constantly changing grid layout foo¹ grabbed our attention. And now, after eight days of exciting agile cooperation and several feature iterations, it's done – and online.
What's so special about this website?
On the one hand it's this mix of a tag-based navigation and a flexible grid of content objects. No more static sitemaps! Tags basically work as content filters, but it's not done at this point here: Every content object has its lifetime and is constantly fading until it isn't visible anymore. In addition to the tags and visibilities of an object, every collection of content objects is a well prepared composition of different content types, which gets slightly shuffled to look nicer without loosing the chronology of its items. Finally all objects are positioned and animated by a piece of JavaScript, which handles any combination of small and large boxes.
Hands on Superfeedr
Beside their editorial content, the KKK people want to aggregate a bunch of Twitter-Accounts and Weblogs constantly. Because we don't like the hassle with grabbing and parsing a growing number of feeds, we're using the Superfeedr API for the first time in this project. There's a handy (but incomplete) Rails plugin on Github you might want to use to subscribe and unsubscribe to feeds, but the HTTP POST notification parsing part isn't covered. So Feedzirra helped us to get down to the beef. After two weeks of running the app with Superfeedr we're not missing one feed entry, but the time period between publishing a tweet and Superfeedr's POST notification is often longer than the promised 15 minutes – yet. We'll see, seems like a painless feed grabbing solution anyway, if real-time doesn't mean instant delivery in your biz.
Enjoy surfing the new website of Kuhn, Kammann & Kuhn!
¹ It’s hard to find the right words. You have to see feel it…
We are Railslove
Since 2008 we have been building web applications for you. We’ve done some really great projects with our partners and we’re happy to see our own web service, channelthing, growing. So, we think it is time to introduce ourselves in more than 140 chars.
As you might know, we three, Tim, Michael and I, started Railslove two years ago. However, in our project we work with many other great web developers who deserve to get mentioned. So, to give you a better insight into our network, we’re going to reveal the “Railslove Family” over the next few weeks.
Yours,
Jan, Tim and Michael