Great post this week on Boxes and Arrows about the usability of scrolling. Change comes hard and many folks still have "Users don't like to scroll" in their heads. Milissa Tarquini squashes this in her post Blasting the Myth of the Fold

The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page.

Someone asked me about our involvement with non-profits and Drupal's suitability compared to Convio recently. Here are some thoughts I shared with him and thought might be interesting to a wider audience.

More than 50% of our projects are with non-profits and it has been extremely rewarding. Almost all of them include Drupal. In general, we end up with non-profits that are a bit more established in scale. They are good partners that understand the value we deliver to their projects.

Many of us will be heading to Concord NH tonight to attend the initial meeting of the NH Drupal User Group.

Lucidus is excited to become a more active member in the Drupal community and supporting this user group is just one of the ways we will be doing that in 2009.

While the user groups tend to cater to a technical crowd, we also hope to have some "Lunch and Learn" events at our office where our customer can hear about the latest news impacting their websites and share best practices amongst themselves

So I've been digging into the Context and Spaces modules from Development Seed. These are two FANTASTIC modules that essentially, when combined, allow a developer to create a web site "feature" that can be essentially packaged for easily installation and use on multiple websites. For example, we're creating a project collaboration site to be used for our client projects that might include things like messages, files, site documentation, chat, support tasks, etc. The challenge thusfar is that the documentation is rather sparse but there are some great videos that show how to get started.

Someone asked me this morning about business/motivational books that I've read recently so I thought I'd put together a quick list of the books I like and the ones I intend to read soon.

Here's my book hall of fame:

It seems that every time I speak at a conference, I'm amazed when I ask for a show of hands of people who use version control software in their projects. The number is ridiculously low. Then we spend 10 minutes of the presentation going through why you would use it and how it works. I found a great visual intro to version control that's worth noting. (I'm a guy who likes pictures).

So we've been talking for several months about the next phase of our lucidus.net site. It had been around for more than  a year and was looking a bit long in the tooth. Moreover, it was on Drupal 5 and needed to be brought current. However, as with every cobbler, our children were not getting new shoes when customers were ready to pay.

My mom used to say that you could tell a lot about the person from the company they keep. (Usually it was to encourage me to find new friends). Today I'm pretty proud of of the company we (Lucidus) keeps at Clark Mortenson Agency. They are a client and our insurance company and they just won BusinessNH Magazine's "Best Company to Work For" award for 2008.

So I took my car to the dealership yesterday for service and took the shuttle back to work. Riding in the shuttle reminded me of one of the best examples of disregarding user's expectations regarding navigation.

Interesting article in Information Week touting Drupal that states "Drupal is conquering new territory as companies look to build Web sites designed from the ground up to support social interaction." It's great to see the product get the attention it deserves. It seems more an more that the conversation in the open source world has moved from Joomla to Drupal and Alfresco. (Guess we picked the right horse).