Judging a Book by its Cover

Follow along with the books read by the creator of Libzig.
To see the full blog, head to http://libzig.wordpress.com.

Life in the Pit (or How to Pamper your Programmers

The office of MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry is located in the heart of Downtown Grand Rapids. It’s on the sixth floor of an old building next to Van Andel Arena. When the elevators open on the sixth floor, visitors are treated to an open floor plan, a nice reception area, a nifty coffee bar, some [...]

Westward Bound – a writing journey

My wife, Denise, and I like to travel.  We don’t often get to travel with our friends and family, but we love to take them with us to share in our adventures.  To do that, we write about our adventures and share pictures. Typically, it is enough to share our Travelpod site and keep that [...]

Cloudflare – protect your website

A month ago, I wrote about the Google Page service.  The Page Service caches your static content and serves it up from their servers for faster page views.It sounds great in theory, and perhaps it will perform well in practice.  Currently, it’s still in a beta period and available to only a small set of [...]

Google Page Service

Do you feel the need, the need for speed? It’s an ongoing battle for coders and webmasters to make their page show up faster. A slow load time can cause the multi-tasking, instant-gratification-needing web generation to move on to another site before you have a chance to show them what your site is all about. [...]

Google Apps Transition – The pain you’ll feel and how to fix (some of) it

Google Apps for Business is a great solution for companies that want email, calendar and documents hosted in the cloud by Google.  Mindscape, where I work, has used Google Apps for Business for a number of years now. It allows me to have aaron [at] mindscapesolutions.com as my email address.  What it did not allow [...]

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

A few years back I read a book that changed my perspective of the fantasy genre.  I’ve enjoyed stories of swords, sorcery, orcs and heroic quests for a long time now.  But for me, after you get past Tolkien’s seminal work, the rest of the stories tend to devolve into the same old story of [...]

Decision Points by George Bush

I find it hard to credit anything the press has to say about any person, especially someone as polarizing as the President of the United States of America. The vehemence that the political milieu generates started in this country long before the present day filled with tweets, buzz, blogs, and the twenty four hour news [...]

The Need for Mobile Sites – a counter point

For users of mobile phones today, a website that offers a mobile counterpart is a website that will be returned to often.  For me, it’s ESPN’s mobile site. It has great navigation, easily allows me to find scores to the games I care about, let’s me watch games through a great Gamecast feature, and has [...]

Summer Reading – 2010

It’s been a busy summer of devouring books as fast as I can; so fast that I couldn’t get a review written of each of them. So, instead, here’s a rapid fire list of what rocked and what was as dull as a rock. Books that Rocked: Outliers: The Story Of Success – Malcolm Gladwell [...]

Review of Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

The founders of 37 signals have something to say about business, and it may not be what you are used to hearing.  This firm started out in 1999 with just three people. In 2004, they created Basecamp to help manage their projects. Soon, their clients wanted to use the tool themselves, so Basecamp was offered [...]