Zebra Kick Blog

Julian

Zebra Kick gets a New Window Decal

Our front office got some new artwork back in November. Alongside our sister company Monster Media, Inc., with whom we share the building, our company’s name and logo was added to the window.

Our logo being added to the front window

Our logo being added to the front window

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Justin

Object Literals vs. Constructed Objects in JavaScript

Another discussion born from a question at stackoverflow.  Today I’m laying out the differences between object literals and constructed objects, when to use which, how to get the most out of them, and a few other tricks along the way.  Let’s get started. Read Entire Post

Julian

Hash Link SEO – Google Jump To Results with Internal Links

Last week while searching for “Fallout 3 multiplayer” I noticed some really cool results in Google.  In the image below you can see that the Wikipedia result has in-site links to subsections of the page.  As if this was not impressive enough to see, the following result included a “Jump to Is there a multiplayer mode?”  Why is this so awesome?  This is another step toward Google supporting onsite semantic markup.  What microformat support could be next?

google-jump-to-link

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Julian

Google Maps Street View Tricycle Video

I was logging into my YouTube to upload some videos and stumbled upon this in my feed from Google.  Still only has 1k views at the time of this posting, but it’s sure to get picked up soon.

Basically this is how Google records street views for Google Maps on streets that can’t be driven on.  Pretty cool huh?

Here are a few links if you found this tricycle interesting.

Google Street View

Video explaining Street View (also embedded in link above).

Site were people post interesting street view images.

Julian

Quick Tip – Make Your Brand Look Popular, Even if its Not (Yet).

I was reminded of this age old marketing strategy when I stepped into Bamee Thai Noddle Shop in Chicago’s Lakeview district for a quick bowl of Tom Yum soup.  The place was empty at 1:30pm, but looked good.  I was immediately seated at the most visible table from the street.  Whether or not he realized it, this restaurant owner was using me as a marketing piece, showing passersby that the shop was doing business. Read Entire Post

Julian

Redbox Email Campaign Needs Focus

Red Box

Somehow, when I opened up my email and saw Hannah Montana in the latest eblast from Redbox, I just knew I had to take a screen shot. Here are a few observations about Redbox and their email campaign that bother me a bit. Read Entire Post

Justin

Magento Onepage Checkout Template Bug

Recently, we rolled out an installation of Magento 1.3.2.3 for one of our clients but ran into small a problem along the way. Being an established open source project, I initially assumed that the error was my own when I found that the onepage checkout process would stop working half way through (step 3 to be exact).  However, after digging around, I found that the problem was actually a bug in Magento’s JavaScript.  The bug has been reported and will hopefully be fixed soon, but in the meantime, here’s the fix and how I found it. Read Entire Post

Justin

Generic Singleton Factory in JavaScript

I recently contributed this little tidbit to stackoverflow’s Hidden Features of JavaScript and thought it would be best to elaborate it on it fully. In a recent client project, I needed a generic method to produce singleton instances of interface widgets.  This is the method that I came up with and it works pretty well. Before we begin, these are not singleton classes in the normal sense, but a generic singleton factory. Read Entire Post

Julian

Using Google Analytics to Find Browser Bugs

In June, one of our SEO clients had some development work done by a third party vendor. Once the site update was launched, it was our job to monitor the changes in indexing and make sure that everything was running smooth in the engines.  The work that had been done was on an e-commerce site, so you can imagine how important it is that things go smoothly.

After a couple weeks of collecting data we realized that our sales numbers were low. Given our recent increase in traffic we knew something was wrong. So, time to dig into Google Analytics.  Read Entire Post