The Signalman gem's origins As any company grows, it reaches a point where it is no longer in the "startup phase". No longer can the target market arbitrarily be redefined or features be pushed out at a whim. At this point, analytics and A/B testing become increasingly important. A few years ago, we found this to be a point of pain at CustomInk and sought to create a more robust solution to meet our needs. Thus Signalman was born.

Ken Collins and Jonathan Lehman will be presenting "Like A Ross! - Building The CustomInk.com Living Style Guide" at SassyDC this Wednesday, September 10th. Be sure to register if you plan on attending: https://nvite.com/SassyDC/f4a

Here at CustomInk we are building the foundation necessary to move forward with creating a new, fully responsive CustomInk experience. Because we have such a large codebase, and customer experience is our #1 priority, we performed exhaustive research and became fully prepared in all departments before we even thought about writing a line of code. Our UX team prepared by familiarizing themselves with the popular responsive grid systems and frameworks. They learned how to write the HTML and CSS of...

The scalable vector graphics format has a really nifty way to define and reuse objects. It does this by allowing objects or paths to be defined in the <defs> element and then used one or many times with the <use> element. It is a great way to keep your SVG's file size low. Even better, it makes for a great programmatic interface to dynamically compose an image. While designing the third iteration of my personal MetaSkills.net blog, I decided to...

Structuring CSS is hard. I have worked on many projects where the CSS was just an afterthought, a hack to get the page to look a particular way. With the increasing interest in frontend tools and development, these days are behind us. Ask yourself the question, "how and why do we apply structure to the code we write?" Now you might wonder, why don't we apply these same rules and considerations to the CSS (and Sass) that we write? There...

CustomInk technology is proud to announce that John Dyer is our newest Inker! Following the new hire tradition, John pushed his first deploy within a couple days of arrival.

The engineering team at CustomInk is always looking to learn new things. We've come to realize that the density of the information is not always the most important thing. Rather, exploring a single idea in depth can be a lot of fun. Avdi Grimm's Ruby Tapas has provided us with a really simple way to execute on this idea.