In the past two and a half years, we’ve built and launched many websites and web-applications for our clients, all of which we’re quite proud of. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot about project management, scheduling, client relationships, and all of that fun stuff. We worked diligently and put in a lot of long days and nights to meet deadlines and keep our clients happy.

All the while we’ve been consulting, Dusty and myself have poured countless hours into our products: Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’ve been splitting our time and focus between consulting and our products, which has been nothing short of difficult, stressful, and time consuming. (If we focus on the consulting side of our business, the product side suffers and vice versa.) Nonetheless, both SPN and Tripleseat have gained considerable traction and momentum over the last year, and, as founders, the need for us to dedicate ourselves fully to these endeavors has become paramount. As a result, we’ve decided that we will be halting consulting work and focusing 100% of our efforts on our products. It’s something that we’ve always wanted to do and there’s no better time to act on it than now.

Note to all of our current clients: We will honor all outstanding projects to which we’ve committed. Additionally, we will continue to support and maintain all projects we’ve built.

However, we will want to transition ourselves out of any and all support and maintenance roles as quickly and realistically as possible. We will be touching base with all of our current clients over the next week to determine the best plan of action moving forward.

Lastly, suffice to say, we will not be accepting any new projects going forward.

Ideally, our transition from a consulting shop to a product shop would be seamless, and we’d be able to find a home for all current employees in our reorganized company. Unfortunately, in the short term, sans consulting revenue, we would not be able to financially support either of the Erins so we’ve had to let them go. It’s one of the hardest business decisions we’ve faced; they’re two of the best employees one could hope for. So, any of you out there who are looking for a talented developer or designer, let us know and we’ll be happy to get you in contact with them.. or you can simply email Erin Hawkins or Erin Standley directly (click on their names for their email addresses) or find them on twitter: @erinhawkins, @tinyxl.

What Lies Ahead

We’re very excited for what lays ahead for both Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’re aiming to grow these companies to the point where they are wildly successful. Both of these products will almost certainly grow to the point where we will need to hire on people, need more or additional space, take on funding, etc. For the time being, both SPN and Tripleseat will continue to operate out of our current office in mid-town Omaha. We’ll be bunking down, working hard, and knocking these products out of the park.

More to follow in the specifics of each of our software / company endeavors. For now, thanks to everyone who has been a supporter, client, friend and follower of BrightMix over the past two and a half years. It has been a fantastic run up to this point, and we’re more excited than ever for what’s in store.

BrightMix Founders,
Dusty & Kevin

Happy holidays from all of us at BrightMix! It’s been a crazy year, with lots of exciting things happening around here, but we wanted to take a minute and wish all of our friends and family a happy holiday season. We couldn’t have done it without the support of those around us, so a big thanks to all of you. We’re looking forward to 2010!

Since we have now have a Jinglemaster, we thought it would only be fitting to leave you with a little Christmas cheer, courtesy of your friends here at BrightMix and our Jinglemaster Devin. Enjoy, and we’ll see you all next year!

HUGE congrats to Erin for making it all the way to NYC, we’re suuuuuper proud of her! And though the judges may not have thought her design was the winner, everyone in Omaha (and Alaska) certainly thought so!

Enjoy some pictures we snapped of the event (forgive the crappy quality, I took them with my BlackBerry)…

We made buttons (thanks GoodTwin for the designs!) !!!

We projected the live feed on the wall, and displayed a live Twitter feed on the TV

Everyone gathered ’round in our newly (almost) finished basement to watch the competition!

And if you’re really interested, we live-streamed all of us sitting watching the live-stream of the Cut & Paste event

Below is the code I am now using to create my RenderPartialToString method:

/// Static Method to render string - put somewhere of your choosing
public static string RenderPartialToString(string controlName, object viewData)
{
     ViewDataDictionary vd = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
     ViewPage vp = new ViewPage { ViewData = vd };
     Control control = vp.LoadControl(controlName);

     vp.Controls.Add(control);

     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
     using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb))
     {
         using (HtmlTextWriter tw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
         {
             vp.RenderControl(tw);
         }
     }

     return sb.ToString();
}

As you can see, this method is much shorter and doesn’t have any sort of additional library contingencies. Pass it a path reference to your partial view and ViewData object (maybe you want that, maybe you don’t) and away you go. The following is an example of how to call the above method from your controller:

// Controller Method
public string Create()
{
     {...}
     var viewData = new SomeViewData { Note = n };

     string s = RenderPartialToString("~/Views/Clients/Notes/ClientNotesRow.ascx", viewData);

     return s;
}

That’s all there is to it!

Be sure to check out the first post in our GridView series, which explains and provides code to render your GridView, including sorting and paging

In my last GridView post, I explained how BrightMix solved the problem of creating sortable, paging GridViews in ASP.NET MVC. In this post, I’ll show you how we took advantage of the urls generated by the grid to maintain the state of the grid across postbacks.

When we set out to write this code, we started with the basics. We knew that we needed to create an html helper that would append the “RedirectUrl” to a url (when a user leaves a grid to view an item’s details, for example), and another helper to read that same url and send the user back to the previous page, with their grid state in tact.

The code for our “AddRedirectHyperLink” is fairly straightforward. As with the paging and sorting, we rely heavily on our custom query string helpers to do the bulk of the work.

public static string GenerateRedirectUrl(RedirectProperties properties)
{
     string redirectUrl = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path;

     string qString = QueryString.SetValues(new NameValueCollection(), HttpContext.Current.Request.RawUrl);

     if (qString.Length > 0)
          redirectUrl += "?" + qString;

     if (!properties.Href.Contains("?"))
          properties.Href += "?";
     else
          properties.Href += "&";

     properties.Href += string.Format("{0}={1}", RedirectKey, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(redirectUrl));

     return properties.Href;
}

The tag on the view is also fairly straightforward. In order to generate the link, we have to populate the RedirectProperties class with the appropriate values for the text and url.

<%=Html.AddRedirectHyperLink(new RedirectProperties { Href=Url.RouteUrl("Default",
     new { action="View", controller="Home", id=c.Id}), Text="View Details" }) %>

Once we had the redirect information added to the url, we needed a way to read it back out of the url, and send the user back to their previous page.

public static string ReadFromRedirectUrl(RedirectProperties properties)
{
    string url = string.Empty;
    string redirectURL = QueryString.GetString(RedirectKey);
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(redirectURL))
    {
        if (redirectURL.Contains("?"))
        {
            int i = redirectURL.IndexOf("?") + 1;
            NameValueCollection collection = QueryString.CreateRedirectNameValueCollection(HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString[RedirectKey]);
            string qs = QueryString.FormatQueryString(collection);
            redirectURL = redirectURL.Substring(0, i) + qs;
        }

        url = redirectURL;
    }
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url))
    {
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(properties.BackupHref))
            url = properties.BackupHref;
    }

    return url;
}

The last step was to add the “ReadRedirectHyperLink” to our view and edit pages. You’ll notice we added an optional backup url. On the off chance the user landed on a page with out a redirect in their querystring, we don’t want the site to blow up.

<%= Html.ReadRedirectHyperLink(new RedirectProperties
    { Text = "Back", BackupHref = Url.RouteUrl("Root", new { action = "Index", controller = "Home" }) })%>

Click Here To Download The Code

When: Wednesday, Oct 7th @ 6:00pm

Where: Our office – 5018 Leavenworth St.

Signup: http://www.meetup.com/jquery-omaha

Hope to see you there!

After listening to that song over and over, we knew that we had to have a jingle of our own! We set him loose on the the BrightMix website, and merely gave him the direction that “maybe we have the background music be 8-bit“…

And thus, I present to you, the first ever (of many to come) BrightMix Jingle….

In case you want to sing along, I went ahead and pasted the lyrics below…

I’ve got a site that barely functions, need someone to lend a hand.

Need an interface that’s a junction of aesthetics and my plan.

My web one-dot-oh disaster needs web two-dot-oh pizazz

Ruby on Rails to turn up traffic and turn down my current spaz

Brightmix, we’ve got a solution for you, web two-dot-oh that easy for you to use

Brightmix, we’ve got a solution for you, for you

Brightmix, we’ve got a solution for you, web two-dot-oh that easy for you to use

Brightmix, we’ve got a solution for you, for you

A huge thanks to Devin for putting this together, and for Bentern for arranging the whole thing. It was a ton of fun to get this back and blast it on the office speakers. If you’d like a jingle of your own, let me know and I can connect you with Devin…

The SPN panel is: Don’t Move! Build a Startup Community Where You Live!

While you’re in there, you might check out some other friends of BrightMix:

• Joe Olsen of Phenomblue – Creative, The Third Wheel of Interactive Branding
• Joseph Knecht of Vipa Solutions – Interactive: Go Deeper and Wider
• Nathan Wright of Lava Row – Saving our Newspapers Through Community & How to Fall in Love With Your Social Network Again

Voting ends September 4th, so get out there and vote!

Today Kevin & I were featured in a story in the Omaha World-Herald today (and on Omaha.com). The story is *actually* about a new degree in IT Innovation available from the Universtiy of Nebraska-Omaha, but we were fortunate to be the recipients of a little buzz and have our mugshots up there for all the world to see.

The new degree has a focus on combining entrepreneurship with a more traditional IT program. We’ve known the program’s director, Dr. Jerry Wagner, for some time now though our involvement with Silicon Prairie News. We’re excited for this new program, and the new breed of students that it might foster.

Davidson, who graduated from Iowa State with a computer science degree in 2003, said he never imagined when he got out of school that he’d be his own boss. He worked at an unsatisfying corporate job before he ever got the bright idea to create BrightMix.

But Davidson said he might have been able to get where he is today even more quickly had he been enrolled in a program like the one the University of Nebraska at Omaha will begin offering this fall.

I believe that 100%. I speak quite often to groups of young entrepreneurs at Creighton and UNO, and one thing I always tell them is that when it comes to starting a business, they have a leg up on me — three years ago I wasn’t an entrepreneur. At no point during my education, or in the years to follow did I give even a single thought to starting a company, let alone was I encouraged to do so by my university. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I had an interest and passion for it. I commend any student who can recognize early on that when you’re in college is a fantastic time to start a company.

I wish these students and the program all the best. We will be keeping an eye on the program to see what kinds of exciting technologies and business might emerge… And you know we’ll be reaching out to these kids to be part of a future BrightMix and/or SPN Internship..