On the eve of the Labor Day festivities, welcome to another edition of Friday Props, another way to bend your mind closer to the weekend. Last week I visited a friend of mine who lives in the flatlands of Minnesota, taking in its foreign cultural landscape and an accent thoroughly entrenched in the letter 'O.' Spectacularly different from Vermont, I spent most of my time bug-eyed wandering around Minneapolis-St. Paul and think that I owe the cities a bit more respect than I had before. First props go to the Skyways of Minneapolis. Constructed to help pedestrians navigate through the city through the winter, the Skyway links 69 city blocks using 2nd and 3rd-story bridges over the streets throughout the city. The climate-controlled walkways make it possible to travel practically throughout the entire city without ever stepping outside and boast restaurants and shops. ELEVEN MILES of walking. Yup.   On the food scene, Minneapolis and the Minnesota State Fair were playgrounds for my stomach. I could rave about the amazing Bloody Mary's, the bratwurst and the Pork Chop on a Stick, but the best culinary innovation I experienced was the Juicy Lucy. There's no dispute on what eatery invented the Lucy, but as [....] Read More >>

We're thrilled to be able to announce that we've provided a new web site for the fine folks at the Waitsfield Elementary School just in time for the new school year! When principal Kaiya Korb approached us with the project there were only a couple weeks to get the job done. We worked closely with Kaiya to develop the structure and design of the new website and are pleased as punch to be offering a greatly improved resource for all the intended audiences of the website:  Teachers, Staff, Students and Families. The Waitsfield Elementary website is built using the Edgeworks CMS for Schools.  We have two more planned release cycles for the Waitsfield website that will round out the schools' offering with Teacher Blogs, subscription services, print-friendly pages and more. Congratulations to the Waitsfield Elementary School on a successful launch of a brand new website to go with the opening days of a new school year! Read More >>

Ed is coding away on a tight deadline and Phil is on vacation, so I get to do Friday Props this week. I was "noodling" (as Ed would say) what my theme could be when I saw a Facebook post by Ed's son, Addison, about "liking" all the colors of the rainbow. I completely understand that. When someone asks "what color is your favorite?" all I can think is "how in the world do I answer that?" It's like asking which of your children is your favorite. None--each is uniquely themselves--perfect as they are. OK, to be fair there are a few colors I prefer less, but overall color and me--we have a love affair. Soothing greens, energizing reds, happy making yellows--well let's just say I am "for them." So here is my Friday Props going out to big, bold, fantastic, daring, exuberant COLOR!!! First--let's start with an architect who is after my heart.: Emmanuelle Moureaux. Here's just a couple of photos of her work. Check out her website and you will see why I am enamoured; she brings fun into her spaces with her use of vibrant color!     Every Christmas for years my fabulous sister-in-law, Cathy, has presented one family member [....] Read More >>

We had a great response to our Friday props request from Jeanelle Achee. Enjoy! So I heard that Ed Rooney likes fish tacos. I guess that spending time in California will do that to you... Anyway, it seemed like a great Friday Props! I just recently returned from Alaska where I learned how to make traditional Mexican tortillas (it's actually pretty darn easy, it involves two ingredients...) and to place inside the newly formed tortillas we made beer battered fish. Here's how to make fish tacos: 1. Buy a boat load of tilapia 2. Cut that tilapia up into strips 3. Mix fish batter and beer and dip the tilapia into it and let it soak 4. Buy a vat of peanut oil and deep fry that shiz 5. Put into a corn tortilla, add lettuce, mexican creme, fresh salsa and limes 6. Stuff your face (and if you are of age, 21 in the United States, add some tequila) It looks something like this when you are done: Another way to do it is you can just catch them in the wild... like this: That seems way more reasonable to me, but whatever. They wanted to do it the traditional way. It seemed important to learn a little about Mexican culture since [....] Read More >>

Tag! You're It! This week we're asking you to hand out the Friday Props either here in the comments on the blog or over on our Facebook page   Read More >>

Eggplant. Who doesn't love a little  Solanum melongena now and again? In this, our twelfth week of Friday Props, we're looking at eggplant. What a strange thing to be handing out props for, yes? Yes. But hold onto your hats because I promise you'll fully like what we have in store for you this week. Cooking up Color Love You might think we're going to look at recipes (and the thought did cross our minds), but instead we're handing out props to one of our favorite spots on the web to get inspiration for color schemes. Colour Lovers is a spot to create, share and use color schemes contributed by a community of users. The aubergine flower to the left was made with a color palette we liked named ... wait for it .... eggplant       Vermont Style Gardening We all know there are no better gardeners than those who manage to bring forth in our short growing season enough bounty to get a family through the winter. Well here's a garden in Rochester, Vermont where the bounty is so rich and the heart behind growing it so generous that we just had to hand out Props. (We don't actually know if there is any eggplant in [....] Read More >>

We are firm believers that every business ought to have a presence on the web - it's as basic as having a phone number. In fact, most people nowadays have their first contact with a business via the web - either on their laptop/desktop computers, tablets or smart phones. It behooves every small business owner to take seriously the need to be reachable, searchable and generally available online. But not all businesses need a full-blown website. In fact, there are many that can do just fine with a business card style website - one which shares the very basic information about a business that most people would be looking for anyway - telephone number, hours of operation, location, directions, links to any social media presence and perhaps the most recent news or specials, but not much more. We're happy to announce that we've used our Edgeworks CMS product to develop very reasonably priced Edgeworks CMS Biz Card websites for just these types of businesses. Our Edgeworks CMS Biz Card platform provides a simple, single page website with all the basic information for your small or micro-business. These sites are reasonably priced but offer features that are usually available only on much more expensive sites. Biz Card [....] Read More >>

For our eleventh installment of Friday Props I was going to start out with a tribute to space exploration and specifically to the Mars Curiosity rover en route and nearly arrived, but it got me thinking about the spirit of exploration in general. That then led me to thinking about the boundless potential of childhood and childhood dreams. So this week we are giving out Props for people and things in some way related to the wonder of childhood. Super Heroes The window washers at the London Children's Hospital dress in super hero costumes for the kids. This is just plain awesome. You can imagine how it might lift the spirits of some kids who could really use it. Major Props going out for these guys - a super hero thing to do. Moonrise Kingdom We won't be handing out Props too often for movies, but this movie is just too good to ignore. It's a sweet, silly, random story of childhood love and wanderings set in the fictional New England island of "New Penzance". The casting, the dialogue, the hillarity  ... it's all so much worth seeing. Props going out to Wes Anderson for his film. Watch the trailer below, check out the [....] Read More >>

We are quite pleased to introduce the Edgeworks CMS for Realtors. As we've mentioned before, we have developed a website building platform and Content Management System called the Edgeworks CMS which we use to build customized websites for businesses of all varieties. We take the basic CMS and then build on top of it in order to adapt the platform to each of our clients'  businesses. There are some types of businesses which have similar needs, however. We've identified a number of those business types and over the coming year we will be releasing versions of the CMS for those business types. The first business category we have targeted is real estate agents. The Edgeworks CMS for Realtors offers real estate brokers and agents a fully connected NNEREN MLS data-aware website. Our offering provides the following benefits: A completely custom front-end design Property detail pages that are well-organized and easy to read Simple to use CMS administrative interface Hands-on training covering how to use the CMS Ability to enhance your own properties with search-optimized pages for your properties Google maps of properties Similar Properties feature Property search feature with agent listings featured Mortgage calculator Hourly updates to MLS data Each and every implementation of the Realtor CMS will still have the individual attention and custom design [....] Read More >>