HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

HTMList primarily focuses on the technical side of the web development work we do here at Synapse Studios. We’re mixing things up a bit with the announcement of the launch of Nestablish.com, a comprehensive loan officer workflow management system, built as a startup for a few loan officers who wanted to make life easier for their fellow loan officers.

Loan officers frequently have to generate and sign pre-qualification forms and other specialty forms (such as Arizona’s Loan Status Update form) for each and every offer a real estate agent makes on a house. This can often come at inconvenient times, such as nights and weekends, when loan officers are typically off-the-clock. Nestablish allows loan officers to configure a maximum value for the pre-qualification documentation. The real estate agent is then granted the ability to generate the forms at the value they require, automatically limited to the maximum allowed by the loan officer.

This project presented a few interesting challenges for us, including working with the Fannie Mae 3.2 file specification to allow for the easy import of loan information into the system, and some complex PDF generation. Since each loan flows through a complex process with a lot of steps and required documents, we built Nestablish to allow the loan officer, real estate agent, and home buyer alike to track the progress on the loan approval and see exactly where they are in the process. This ensures faster closings with fewer back-and-forth during the typically-stressful home buying process.

We’re incredibly proud of our team here at Synapse who helped make Nestablish a reality, including Jeremy Lindblom, Andrew Reida, and Bob Eagan. We’ll be working with the fantastic team at Nestablish to deliver a whole new suite of features to the site very soon, but loan officers can get started today by registering for a free 60-day trial. (Nestablish is free for real estate agents and home buyers, and only $29.95 for loan officers after the free trial.)

Nestablish — Loan Workflow Management & Form Generation

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged with: clients, launch, launching, nestablish, projects

Posted in: Announcements

Our company Synapse Studios is hiring a senior PHP developer right now. Specifically, we’re looking for someone who can help lead our talented team and establish methodologies that scale and make for a more powerful team. More information on the position is available here, but you’d be working in our offices in downtown Tempe, Arizona, right on Mill Avenue. It’s a great space with fun people and exciting work, so if you’re interested, view the job post on our site and follow our instructions over there.

Senior PHP Developer Job Posting | Synapse Studios

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged with: developers, jobs, php, synapse studios

Posted in: Announcements

Here at The Studios, we tend to keep things a little nerdy. Which is why we reimburse our employees for have a geek-based customized license plate every year.

I think we’re doing pretty well. Here, we happened to park such that it laid out thusly: SUDO RM RF CHILLAX CTRL Z. Naturally, CTRL Z has different ramifications in Linux, so relaxing might just be the last thing you do if you made a mistake, but I digress.

(My plate is CTRL Z, an idea I got when looking down at my shirt and thinking how ironic this will be if I get in an accident.)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged with: ctrl z, fun, Geek, Geeks and Nerds, license plates, linux, nerd plates, pictures, Sudo

Posted in: Announcements

Sometimes, our developers are a bit too busy to come up with blog topics on their own. They’ve requested we have the masses feed them to them directly, instead.  So in an effort to make their lives easier (and to stop us from having to beat posts out of them each week), we’ve created a new category: Ask HTMList.com.  Here, we hope to open up to our readers and answer any of your questions on anything ranging from UI/UX design concepts, complex development issues, architecture and code concepts and everything in between.  We’d also love for you to seek reviews of websites, services, books or anything else related to technology or that you happen to find interesting in the field.

So start submitting your ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, your questions, and your links for our review now!  We’ve added this handy form that shows up on the sidebar when you are in the Ask HTMList section of the site to make it easier on you.   And of course, you can email your questions to ask [at] htmlist [dot] com. Try to stump us; we’ll let you know if we had to cave to Google in our responses!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged with: blogging, books, code, Design, htmlist, news, review, websites

Posted in: Announcements, Ask HTMList.com

So in my zeal to get our new theme launched, I failed to remember to update some code on the comments page that is in place to keep us spam free.  The end result of this was that Yawasp, our anti-spam plugin, was identifying every comment as spam and rejecting them outright. Anyone that tried to post a comment over the last few days, I apologize profusely and encourage you to come back and post it now.

Special thanks to Ivo Jansch for taking the time to contact us and report the problem!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged with: bugs, comments, errors, web development blog, wordpress theme

Posted in: Announcements

As you have probably noticed, we recently unveiled the new and independent look for HTMList.com.  We wanted to establish an identity separate from our web development company so I took it upon myself to get the ball rolling last weekend and decided on a layout that I felt would work well for what we are trying to do here.  We found a great free theme over at TopWPThemes and used that as a starting point. Since then, we’ve been enhancing it bit by bit.  We hope you like it and we’re interested in hearing your feedback about likes and dislikes of the new design.  You may notice the site altering slightly over the next week or so as battles continue to rage within the office on some points of contention surrounding a few design aspects. (No more “slashdot green” for instance.)

Additionally, we look forward to releasing a couple new blogs into our blog network over the course of the next month.  We have some really exciting ideas (not to mention domain names as sexy as HTMList to deliver them on).  More on that soon, so keep your eyes to the site (or feed) for further updates.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: blogging, feeds, htmlist, news, synapse studios

Posted in: Announcements

We’ve decided to get a little serious about this and brand our blog under the awesome HTMList.com domain. I know, you’re jealous, right? We’ll be changing some design elements to reflect the shift in real estate soon but get a head start and subscribe already using the nifty dropdown on the left. You can add us to iGoogle, Google Reader or about two dozen other subscription aggregation services you’ve never heard of.

In the mean time, expect more posts on bleeding edge web development concepts, quick and easy how-tos and the nitty gritty into the languages and tools we use every day. We’re going to be attacking things across the spectrum skill-level wise so there should be something for everyone. And yes, we’ll be covering nearly everything web dev—far more than “just” HTML.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: html, htmlist, htmlist.com, relocated, web development

Posted in: Announcements

Synapse Studios is proud to announce that our proposal was selected for an enterprise accountability database project for Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. The project was awarded through Arizona’s SPIRIT e-Procurement system and Synapse Studios’ proposal was selected over six other web development companies who submitted proposals.

Our proposal received a 938 out of a possible 1000 points on their evaluation criteria, with the following comments for our Method of Approach:

Excellent five-phase method of approach; communication and progress reporting; timeline. Excellent case studies. Communication doesn’t appear to be a problem since it’s a local company and they are willing to communicate in person and by phone. Best Method of Approach proposed, meets and exceeds all Scope requirements.

The application will handle accountability and compliance tracking and management for the State Board. Synapse Studios is proud to add the State Board for Charter Schools to their roster of government clients. The project is slated to be completed by the end of 2008.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: arizona, awards, charter schools, projects, synapse studios, web development

Posted in: Announcements

We are proud to announce that we are re-opening our blog in order to provide company news and technical updates relevant to the area of custom web application development. We had previously had to suspend it due to time constraints with all of the projects we had taken on but this month we have taken on a few new members of the staff and will be quickly filling pages upon pages with useful information.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: company news

Posted in: Announcements