Alan Turransky – Partner
Alan Turransky, along with Scott Cunningham, successfully led new media and emerging technology initiatives for over twenty years at the top three U.S. newspaper publishers (Gannett, MediaNews Group and Digital First Media).
At Digital First Media, they led the redesign of over 100 web sites in less than four months; rolling out a standardized design and ad map across five different content management systems publishing 6000+ articles per day, while overseeing the migration of over 6,500 ad campaigns from Yahoo APT to Google DFP, across all sites within a five week period.
While at USA Today they were members of the core team responsible for the creation, growth and long term development of the site; expanding its existing 10 million+ daily readership 380% in new user registration and 21% in unique site visitors.
Prior to that, Alan was part of the team that designed, built and launched the original washingtonpost.com web site; a co-author of the MIT Press book “Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration”; and a graduate of both MIT Media Laboratory and UMASS Amherst art department.
Services & Solutions:
  • Framework (client, server), hardware (computer, mobile), platform (.Net, Java, Google), system (Android, iOS) and programming language agnostic
  • Data manipulation, tranformation, markup and processing
  • Workflow and production automation and training
Environments:
  • ‘nix: A/UX, AIX, BSD, HP-?UX, Irix, Linux, OS X, Solaris, System V, Ultrix
  • Amiga OS, DOS, System 1-9, VMS, Windows
  • Android, iOS
 
Languages:
  • ActionScript
  • AppleScript
  • ASP
  • C
  • C*/Paris
  • C++
  • CLOS
  • ECMAScript
  • Elisp
  • Fortran
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • JScript
  • Lingo
  • LISP
  • Pascal
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • PostScript
  • Shell Script (tcsh, bash, csh, zsh, sh)
  • SQL
  • VBScript
 
Graphics:
  • Adobe Graphics Server
  • CUPS
  • GD
  • Gimp-print
  • Graphics programming/
  • ImageMagick
  • MING
  • MPEG
  • OpenGL
  • Flash
  • Flash Remoting
  • Flash Streaming Server
  • QuickTime Streaming Server
 
Markup / Metadata / Transform:
  • ANPA
  • Dublin Core
  • IPTC
  • NITF
  • BNF
  • CSS
  • DHTML
  • EBNF
  • EXIF
  • HTML
  • SMIL
  • XHTML
  • XML
  • XMP
  • Xpath
  • XQuery
  • XSL
  • XSLT
“Having spent the entirety of my career trying to remain “invisible” (e.g. no one should really care who made the “pen” as long as the user can forget it even exists and focus on telling their story), I have come to appreciate the need to balance short term decisions alongside future desires.  Software is a pen.  It serves its purpose only in so much as it gets the job done (my thinking is if one stops here and rests on their laurels, then the marathon is already over), knowing full well that it will eventually run out of ink if not accounted for.  My objective is to provide services and support; to continually engage my clients so that they know there is no other; and to seize each opportunity with the mandate that it is just as important as the next, for it lays the foundation for things to come.”