We all see the stop pages on our favorite websites. Most times they are the standard blah, blah, blah format. Mixx.com has taken things a step further. Zack is the son of Kerry Pierce Parkins, Vice President, Products and Marketing at Mixx.com. Zack is the cute widdle guy we see on all the Mixx.com stop pages.

I thought it would be a great idea to dive deep and get the back story on these pages and the pictures. Since Zack is underage and couldn’t be contacted for interview as his schedule consists of a lot of playing and nap times, I reached out to his mother for the information. Like any proud parent Kerry was happy to share.

So Kerry let’s talk about Nap time.

We bring the Mixx site offline for two reasons:  a) to install new Mixxer-facing code and features and b) to do maintenance work that is only indirectly obvious to our users.

We wanted to send the message for the maintenance upgrades that Mixx was only going to be down a little while.  That led to the concept that we were only napping and thus, of course I had a napping Zack picture

Of course, I have lots of pix of Zack napping, as all parents do, but this one was especially good because it just shows him completely zonked out. Asleep on top of a stuffed animal. Pacifier discarded next to him. Hand in a “that’s gonna hurt when he wakes up” position. And obvious full-of-pee diaper.  That’s one sleepy baby

So what’s with the “Spade Zack” timed out page?

OK. So if the Mixx application takes too long to process a request (like you are trying to calculate VioletPlanet’s karma or something), the application asks the browser to throw a timeout message.   For a bit of time about a year ago, we started to get a few of these so we decided to put up a page that told our users that Mixx was taking too long but that we’d be back.

This is the “Spade Zack” page (and its funny, when we write bugs against the code, we call these spade zack and mopping zack and etc).

I was out on vacation when the spade zack page was created. My family and I were down in Jamaica

But Will needed a picture, so he went to the great wall of Zack and chose a picture that was one of him just hanging out, waiting. He pulled it off my wall, scanned it in and there it is.

And when she says take one down off her wall, she is not kidding!

My son is luckily very photogenic, and I’m one of “those” moms so you can see that we have not yet begun to Zack.  Will and Kori laugh about my obsession all the time. I just hope we never have to move offices–a lot of work to move the pictures!

So I drifted away here, back to the background on the Spade pic.

Background–this picture is taken underneath the very famous “Welcome to Vegas” sign.  I was trying to juggle a camera, Troy, Troy’s mom, the baby carriage and Zack and get them all positioned. I handed the camera to Troy, put Zack down on the spade and started to move his mom into the picture.  Troy snapped Zack squinting in the sun, perfectly laid out on the spade.

A family portrait was taken a short while later.

So tell us what’s going on here. We love the Mixxingbowl off ramp but it looks like Zack is telling us off.

The Zack you see when you click from the Mixx footer to the Mixxingbowl.  What we wanted to do was to make sure that n00bs understood that they were leaving Mixx.com proper when headed over to the bowl. So when the bowlers screwed up it didn’t reflect badly on us ;-D  J/K on the last part.

SO we thought we would say to the user “HEY,  WHERE YOU GOING?”
And this picture of Zack worked perfectly for that.

The backstory:
We were trying to get a nice beach picture of him. Propped him up on a towel on a dune. Started to get some nice shots when he decided he wanted to move. started crawling away, got turned around.
Took a tumble with a cry. Had to be helped up.
And then we got the picture we did. Kinda explains the look on his face and the sand in his hair, etc.

Zack cleans up

So this was the first instance of “baby” on the site.

Our designer was tasked with designing our “oops” page–when Ruby on Rails craps out and we have sort of an unrecoverable error.  He was thinking that type of error stopped you from mixxing. No mixing. What else doesn’t mix.  And he found the JibJab “Babies and Lemons” don’t mix video.  Sold.  We even, when writing bugs for us to fix these errors, called it Babies & Lemons–like submitting from www.ysodf.com generates Babies & Lemons. That eventually got shortened to B&L.

But then that video got taken down from YouTube (maybe we were hitting it too much, ha!).

And we were looking for some other theme like oops, or uh-oh or something.

We almost went with a picture of Zack from our office. He was in one day and made a total MESS around our watercooler.  And then someone (Doug maybe?) said too bad we don’t have one of him cleaning up the mess–kind of like Mixx needs to clean up our code.

Ah, hang tight I say, of COURSE i have a relevant picture.  And thus “Mopping Zack” or MZ as he appears in bugs.

So the story here is that my husband and I opened up some donut shops in Loudoun County VA.  And as a small business owner, you never really get away from your business. After a full day at Mixx, I often go and put in some hours at the donut shop. Sometimes Zack is with me.  On this particular day, I was responsible for mopping the floor up after we closed. Zack decided to help. Did a pretty good job of it, if I might add.  We snapped the picture and so there it was when we needed it.

Here is another cute photo of Zack at the donut store during the filming of a Food Network special at our store (on Unwrapped–should be broadcast soon).

Here is probably one that you have never seen–its the browser upgrade page. Like most websites, we just block access to our site from really old browsers. Because yes, there are people still using IE 3.0.  Rather than trying to make our site work in these browsers we just block them and encourage upgrades for the benefit of all users.

So this picture is what you see if you can’t get to Mixx,  because hey, you’d be crying if you couldn’t be Mixxing.

The blender and the cook’s corner.

The Cook’s Corner was thought up by Joe to enable the engineers to put out some interesting stuff they had been playing with.  Of course, once they indicated to me that they had some free time, i just made them more busy so they can’t actually create new stuff there

And as before, when we went to go build the WAILA section (the What Am I Looking At? section) at the top, we decided (well, I decided) that another Zack would be in order.  And yes, I did have one that matched the cooking theme!  We were in Las Vegas at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant–which has a bit of an open kitchen. Being the quality mom that I am, I lost track of Z and he went wandering into the kitchen. He quickly got shooed out, but the chef thought he was so cute, she gave him a chef’s hat to wear for himself.  Subsequently, Zack has gotten very in to cooking and tries to help me make dinner every night.

And the blender where applications that use our API live.
This is the only Zack photo that I had to stage. Given his love of cooking, it was quite easy to convince him to pretend to pour stuff from his sippy cup into the blender. But I feel bad that I had to actually stage one of his pictures.

All Dressed Up!

The other reason we take Mixx offline is to release new features.  We thought “hmm, we should put up something that looks different from the down for maintenance. Sort of tease people that something new is coming. Something interesting is coming.  Like we’re getting dressed up for the big reveal.

And of course, I have a picture of Zack dressed up.

One day Troy and I were hanging out discussing how funny it is when you see a little kid all dressed up like an adult. Makes us laugh (kind of like manbabies.com makes us laugh).  And Troy said we should get Zack a tux, ha ha ha. So I looked online the next day, found one and ordered it. They are pretty cheap–it was like $40.   We put him in it and just laughed and laughed and laughed.

But when it came time for our holiday family photo, we knew we needed to tux up. So Troy and Zack got their tuxes on, i broke out the old formalwear and we started shooting. Zack, at the age of 4.5 months, generously decided not only to sit up nicely but also smile for us.

Like many things about Mixx, baby Zack is near and dear to our heart. I firmly believe he is one of perfect personal touches to the site. I want to thank Kerry Pierce-Parkins for taking the time to let us get to know more about Zack.   I’ll be watching for that Episode of Unwrapped! Kerry, Zack, thanks again!