Raincity Studios Acquires Bryght, And With It, A "Support Cowboy"

The press release announces it and the announcement over at my company's website confirms it: starting January 1st, I'm going to be an employee of Raincity Studios. On Tuesday RCS acquired Bryght, the Vancouver-based Drupal-based hosting and hosted service company I've been working for since 2004. My role, currently as community support guy, will change slightly, details we'll work out in the following days and weeks. I'm excited and nervous at the same time, both usual for me when change like this happens. To say this came at the right time for me, however, is an understatement.

It maybe took a little longer than it needed to, but it really hit me how impressive their design chops were when Mark Yuasa's offered to redesign my blog back in 2005. 2005? Seems longer ago. I remember meeting him at BCIT and going through what theme I wanted for the look. Since it was around March, cherry blossom trees started losing their petals and the smell and sight of pink leaves all over the streets of the Lower Mainland filled my senses. With a little trepidation—pink not being the manliest colour—that I asked him use that as the concept, and his two original concepts floored me. One, while beautiful, was a little too white for what I thought of, but the other, overwhelmingly pink design made the choice obvious. I was impressed with his holistic approach (he asked me to write down what music I liked as part of the design consideration) and his attention to detail and his flexibility in the changes I requested. I've since reverted back to a default theme for the site (changing the colours to match the previous look), and I've committed to releasing the theme to the Drupal community.

Raincity is cataloging the social web's reaction to their announcement, and if you visit that link, you'll get to see me a little more than halfway down at the Cambie Pub, during my first week officially working for Bryght, in September 2004. That's a fairly iconic photo of me, so much so that Karen has taken to calling me a "support cowboy". Think I can get away with calling myself that? Probably not: I'm the strong, silent type, and besides, I don't like horses that much. I'm still going to celebrate by buying another cowboy shirt.

Comments

Thanks to everybody at Raincity for your in-person comments, and thanks to Sean @ Beyond Robson for the traffic to this post.

Thanks for the link on Raincity tracking the social web's reaction to their announcement. I've found myself a new case study on how companies make use for social media. Thank you, support cowboy.

Be sure to note that Raincity employees commented on most of those reactions. It's one thing to point it out on a company blog post, but it's another to let the readers of the reactions know that we've seen them (since the readers might not necessarily see the aggregated blog post we made). I think it's important that companies our size respond to blog posts about them, thanking them for either praise or a bad review, and making sure that any issues at the very least get acknowledged if they can't be fixed. Ma.gnolia does a good job of this, as did PubSub before it. It might not scale for established companies, but it's important for small and growing companies that they're attuned to what people are saying about them and that third parties know we're listening.