Google “web design tutorials” and you’ll mostly find Photoshop tricks and tips, CSS 101 articles, and how to make graphics straight out of the ‘90s. What’s often overlooked (yet equally important), however, is what happens before all of that–the brainstorming.
A lot of what I was/am trying to accomplish with the Tumbl3 redesign is a certain amount of centralization and connectivity between the various fragments of my online presence. So far I’ve greatly simplified the design to allow for various content types, built and integrated TweetRemote, and have now added a lifestream that runs off FriendFeed.
Besides being an excellent tool for all the stalkers out there, I’m hoping it will prove to be an easy way to share all the cool stuff I find and possibly do around the interwebs. It does not get sent through the RSS feed for this site, so you don’t have to be worried about being overloaded with information. However, if you do want to keep a more watchful eye on it you can subscribe to me on FriendFeed or keep a watch on this feed (or just randomly check the page–some things are just more fun the old-fashioned way).
The code is very easy to set up for any account (really only requires changing one variable), so it may also get a public release in the near future.
What other ways have you seen or used for controlling the fragmentation of online presences due to the social web? Do lifestreams interest you?
I’ve mentioned TweetRemote a few times both here and on Twitter a few times, and I keep saying I’ll publicly release it as soon as I can get a site up. Well, tonight I did that and TweetRemote is officially available for download.
Many of you have noticed that I’ve been using it here and have asked about it. Here’s your chance to have at it. Check it out, play around with it, and please leave your comments here to let me know what you think. Note that in order to successfully install this on a blog, you’ll also need to set up an RSS aggregator such as FeedWordPress.
As another side note, I have not even opened tweetremote.com in IE and know for certain it’ll look awful in IE6 (thanks to my wonderful .pngs), and I’m OK with that. It now works in IE6 as well thanks to the genius little script Unit PNG Fix
Cool animation by Glenn Marshall done with Processing.
A lot of people nowadays love to blame the internet for what they perceive as an ever-growing epidemic of short attention spans. Apparently this causes a horrible lack of focus that will ruin your life or something similar.
Granted, people tend to jump around a lot, going from site to site and perhaps only spending a few seconds at each. But is this really because of a lack of concentration ability?
Decisions can be difficult, and sometimes you might be arguing with somebody over the internets and wish you could just flip a coin. Cheating is always a possibility, however, since they could always lie about it.
Not anymore. I bring you FlipFor.Us, the sweetest virtual coin toss on the internets:
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I’ve been noticing an unusually high amount of traffic to the link I posted a little while back to Photoshop Express, so I thought I’d touch a little bit more on it. If you haven’t heard much about it yet, it’s an excellent little app written in Flash and I’d highly recommend giving it a quick whirl through their test drive.
This is probably the most feature-rich online photo editing application out there (at least that I have seen–if any of you have seen better ones, by all means send ‘em over to me), yet it’s not just a port of CS3 taking the features easiest to recreate for the web and slapping them on there. Instead, most of the features are specifically geared toward the quick type of editing one would want to do through a web-based application like this while keeping an extraordinary amount of speed and simplicity. This is something, as a web developer, that I find impressive–and so is what I want to actually touch on.
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Advertising’s always a popular choice for generating revenue, but I’m more interested in alternative models. I’ve racked my brain, and here’s a list of ways and places I’ve spent money online. Read more…
Online help documentations seem to be becoming more popular. It used to be where you’d go to help in an application and you’d be presented with documentation that was installed with that app. Nowadays, you’re often just forwarded to a website. This has its advantages, for example it can be updated without the actual application itself being updated, but this should never be the only documentation available.
Hey there, I’m Elliot. I'm co-founder of DuroCast and do freelance web work. My side projects include Postable, WorthWorkingFor, TweetRemote, Accidental Procrastination, FlipFor.Us, ShootYourselfWith.Us, StalkMy[dot]Com, Shweetness, and Man of Pink. Some of these places actually exist, and some I wish existed.
