Archive for category Ramblings
Dog Nappies, Dog Diapers? put a nappy on your dog.com
What do you do if you are 5 years old and need to raise awareness for an issue. Easy, you hire a web designer to make a video and a game and put them online. That’s what my son did, although when I say hire I use the term loosely, because when I mention the cost of developing a site like this, he reminded me that you don’t pay family for doing work. Next time I’ll give him the few cents to clean his room. Check out the site we made, and bear in mind that most of the thought behind this is from a 5 year old. Dog lovers out there be ready for a slapped hand And for those over seas a nappy is a diaper |
iFound iPhone
I’m not exactly an early adopter when it comes to new techo gadgets and devices. It’s not that I don’t like them it’s more of a ‘how can I justify the spends?’ kind of thing. I always keep my ear to the ground with new tech and love experimenting, especialy if someone else is dishing out the funds. I’ve noticed a bundle of flash developers switch over to iPhone development over the past year, but I was reluctant to fork out the cash, and no one was lining up with their wallet. Around Christmas I went into my local o2 store and lo and behold free iPhone with contract. I’ll have one of them thank you very much What can I say, it’s great! The first thing that knocked me back was a power connection that accepts a USB cable. Very tight. It was a nice little intro into the kind of thought that the folks at Apple into making every little thing as usable as possible. The only drawback I can see at the moment is that predictive texting has been removed. I can’t understand why this standard tool has been removed and I can see why some people are finding the switch to iPhone. Having said that, the usability is quite fluid. My four year old son gets around it without issue. I’m frequently finding photos of our tv with a Lego effect. The fact that you have to enter a password to buy an App eases my mind as to what he could get up to. Not only that the precision of the touch screen Lets me sit hereon the bus writing a post for my blog with very little error (despite Dublin roads). What next you may ask? Well I have hijacked a Mac I’m work and have installed snow leopard, Xcode and the iPhone sdk, so next step is ‘hello world’ then who knows? Maybe a predictive text app |
Facebook needs to be socially supportive
I’ve started building a Facebook fan page for one of our clients. Basically we took a similar fan page online, and built content to suit this pages layout. When I started to put it together I noticed that some of the feature which looked like they should have been out of the box features, were not. For example adding a simple box with a header on the left side of the profile. I looked into it and there is an app called Static FBML. When I tried to add it to my page, it only gave me an option to add to favourites, this was no use, after a while of trudging through the discussion forums it occurred to me that maybe I should be logged in as a developer. Once I did this, the option of Add to page came up and all was well. I posted my findings on the discussion and then it dawned on me that the way the discussions are laid out is wrong, there are no mediators on these discussions. There is no one to close a resolved issue query. The lack of formatting options in the facebook discussions doesnt allow visual cues so that people can find the answer quickly rather than trudging through. In fact maybe there should be a way so that rather than, a page with a multitude of people saying "I have this problem too", an app can be built that simply adds a user as a fan of an issue, so that they can be notified of a resolution. rather than having to go back to the discussion page to find it.
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WordPress plugged in
Ok, so I built a wordpress site for my brother. He’s not too big on technology and asked that I make it as simple as possilble. I have used various blog and CMS technologies in the past and WordPress is by far the easiest to use. This blog is my first experiment with WordPress, and to be honest as you can see by the number of posts I havent really bothered with it. It’s only that my brother asked, that he’d have various things on his blog that would be easy for him to use. This is where WordPress plugins come in. I simply ran a search through thousands of already built plugins, and found the exact plugin to help with my brothers needs. If you are looking to build a blog for a client, then I recommend WordPress. I would build a WordPress blog for friends or family first, so that you can experiment with the various Plugins out there before you have to work for a paying client. Enjoy! |
Walking the fence – the plight of the creative technologist
Ok Creative technologist -sounds a little pompus – looking for a pay rise are we? Its the kind of term that gives me the same sickly feeling as the 2007 gem Web 2.0 - Buzz word alert!!! Buzz word alert!!! But with every new version of industry standard design/development suites boasting new features that enhance the designer-developer workflow I am starting to feel a little nomadic, wandering aimlessly from one side of the fence to the other. I’m sitting here looking at my business card, wondering to myself why it is saying Web Developer, surely I make things look nice too, but I also can’t put Web Designer because I build stuff. Whats the problem? I want one title on my business card, 2 will look just wrong (thats the designer in me talking), am I being pedantic? I don’t think so, I believe that I should have a singular title, that truely reflects what I do. Ok, this sounds like I’m a Generalist now, but I’m not liking that at all, sounds like I’m a bit of a jack of all trades – master of none, this is probably true but not very apealing and for some reason has a negative feel about it – looking for a pay decrease now ay? So I have finally come to the decision that Creative Technologist is actually sounding good now.
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Welcome to BrainDump
Hi, and welcome to brain dump. What is BrainDump? BrainDump is basically my means for getting whats in my head, out. Primarily its a personal site to help me collect my thoughts generally about my work as a web developer/designer, but this doesn’t mean I wont stray from it in to other fields. Even though I’ve been in the game for over 6 years, this is my first blog. So I’m just playing with it at the moment. Fingers crossed I wont drop it after a week, like many many projects before it… we’ll just have to see. Chat soon! Paul |