Recently in Web Category
The redesign is based on a rejected 'heart' design for a poster promoting the 'Ich Liebe Dich' shows in Dublin a few years back. It's a really cool graphic, but the cross of the heart sticks out quite a bit which makes it heart to design around. I'm still not happy with the design, it is a bit of a compromise, taking into account feedback from friends, the client and my coding limitations. I am not keen on the font used for the 'gavin friday' header, or of its placement on the page. I think it would look better with a less ostentatious one. I also think there's too little connection between the homepage and the rest of the site.
And there's still much to do. Mr client was happy and I thought we were ready enough to launch, but I still got years of archived stuff to add to the database (Blogger export wouldn't work and it needs careful filtering and rewriting anyway.) and lots of other things to add and improve.
They'd listed us among the 25 essential fansites not too long ago.
Thank you, I can retire now.
With each tweet with 'olpc' in it you semi-voluntarily raise 1 euro for the One Laptop Per Child project. Each laptop is 140 euro. Please make sure @twitstat follows you before tweeting 'olpc'. And twitstat doesn't count you if you have locked your account.The fundraiser was started by Dutch journalist Francisco van Jole ( @2525) who sponsored the first few laptops before other people started chipping in as well.
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.
(watch the New York Times review of OLPC's laptop)
The charity drive runs till midnight on Christmas Eve.
Final tally: A total of 2883,50 euro was raised, enough to buy 21 laptops. Full story (in Dutch). Happy Christmas!
I had an old Orkut account and I know I tried to merge it with my Google account some time ago, but it didn't work out. I now have a 'new' account, without any of my previous contacts, and I can't find my old one.
Do any of you still have Orkut accounts and am I still listed in your friends list?
... just having started a new job, I'm not going to be doing a lot of travelling any time soon. So I'll be gnashing my teeth watching other people's journeys.
Lemme know if you want in.
Dutch public broadcaster VPRO's music portal 3VOOR12 is reporting from the three-day Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, The Netherlands, using a very cool mashup site www.vpro.nl/lowlandsmashup.
The page, a collaboration between 3VOOR12 and Today's Art combines a live broadcast from the festival, photos from the Flickr Lowlands pool, video reports at Kyte.tv, weather forecasts and a Twitter and Jaiku feed. Viewers at home and audience members as well as professional reporters on site use the Twitter feed to cover the festival.
To post to the Twitter stream, follow Twitter user 3VOOR12, then post your tweets as usual, but start your sentence with #LL07. Alternatively, log in straight from the mashup (bottom menu, click 'Twitter/Jaiku' Direct').
Lowlands 2007 takes place August 17, 18, 19. The festival is sold out.
VOX, Six Apart's new blogging tool, is now open to everyone. I've been using it for a couple of months now and (as you may have noticed) it's made me forget about this here MT-powered self-made blog that I've had for the last 7 years. Why? Because I, like everybody else, have less time to spare and want everything to be quick and easy at this point in my life. Maybe when I retire I'll go back to hand-coding my thoughts in Notepad, but right now, I want VOX.
Vox doesn't do everything I want. I can't import delicious, last.fm, upcoming, etc like I do here, but it does all the basics really well. But most importantly... all my mates are there in my own little neighbourhood! With it's privacy features, it's perfect for the easy, 'secret' blogging of stuff you want only your best friends and/or your family to read. It's free, so give it a whirl, and invite your mates or maybe your techno-phobe dad.
Hmm, that came out like a copywritten advertisement. It's not. Honest.
So what am I gonna do with eachman.com? Well, I'm thinking of reverting back to prolific.org and making this an aggregate-only hub. I think I'll be stripping this site of its current 'design' soonish.
For the past couple of weeks I have been mostly blogging at Vox, where I can set my posts to 'private / friends / family'. Yeah, like LiveJournal, but I've never felt at home at LiveJournal - it doesn't look or feel like blogging to me there, and I've never got my head around its bizarre GUI.
Back when I started (98/99) blogging appealed to me because of the small and friendly community of people involved in it. A couple of hundred webheads, mostly American. When blogging spread and reached The Netherlands, things quickly got nasty.
The second wave of early Dutch bloggers took delight in bullying. I quit my Dutch blog very soon after and retreated back to my English blog(s) where things were still quite peaceful. And then blogging went world wide, it went A/N, it went political, it went... fucking mental. And part of me went: 'oh, you're no fun anymore'.
In an article in Time Out Chicago Mena Trott says:
“Being online can be fun. We want to capture that. This is supposed to be pleasurable. If you want to write posts that never get troll comments, that are just for your friends, that’s completely acceptable.”
“What we’re trying to capture is how we felt about blogging in 1999, 2000, 2001.
“That your community is small enough that you’re just with people who care about you. You’re communicating with people you know. And that’s a way to express yourself more.”
And that's exactly how I feel. So I'm blogging at VOX for the smallest group of people you can imagine and it doesn't matter because I stopped caring about readership numbers (which have dwindled dramatically) on my personal weblog quite some time ago.
I still have to figure out what to do with eachman.com, but I may just make it a link or aggregate blog.
I miss MT.
Please don't hurt me.
If I ever get put on trial for abusing publishing tools, I will claim temporary insanity: "Your honour, I am not myself today."