Filed under “webdesign”

Project fecundity

 I put this chart together after a friend told me my project productivity was unusually high. I picked out the major web projects I’ve done over the past several years and highlight how they’ve influenced subsequent (or previous) projects. Every one of these projects launched or shipped… except the DigitalBicycle, which is why it holds [...]

Shirt sales, scraped daily

daily t-shirt sales
 I am remiss to finally get around to blogging Day of the Shirt, which I launched back in October, 2010. It’s a straightforward and (hopefully) aesthetically-pleasing t-shirt aggregator. What’s nifty about Day of the Shirt is that it’s built entirely with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser. And when I say entirely, I mean entirely: there is [...]

A form from my favorites

brompt-signup
 Above is the signup form from Brompt, the blog reminder service I built a few years ago for undisciplined bloggers like myself. I’m very proud of this form: it’s clear, it contextualizes the data being requested within the functionality of the application, and it drives people to action. There are a few areas for improvement: [...]

This is not a website

 In conversation with a friend, he mentioned his dream for a “No Website” Movement: content should be freed for consumption in whatever format its consumer desires. This is not a website; it’s a scrapbook, a swipe file and a memory hole. There is no separation between content and design, form or function: all is one. [...]

Find fresh perspectives at NonprofitMillennials.org

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 Myself and the Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance are proud to announce the launch of a new website: NonprofitMillennials.org: “We blog about the millennial generation and nonprofits!” The Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance is made up of young writers collectively bringing important issues about the nonprofit sector to the forefront. While each of us looks at the [...]

Goodbye Producers’ Forum

Producers' Forum | collaboration tools for media creators_1243800159999
 I launched ProducersForum.org 4 years ago. At the time there was a need for a “Yahoo Groups”-functionality that offered: RSS Feeds Wikis Sub-lists for working groups that would still be accessible/cross-searchable It seems rather quaint now, but there was a need for this for community media groups in 2006. Built using Drupal, it is the only website I [...]

Making ReCAPTCHA not suck

 I really like using the Drupal CAPTCHA system with ReCAPTCHA (the one that helps scan in books). Both of them suck in the standard “Drupal makes everything ugly and hard to use by default, but it’s still easier than building something from scratch”. One of ReCaptcha’s problems is that the words are sometimes hard to [...]

What to ask before building a website

 I’m always curious to see what people spec out for consulting (since I have my own template as well). Found this great listing (pasted below) from SitePoint via one of our VISTAs’s personal website UI and Me. Background * Goals. What are your specific goals? Consider: o company/brand awareness, o product/services awareness, o product/services sales, [...]

Brompt is a blog reminder

brompt-logo
 Two weeks ago I launched a new website at Brompt.com. It’s a web-based service for unreliable bloggers (like myself) that sends you an email if you haven’t posted to your blog in a while. It’s sort’ve like HassleMe except Brompt actively scans your blogs RSS feed to only send reminders when you’re lax (as opposed [...]

Introducing Panlexicon.com

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 I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational. Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to: First Albino Farm full , perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms. Second, view synonyms [...]

MeetAmeriCorps still a success

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 I just got back from some extended travel in California where I met with some fellow AmeriCorps*VISTAs and, among other things, discussed how we could get our AmeriCorps social networking website growing even faster. Right now the site has over 300 registered users, which is pretty good for a six month old baby. Most importantly, we’re [...]

MeetAmeriCorps is “social networking”!

Meet AmeriCorps
 My pet project, MeetAmeriCorps.com has finally passed that development milestone that marks a “social network”: Buddylists. To be a little more haute, we’ve decided to call them “contact lists”, but the concept is the same: you can demarcate people who you like/know/want-to-be-on-your-contact-list. Since I haven’t really been advertising it too heavily, Meet AmeriCorps was a [...]