Posted by
ted
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on March 19th, 2009
Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:
- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great
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Posted by
ted
in Code, Findings, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized on March 5th, 2009
Below are the first 5 “specific quality guidelines” in Google’s Help pages, which are an ideal guide for creating any SEO friendly web site:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
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Posted by
ted
in Business, Uncategorized on March 1st, 2009
There are many benefits and a few detriments to incorporating if you doing contract/freelance work. I’ve personally started at least 10 corporations of all types (C-Corp, S-Corp, LLP, LLC), so I possess a little bit of knowledge worth sharing.
The positives
First you are protected legally/financially by the corporate shroud once you are a corporation/propriety. Second, you can write off expenses through the corporation in ways that are well documented and easy to follow. Third, you can control your salary to yourself via dividends, which typically allows for better tax treatment. Fourth, many companies’ accounting departments will treat you a little more…
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Posted by
ted
in Business, Uncategorized, Usability on February 19th, 2009
Steve Krug discusses doing usability testing with 4-6 people about once a month can lead to solving problems typically yield big efficiencies and return on investment. We wholeheartedly agree, Steve!
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Posted by
ted
in Uncategorized on February 18th, 2009
I really like how this software, Visuwords, brings a visual interface to something as common as the thesaurus and dictionary. The application has nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs all color coded, in addition to the relationships between the words (opposes, entails, is a member of, is similar to, causes, etc.). Some might pontificate that this is information overload, but I find it a useful tool, probably because I learn and retain information usually better with sight (as opposed to auditory).
I first stumbled upon a visual thesaurus from the M-W.com site, where I saw a promo for the Visual Thesaurus. Their…
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Posted by
ted
in Code, Reviews, Uncategorized on February 9th, 2009
For years we’ve supported open-source development and creative commons, building some of the first instances of ecommerce on Linux machines and JRun. Now that we do less hosting and more design/development so we primarily use Linux machines as desktops. One favorite flavor of *ix we like is Ubuntu, both on Windows boxes and many more as virtual machines on MacIntel. Here is a collection of tools we use for web dev and design:
Creative Tools
Wonderful 2D drawing program called Xara Extreme.
Inkscape is similar to Illustrator or Xara.
An easy to use 3D modeling app called Art of Illusion.
Full featured 3D modeling app: Blender.
A…
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Posted by
charles
in Uncategorized, Usability on January 30th, 2009
iPhone apps are proliferating like so many bunnies in a vast green meadow. To this point, the overwhelming majority of these new apps are for entertainment, utility or novelty. However, commercial applications are only around the corner. Here at Billups Design, we’re working on commercial applications for the iPhone that our clients and prospects can procure to advance their online communications. Until that time when private enterprise awakens to the uses of iPhone apps, we’ll just have to have fun using our phones for things like this: The Rubik Cube Solver.
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Posted by
ted
in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on January 14th, 2009
I’ve been using Songbird (instead of iTunes) lately, and I have to say it’s quite a nice media browser/player. It is an open-source project with a focus on the api and web integration throughout – very similar to Firefox. In fact, it uses Firefox’s XML-based XUL user interface description language, so it even supports many of Firefox’s add-ons like DOM Inspector. One popular add-on is a panel that displays lyrics.
On launch it can import your iTunes library and settings, and instead of “The Genius” it has mashTape, with artist info, reviews, news (Digg, Google News, MTV Music News, etc.), photos and…
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Posted by
steve
in Uncategorized, Usability on November 6th, 2008
Typography on the web has always left something to be desired. With so few options it can be frustrating to many web designers. However, recently there have been many developments on the web typography frontier and now with a little extra work there are ways to get any typeface you want to display on your web pages.
1. 
sIFR is perhaps the best known dynamic text replacement technique. It was first conceived by Shaun Inman as a way to dynamically replace HTML text with flash text. It’s a great solution from a user standpoint because the text not only looks great, but it…
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