Yet another delightful animated short by some unknown-to-me art studio from the way far away. There are some fantastic details here. For instance, I'd love to visit a Greece where every roof has a pool that spans the entire length of the house. Also: it's got one of the true hallmarks of any great two minute film – a killer open-ended ending. (#)
Sep. 26, 2008
11:45 am
In May I had my first meeting with a major label, Universal Music Group. I went alone and prepared myself for the worst, having spent the last decade toeing the indie party line that the big labels were hopelessly obstinate luddites with no idea what was good for them. I’m here to tell you now that the labels understand their business a lot better than most people suspect, although they each have their own surprisingly distinct personality when it comes to how they approach the future.
Justin Ouellette, from a lengthy exposition on the death and rebirth of Muxtape. The RIAA is, indeed, a big stinking bully. (#)
Sep. 25, 2008
3:22 pm
I doubt that I’ll ever make anything one-tenth as intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging as The Wire, and, in all likelihood, neither will you. But, again, that’s not the point.
The inspiration you need to take away from this is the idea that every scene matters to some arc. Even the one minute with the drunk furniture assembly. Whether your given “scene” is in a screenplay, or an Excel spreadsheet, or the Tweet that you’re about to type about your flight delay: it matters. It all matters.
Merlin Mann, calling on all of us to write into our arc. (#)
Sep. 24, 2008
Sep. 23, 2008
ExpressionEngine’s exp:weblog:month_links function is one of those basic blog tools you’d expect any leading software to include. It’s main responsibility is generating a list of links to monthly archive pages. But like a number of ExpressionEngine’s core functions, turns out it’s actually less flexible than the core system itself. If you’re creating an archive of future posts – say, for a list of upcoming events – there’s no way to pull those future dated entries. Luckily, there’s a workaround.
Sep. 21, 2008
I'm just getting started on a site dedicated to the baby bump and the little whirlwind he's sure to become. I've been concentrating on lifestreaming a lot as of late, so I've decided to use that model for his site – some flickr pics, some twitter tweets. Nothing fancy. Since Jeff Croft's had such success with Django on his lifestream-y site, this seemed like the perfect time to kick the wheels of this celebrated web development framework. Webmonkey's series of Django tutorials is what's making it all possible. Truly one of the best tutorials I've ever read. It's concise and focuses on getting you up and running so you can do now and suss out the inner workings later. (#)
Sep. 20, 2008
12:05 am
[Modern film] spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The ‘Watchmen’ film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.
Alan Moore, from an interview on Hollywood and its adaptation of his most celebrated work, Watchmen. (Via Jason.) (#)
Sep. 19, 2008
The whole "time lapse video of the last n-years of my life" is becoming its own little meme, built completely by the most anal retentive (and unbearably pretentious) among us. But this one gets more things right than most. For one, consistency – of position and expression. Another: brevity. Two minutes is about as much as I can handle. And most importantly, a joyful levity. Aging doesn't have to be such a total fraking drag. (#)
I've been ignoring all the posts Jeff Atwood's been posting about his latest project, mostly because I assumed if Jeff was into it, that probably meant the whole thing was a good six feet over my head. I didn't realize what he was building was actually right up my alley: a Wiki/Forum/Blog/Reddit-type-thing for programmers of all skill levels. No doubt there'll be the standard n00b insults and petty back-biting, but still – this site has some serious promise. (#)
Sep. 17, 2008
So this is how all those Objective-C blogs, with authors that clearly know not a lick of CSS, are formatting their code examples. Syntax Highlighter is a JS-based code highlighting utility for bloggers. Makes code pretty colors! Nice line numbering and indentation! Plain text view! If you can deal with slow, this might be a good option for your code-centric niche blog. (#)
2:51 pm
[S]ome people actively search for routine and repetition as a means to cope with stress or anxiety – which in turn provides the stability to focus (and be creative). Why is instability and disruption so often cited as a means to creativity or innovation?
Sam Martin, from the Design Mind blog, responding to a video installation by Berlin-based artist Jan Koepper (#)
Sep. 16, 2008
10:20 pm
Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.
George Saunders, ripping apart that obnoxious "regular Joe" schtick Republicans seem so fond of. Sometimes I love The New Yorker. (#)
I don't post a lot of web design inspiration links here on TNF (I tend to keep a record of those at delicious), but this one's kind of a special case. The personal site of UK developer David Emery is, yes, a little bit of all over the place – but the special touches on this one are especially special. Love the headline blocks that break out of the main column. Love the huge, page spanning photos that accompany each post and page. Love how when you scroll down the work page, said photo changes depending on which item you're scrolling through. (#)
Sep. 14, 2008
Their tagline sums it up pretty nicely: Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy. I was lucky enough to get a beta invite from a friendly stranger a month ago. This is one seriously terrific service. Because your Dropbox acts almost exactly like a local folder, folks are bound to find some interesting uses. Here's mine, a method for syncing a single Things database across multiple computers. (#)
Sep. 13, 2008
12:16 am
If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative.
Merlin Mann, a dude who's web famous for his writing on 43 folders but creates brilliant material all over the place, writing about his renewed focus on creativity and quality in a world full of cruft. (#)
Sep. 11, 2008
This is one of the (very, very) few geek ideas I might be able to convince the missus about: bathroom/kitchen tile in the shape of Tetris blocks. Personally, I think the first example – without the individual squares – is a lot more recognizable, even if it would be harder to implement. (Via Anthony.) (#)
10:37 am
Just as everyone in development is enamored with scaling, it seems that far too many designers ask the question, “how much content can we dump in here, and still have things make sense?” rather than “how can we nix this nonsense, and just say what we mean?”. In many projects, it’s taken a priori that all the content that exists going into a project must remain intact. Of course, this leads to the new site simply shuffling a rotten core, putting a new face on old problems. Really, what’s diluting the web are piles of meaningless words, not a lack of style.
Matt Brown, suggesting some ways designers could help simplify the web. (#)
Sep. 10, 2008
Man, the WordPress Codex is deep. I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit plumbing its depths, and I still get the sense I haven’t seen more than a tenth of what it has to offer. Here’s a function straight from the codex that’ll be a big help to theme and plugin developers: the wp_enqueue_script() function. If you find your self building WordPress themes and plugins that’re heavy on the JavaScript, this guy’s gonna be your new best friend.
It's admittedly a pretty old post – the announcement that ExpressionEngine 2.0 is now officially delayed would be a much more timely link – but this is terrific news for anyone who develops sites on ExpressionEngine for a living. One of the best parts about WordPress is its (relatively) dead simple themeing system. From the looks of it, Ellis Labs is creating an even more intuitive and flexible system for the next version of EE. That's good, because the current methodology has been proven to cause vertigo and severe nausea in laboratory test subjects. (#)
Sep. 9, 2008
Now that Agregado is launched, I’m starting to review what I learned during the build process. In short: tons. But how about an example? Let’s take a look at one of the handy SimplePie tricks I learned from working on this project.
Last time I searched for it, back when YouTube was still a little baby startup, this clip was nowhere to be found. George sings his rendition of The Greatest American Hero theme song. Probably my favorite Seinfeld moment. Just brililant. (#)
