HeyBuzz - The Blog of Pete Usborne » Stuff to Try

PDA Blogs

Buzz — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:31:18 +0000

Making iPhone/PDA specific sites for your personal site really isn’t that fun, I’ve done it before – and it’s time consuming and tedious (although there’s something to be said for developing for just one browser). Anyways, I was pretty impressed with this WordPress PDA plugin – which will convert your blog into a PDA ready site (see above). Check it out.

Beginning CSS Web Development

Buzz — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:00:57 +0000

Recently, a few friends of mine who work in the fashion, packaging and print design sectors have started turning their attention to web. More than anything, it’s become apparent that a knowledge of web design is an extremely useful commodity for any designer wanting to make themselves truly indispensable. My advice to these friends has been to try and get a basic handling on how a website is built, and how it works – which will, of course, give you the ammo to create kick-ass sites (seeing as they’re already Photoshop ninjas).

I’ve found myself shouting a lot about this book – Beginning CSS Web Development by Simon Collison. It’s what I used to get a grasp on CSS a few years back, and although I’ve read a whole stack of books on the same topic since, this is still the best by far. So if you’re keen on broadening your repotouire, or fancy brushing up on your CSS skills – I reckon this is a pretty good use for 1,924 (Amazon) of your hard earned English pennies.

Package Illustrator

Buzz — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:06:49 +0000

I’ve recently started playing around with Scripts in Photoshop an Illustrator – and although pretty useless on the most part, I’ve found one that’s been extremely useful. It’s a script that will group together all of the links within an Illustrator document, and save it ‘Packaged’ much in the same way as InDesign. Fast, clean and extremely useful. Download the script here (via Interactive Llama)

Resumé Template

Buzz — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:38:38 +0000

For the friends of mine who face uncertain futures – I found this for you… an online HTML resumé (that’s a CV to us brits) creator tool. Brilliant!

Konami Code

Buzz — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:03:18 +0000

The Konami Code is a Japanese gaming cheat that consists of you pressing, in sequence up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a on your keypad. Now log into FaceBook, do the code, press enter, then see what happens when you click on something (like text, or the white background). I love hidden stuff like this! Check out this site, which lists all the other sites that have this ‘cheat’ (like Google, FaceBook etc)

XMarks

Buzz — Sun, 10 May 2009 10:57:47 +0000

I’ve just set up my new MacBook Pro (mmmm) – and thought I’d share something that’s saved me a heap of time and effort, XMarks. It’s a Firefox plugin that shares bookmarks and passwords securely accross computers. So all I had to do was install it, log in, and I had all of my thousands of beautifully labelled and ordered bookmarks at my disposal. I highly recommend it!

Visit the site and download

YCN Library

Buzz — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:08:10 +0000

I recently learned that the YCN Studio (Shoreditch) have opened their doors to a new lending library. So I headed on over there at lunchtime to check it out/sign up. Not surprisingly, it’s a beautiful space with some really nice books to borrow, one-off posters and other prints to buy. I spent a while in there browsing around before ending up standing outside their offices for 20 minutes like a crazy person (it’s OK, I was on a call… can’t seem to master speaking and walking at the same time)! But it’s yet another reason to love Shoretich!

If you get a chance you should definitely go check it out! Whilst you’re at it – you should probably also check out my newest RSS addition, SiteInspire (a Daniel Howells project).

Spreadtweet

Buzz — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:43:07 +0000

So, you work at a big corporate, huh?
And you’re not allowed to use Twitter…
Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel?

I love Spreadtweet – it’s brilliant. As is a LOT of Elliott Kember’s stuff!

Real World vs. The Web

Buzz — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:53:32 +0000

This is utterly insane! From GE’s marvelous new site (via ISO50)

Lingo Bingo

Buzz — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:01:00 +0000

Take ownership, We need a vision, Quick win, Mission/vision/values (all in same sentence), Can we park that for later?, Push back, High level

Next time you’re in a meeting (or a meeting about a meeting), play Lingo Bingo. Basically just list a whole bunch of hot topic, new-media-bullshit words that are chucked around these days… and see how many times they come up. You could probably add some webbie ones to it too (AJAX, user-centric, above the fold, real-estate etc etc).

Me and Russ used to play to see how many times Apple was mentioned. Quite a lot, as it happens!