Links from 2007

A Few Good Creative Men.

Every different iteration of these new music strategies are uncritically assessed in the news media as an artist ‘giving away’ their music for free. When, in actual fact, mostly that’s not what’s going on.

Some reasonably useful basics.

As long as you can logically formulate what you want to say, jQuery understands your intentions and will interpret for you regardless of which user agent is listening in.

"Give us your del.icio.us username and we'll feed you anything that you've tagged as: "tagmindr" and "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". We'll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it's RSS."

How many projects have you worked on where the implementation team gave any consideration to the way people would be affected by the changes the new system would impose on them?

TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL.

Love the smell of warm vinyl in the morning? Russ Parsons, co-founder of London's Uncharted Audio imprint, talks to Spannered about his fondness of the black stuff and of the label's current Signals project.

Highly popular Industrial Rock Band Nine Inch Nails have announced that as of today they are free agents, and will not be using the services of a record company in the future.

Charlene Li from Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising.

Green Thing is a community that makes it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener. Every month you’ll get a different Green Thing to do. All you have to do is do it.

"Green Thing is a not-for-profit online community that makes it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener." Press release listing involvement: Pete Fowler, John Hegley, Howie B, Mother, Agency.com, Glue, AKQA, Agency Republic, LBi etc etc

Visitors appear to be using the location of the scroll bar but not the size of the tracker when scrolling, since the scroll bar location is a relative indicator and the scroll tracker size is an indicator of page height.

"Internet Explorer [...] has a bug where clicking on an image inside a label tag does nothing [...] What I've done is put together a quick bit of unobtrusive JavaScript to "fix" the problem." Nasty, but if you have images as labels...

For the best HTML e-mail delivery results, CSS should be inline. This is a huge pain and a simple newsletter becomes un-managable very quickly. This script is my solution.

"Releasing music is a real responsibility as you’re dealing with people’s creativity and in some cases the starts of their careers – the last thing an act needs is a false start or early over-exposure before they’ve developed into being something

Branching is widely misunderstood, and rarely implemented-- even though branching, like versioning, lies at the very heart of source control, and thus software engineering.

Basic Google maps via little-known querystring.

A mobile twitter client application for the Nokia N95. In addition to some basic twitter functionality it can make use of the built-in GPS of the N95 to add your current position to a tweet.

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has bought the travel guide publisher, Lonely Planet.

BBC Radio 4 – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently comes to Radio 4 Wednesdays at 6.30pm, from 3rd October 2007.

The Arcade Fire presents…

Good Continuous Integration run-through and, ooh, smart Ambient Orb hack!

Michael Pollan – The Omnivore’s Dilemma

“The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape.”

Great ideas are only great if they fit a purpose, as such it is important to be clear from the outset what your site’s core user proposition is.

"The next time you tag something cheese on toast or woopwoop you might actually cause some researchers somewhere out there sleepless nights while they are trying to understand what kind of music those tags define." Oops!

Assume this is a custom group page. Hadn't realised that was on offer...

"The "attitude," as it came to be known, was built around three core attributes: inspired, genuine, trusted. Innocuous as they seem, they were vivid enough for a group of designers to begin to articulate a common visual language."

It is likely that many of its millions of die-hard fans will be unable to resist buying the box-set, available in December, while Radiohead will not be required to share its profits with either a record label or shops.

A scalable and strong email template that has really good flexibility

Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat.

Pick something small in your organization. Internal systems are usually a good fit [...] Pitch this system as a test balloon for another way of doing things.

Microsoft threw an invite-only gathering at its London offices: something about start-ups and Web 2.0. [...] Here are the notes I took…

This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.

Occasionally we all accidentally hit the reset button on a web form and lose all of what we just spent time typing out. I’ve written a little bit of javascript that makes it possible to recover from these disasters.

Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

Whatever your skills as software developer or web designer (or whatever your web work career entails), you need to also understand the basics of estimating.

Allows searching of Landmark Trust availability PDFs.

A novice wanted to learn the Tao of Backup. The master said: To become enlightened, you must master the seven heads of Backup. He who knows the heads will keep all his data forever.

Fast, reliable, and secure with unmatched spam control.

Good music and great example of self-promotion; the guy is everywhere without being annoying.

Takes the UN Secretary General's schedule and bungs it into a twitter account. Smart.

I am here to tell you about backups. It's very simple.

Created as a non-profit filmiac expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective

If you think it's possible to identify a single date, somewhere off in the future, upon which you'll receive everything you've requested and for a fixed price, then you're setting yourself up for failure and disappointment.