Wow! What a week it’s been. I can safely say this has been one of the busiest times of my life, especially with Rawkes gaining momentum – my feet haven’t touched the ground all week! There are many projects and ideas firmly in the pipeline for the blog – namely a series of screencasts, the first of which is currently being recorded.
I’ve taken a breather from work to bring you this week’s events (and to soak up some of this beautiful weather). Enjoy!
This week’s news
Tickets were announced on Tuesday for this year’s dConstruct conference, taking place on the 5th of September in Brighton. The tickets were predicted to sell out within 24 hours, but due to a hiccup with the booking system (it went down) there are still a few left. I’ll see you there if you managed to get some!
Note taking application Evernote was released to the public on Tuesday, but is is all it’s cracked up to be? ReadWriteWeb don’t seem to think so. Evernote also released a new Web Clipper which I have to admit is pretty cool! Personally I’ve been using the application quite substantially the last 2 weeks and I’m really impressed with it as a whole. I’m excited about the future of Evernote.
Wednesday saw Moo announcing that they will be offering a new service: Business cards! I think this is a sensible move from Moo as although their small cards are funky, regular sized business cards are still a staple in the business world.
Search behemoth Google has released a new product in it’s maps suite: the Google Map Maker. Think of it as social mapping, where anyone can add and edit places on the map. It will be interesting to see how Google use this data, and if any of it will make it’s way into the main Google Maps.
WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 has been released with a mid-July date for the completed version. There are many of the usual bug-fixes, but my favourite feature has to be post versioning. The new feature allows you to go back and undo previous changes to a post, like a time-machine for WordPress.
Links of the week
- Tiny Country Flag Icons – These 247 tiny country flags proved extremely useful at work this week
- Awesome offices – This site has filled me with inspiration for my perfect office
- Magneto iPhone theme – Magento is really shaping up to be a killer in the eCommerce scene
- WordPress iPhone theme – I’ll be using this when I get my 3G iPhone
- Is web design dead? – An interesting post on the Web Designer Forum which spawned an animated discussion on the future of web design
- Elements of Design: Login Forms – Christian Watson (Smiley Cat & Elements of Design) strikes again with some great examples of login form design
- Live search: Quicksilver style – A really interesting way of implementing search on a blog
- Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3 – This article pushed me that last step to signing up to Amazon S3
- Why Freelancers Need Multiple Skills – I totally agree with the premise of this article
- The PHP Benchmark – Running speeds of various PHP functions
- 30 Useful PHP Classes and Components – An awesome list of classes that will better your PHP applications
- Better CSS Font Stacks – Theory and explanation behind organising font stacks in CSS
Sites of the week
Adit Shukla
I adore the header on this site!
Jason Santa Maria
Cool, clean and sophisticated.
CakePHP
Fun, vintage and quirky – love it!
Komodomedia
Stunning attention to detail.
Lesson of the week
Keeping organised really does help relieve stress! I highly recommend David Allen’s book: “Getting Things Done” if you want to learn how to get (and stay) organised.
Track of the week
“Forget It” by Breaking Benjamin. This track has immense meaning to me, every time I listen to it I’m flooded with emotion. Hopefully it will help others who get a bit stressed sometimes.