Rawkes Weekly – 29 June 2008

Stardate June 29th, 2008 – 8 Comments

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.

Tags: weekly

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 1:46 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

8 Responses to “Rawkes Weekly – 29 June 2008”

Stefaan says: [perma]
Can’t wait for the Moo business cards!
Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
@Stefaan: I haven’t decided if I’m going to use them yet. If they offer some with rounded corners then I’ll be buying loads!
Meshach says: [perma]
Wow! Nice Websites, thanks Rob. :)
Seth Goldstein says: [perma]
I loved this weeks post! Keep it up Rob!
Richard says: [perma]
Excellent round-up Rob… just wanted to point out a misspelling. Its “Magento” not “Magneto”.

Keep up the excellent work.
Chris Vincent says: [perma]
Cheers for the link to my site ;)
Rob Hawkes says: [perma]
Thanks for the comments everyone – I’m glad you’re liking the series!

Extra kudos to Richard for spotting the deliberate Magento error =p

@Chris: Not at all. It was more than worth a mention!
Rawkes Weekly – 20 July 2008 » Captain's Blog » Rawkes says: [perma]
[...] every post and page, and the new bookmarklet that lets you blog from wherever you are on the web. I mentioned this update in the past and I’m really glad WordPress are pushing forward with fresh ideas for [...]