Social connection sites are proliferating at a geometric rate. With each day it becomes harder to remember the vast assemblage of passwords and user IDs for each site. As I begin to list the number of sites I am participating in, it is easy to see how there are not enough hours in the day.

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Tags: software, web, web 2.0

The team at RealMacSoftware have just release an update to RapidWeaver; their web creation application. Go get it now.

Tags: rapidweaver, software, web

Hot off the presses…the first survey by one of the most important sites for web design and development. Go on over and participate.

Tags: financial, web

I was a judge for the recent Internet Ad Competition. There was some great work submitted and the winners have been announced.

• Fishbowl Marketing for Shamrock The Vote
  (Best Ads the Client Did Not Pick)


• IQ Interactive for "Explorer" Video Newsletter
  (Best of Show Email Message)


• NASCAR.com/Datran Media for NASCAR.com Revs Up Fans with Email Marketing
  (Best of Show Email Message Campaign)


• TMX Communications for Find the Time Capsule Campaign
  (Best of Show Integrated ad campaign)


• Hornall Anderson Design Works for My Family
  (Best of Show Interactive Application)


• Wunderman Team Detroit for My Dream
  (Best of Show Microsite/Landing Page)


• Idea Integration for Sony Noise Canceling Headphones
  (Best of Show Online ad)


• Palm Communication for Oryctolagus cuniculus
  (Best of Show Online Campaign)


• Coldwell Banker Seal for Coldwell Banker Barbara Sue Seal eNews
  (Best of Show Online Newsletter Campaign)


• Ayzenberg Group for Mobile Suite Gundam: CROSSFIRE rich media creative
  (Best of Show Rich Media Online Ad)


• Profero for Mess With Your Mind
  (Best of Show Rich Media Online Campaign)

And, TMX Communications of Conshohocken, PA was recognized with the 2006 Top Agency Award. Congratulations to all the winners.

Tags: competition, judging, web, design

Mad4Milk has released MooTools: MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework designed to make writing extensible and compatible code easier and faster. Essentially MooTools provides a creative solution to animating items on your webpage.

Tags: web, web 2.0, design, programming

The IAC is another award show dedicated to online advertising. Last year there were some pretty cool submissions that won and it should be a good year for the winners. Looking forward to seeing what the judges deem worthy for the awards.

Tags: competition, judging, web, design

Yetihotel is a site designed to promote the newest attraction, Expedition Everest, at Disney's Animal Kingdom. The design was picked up and is featured on Full Single. The site was really supposed to be much more of an immersive experience, but as projects tend to go had to be scaled back. Still a nice site, in my mind (although I am a bit biased), that has some custom AS code for the animations and reflects the feel of the ride.

Tags: web, design

I have used Safari and Firefox for ages, but the featureset for Firefox has finally made me convert to using it as my full-time browser. I had been reluctant to make the final leap since Firefox still does not address the very handy Services menu in OS X. I use this function extensively, especially while browsing to save snippets of interest, but that was finally outweighed by the enormous amount of features available from the Firefox community.
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Tags: software, web, programming

Adobe Labs has released the Alpha version of Flash 9. You must sign up to have access to downloads, but I would recommend signing up. There are some great options available from this type of pre-release software to their support forums. Read More...

Tags: design, web, software, review

This is another thing I love about the web. I found this on the RapidWeaver Forums and thought it was an intriguing way to showcase data. Enter the URL you wish to have reviewed and this site will generate a visual representation of your site. It reviews the code and generates the image based on several criteria: H1 is brighter than H2 is brighter than H3, etc., table is brighter than TR which is brighter than TD, DIV layout is brighter than a table layout, and on. A semantically coded site will appear brighter than an invalid page.

Tags: web, insight, funny

I have had Google Analytics running on this site for less than a week. It is interesting to take a look at the voluminous reports you can create as you analyze your site and the traffic it generates. In the week that I have had it running, I have come to discover more and more what a small planet we have and the need to communicate better through intelligent means like the web.

Just under half of the traffic to this site has been from non-English speaking countries; Japan, Slovakia, Italy, Germany, etc. As I write these opinions, insights, tutorials, they have seemed to make their way around the globe and back again. Read More...

Tags: software, web, cultural, insight

Really Simple Syndication is a means with which to broadcast feeds (alternatively call streams, webfeed, channels, etc.) to the general public. These feeds provide content, or brief summaries and associated metadata, to the end-user with links back to the full or expanded content. The end-user uses a reader or aggregator to subscribe to a feed as well as review the content.

There have been forms of syndication, but none ever achieved a fraction of the success that RSS has obtained thus far. With the variety of rich media (blogs, podcast, photocast, vodcast, etc.) that can now utilize an RSS feed, its popularity will only increase. Read More...

Tags: insight, software, web, programming

With so much to do during the day it is always best to streamline production to work more effectively. A lot of the Flash work I am called upon to develop is online marketing materials (read: banners). These pieces always have a definite set of parameters to run at the publisher's sites. One requirement is that all banner advertisements need an outline. I used to always create this within Flash, converting it to a symbol that I could cut and paste between files. Read More...

Tags: tutorial, flash, web, programming

It is amazing the many and varied ways to present data. Here is a site that will take any website and make a graph out of it. The image is this site, before adding this entry, however.

Tags: web, insight, funny

Here is another great bit of code for showcasing imagery on your site. Lightbox (external link) offers a dynamic slideshow for your imagery with just a small bit of code from the prototype (external link) framework and the scriptaculous (external link) library. It works very well and provides an easy to implement and effective showcase for imagery without the overhead of Flash (not that I am bashing Flash since I work with it quite a bit).

Some folks have expanded the effect and there is a good bit of activity in the community (external link) for creating nice solutions using this method. When you need to implement something other than the standard Flash gallery, this may prove a valuable alternative.

Tags: programming, web, website