Archive for the ‘designmeme’ Category
Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have confirmed something I’ve had a growing suspicion of—meetings are bad. The longer and more frequent meetings, the greater the negative effects on the participants: anxiety, burnout, and depression.
Over at 37 Signals, they offer some suggestions as to why frequent and long meetings are bad — they usually contain a very low amount of information conveyed per minute, they drift off subject far too easily, and they’re normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things. Their advice for dealing with meetings: don’t have them. Or if you absolutely have to have a meeting, keep it short. 30 minutes at the most.
Once the meetings are short, and less frequent, the next step is making them more productive. Manager Tools has some great tips and resources to help with this, including sample agenda templates to download and a very good podcast.
I’ve also heard very good things about John Cleese’s training video Meetings, Bloody Meetings, in which he is a thoroughly inefficient chairperson who dreams he is hauled up before a court for negligent conduct of meetings. Unfortunately the DVD is $650… so I think I’ll try and borrow it from someone who already owns a copy.
Tags: business, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 5 Comments »
Friday, January 20th, 2006
Wordpress is a great tool for blogging—it’s easy to setup, the interface makes it easy to use, and there are tons of plugins you can download to add new features. Unfortunately when you’re just getting started with Wordpress, the sheer number of plugins can make it hard to know which ones to start with.
After more than a little trial and error and a lot of looking at discussions of other people’s favourite plugins, I’ve found 11 that seem to stand above the rest. Here are my suggestions for the 11 plugins you should consider adding to your blog.
- Adsense-Deluxe
Place Google AdSense ads in your posts, or as part of your template. This plugin ensures you do not have more than 3 ads displayed at once—part of Google’s terms of use.
- del.icio.us – Bookmark this!
This plugin lets you easily add a “Bookmark this page on del.icio.us” link to your blog or individual articles. Del.icio.us is a personal favourite, and a great way to save, organize and find new links.
- Digg This
Detects if one of your articles has been linked on digg.com and adds a link to the entry. This might not be as useful for blogs that are unlikely to ever be bookmarked there—but for me it’s a nice find.
- Google Sitemaps
This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Having a Google sitemap can help keep your site as up-to-date in Google’s indexes as possible.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner.com so you can make use of their various advanced features for feed presentation and subscriber analysis.
- Gravatar
Show the custom icons associated with the email addresses of users commenting on your entries. This is a great service more people should sign up for.
- Head META Description
Some search engines display the Description meta data for a page in search results. Since Wordpress normally uses the same meta data for all the pages on your site, this is a problem. This plugin builds a dynamic Description meta tag for each entriy based on the page content itself.
- Optimal Title
Moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before, letting you put the title of your post before your blogs name in the title tag for an entry.
- Related Posts
Displays a list of related entries based on keyword matches. This is a good way to encourage visitors to read more of the content on your blog.
- WP-Amazon
WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. Great if you’re an Amazon affiliate, but also a good way to add some extra images to your blog entries.
- WP-ContactForm
This plugin creates a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
Tags: blog software, designmeme, plugins
Posted in designmeme, tools | 26 Comments »
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
Hello to everyone visiting from Digg.com and Del.icio.us today!
After publishing the X-Ray extension for Firefox last week I wasn’t exactly sure how to let people know about it. I applied to have it listed at addons.mozilla.org, but they’ve recently updated their policies and no longer accept extensions with external update URLs. That meant I’d have to republish the extension, and I hadn’t really wanted to do that unless I was adding some new features as well. So for the time being, mozilla.org wasn’t an option.
This morning I was checking out the new links at digg.com—a great social bookmarking site that’s very nicely designed too—and thought “what the hell—I’ll submit the link and see what happens.” While I figured that submitting a regular blog entry would probably be bad form, and wouldn’t have very many other people “digg” it (bookmark it), I really thought some people might like the new extension. The people I’d mentioned it to over on the blambot forum all seemed to like it, so I set up my new digg profile at and submitted the link.
I thought I’d get a few extra visitors and a little more feedback. I got a ton.
Today, the X-Ray Extension for Firefox was on the Digg.com homepage and currently has almost 1,000 people digging it. Del.icio.us users must have seen the link on Digg, because the extension also made it’s way to the del.icio.us popular page. Even better than the number of visitors was the great feedback. Lots of people emailed to say they liked the extension, and Thom Wetzel was nice enough to suggest a CSS fix for the background on the site! Thanks everyone. 
Tags: blog, designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 4th, 2006
If you’re subscribing to the feed for the site, you’ll see some changes today as I’ve started using Feedburner to add some extra features. The feed is now translated on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with the feed reader you’re using. CSS is also used to change the feed into something a little nicer looking when you preview it in your browser.
I’m happy to see the term “feed” being used more frequently and acronyms like XML, RSS, ATOM (is that an acronym?), RDF and so on being used less. Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla team led sums it up nicely:
I’m encouraged that we’re further distancing browsers from the awful “RSS” as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don’t call web pages “HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages” and we don’t identify them in the browser using little icons containing “HTML” and “CSS” acronyms; We shouldn’t do it for feeds either.
So we’re beginning to see people standardize on the term “feed” and even on the image used to represent a feed. The Internet Explorer team has decided to use the same icon as you see in Firefox, and FeedIcons.com is providing a wide assortment of graphic formats to help encourage it’s use.
Tags: designmeme, web
Posted in designmeme, tools | No Comments »
Friday, December 30th, 2005
As 2005 draws to a close, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t need to lose weight or quit smoking, and even if I did—those wouldn’t be very interesting for you to read about. What would be interesting—and by interesting, I also mean challenging—is to resolve to complete a number of different creative projects and post about them here on my blog.
Creative Project Resolutions
- Comic
After having worked with so many comic artists, been involved in a comic collective, helped start a comic printing company, and contributed to a book on comics, it’s somewhat surprising that I’ve never created one of my own.
- Design
Redesign this site. Yes, this is an inevitable one…
- Game
Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of reading about game design theory, and working on some ideas for what I think would make a fun board-game. This year I’m going to turn those ideas into a finished game and publish it.
- Music
Learn to play some type of musical instrument. The Ukelele is looking like a real contender here.
- Painting
At least 2 paintings I feel good enough about to put in frames.
- Software
It’s been a while since I’ve done much coding, so in 2006 I’m going to make sure I produce at least one interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.
- Video
It’s been much too long since I shot and edited any video. This year I’m going to finish a 5 minute creative video and submit it to some type of competition or festival.
- Writing
Over the next year I’m going to try and improve the quality, quantity and frequency of my writing—both for this website and for other projects—whether they’re technical articles, creative writing, or contributions to collaborative projects.
Let’s see how well I can keep these resolutions. Wish me luck!
See some other people’s 2006resolutions.
Tags: blog, designmeme
Posted in designmeme | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
Ali G — no not him, this guy—was one of the artists involved in yesterday’s identity theft fiasco. The thieves were trying to pass off his comic as their own creation—but they were just linking to the image files on his server. After looking at his website stats Ali realize something weird was going on and mentioned it to DJ Coffman, who in turn let the rest of us know about it. Today’s HousD comic makes light of the entire strange incident.
My brother Kevin Robertson has also started posting comics. He’s added them to his blog and they’re about whatever happens to be going on in current events. The first two involve Cronulla and the Sydney Race Riots riots and Brokeback Mountain — so it’s probably safe to say he’s going to cover a lot of different things. I lent him my copy of Webcomics : Tools and Techniques for Digital Cartooning a couple of weeks ago and have been giving him some tips on running his blog, so it’s great to see his stuff online so soon.
And while I’m posting about current events, I should mention that the contact form has once again returned to the site. If you were wondering how to email me, now you can.
Tags: designmeme, Family, web, webcomic
Posted in designmeme | 7 Comments »
Stuart Robertson