My Ipad has been All Around the World
My Random Walk
Tech enthusiast, IT executive and dad.(about)
Scanning this will direct you to my site via a goo.gl short url. I've been seeing people wave their iPhone in front of posters and signs. It's easier than jotting down url's etc. Thinking about making it my new business card.
Check out Wikipedia for more on QR Codes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
Check out this QR Code Generator. http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/
Update 1: (for blackberry users) Upgrade to Blackberry Messenger v5.0. It's equiped with a camera-based QR scanner. It worked well with for url and email encoded QRs, but not contacts or text. BBM 5.0 download available here.
Click here to play game including Super Nova and Galaxy Invasion. You won't be surprised to read that you should probably not try this with Internet Explorer. In fact, Peter Phillips, did some browser performance research using the TRS-80 javascript emulator... uber-geeky.
Have fun.
I'm no designer but I'm a huge admirer of them. I love using sites, applications, and products that are functional, beautiful, and fun. My basic approach was to try to remove elements and increase whitespace and readability. I changed it because the old design just kept nagging at me. It felt cluttered and choppy. The more I looked at it, the more things I found. I surveyed a few hundred sites and took a few ideas that I kept seeing over and over again on great sites... At least I thought they were great:)
Now for the changes...
Fonts
Helvetica Neue and Arial to Museo Sans. Museo Sans is easy to read. Also it's not Helvetica(which I love, but too common), and definitely not Arial.
Logo
I liked the idea from the old logo to do one name in bold so I just change the font and the size a little.
Old Logo - using fonts Century Gothic and Arial
New Logo - using Museo Sans... a looks a little crisper to me. I also added a 5px border on the top of the page and added extra whitespace around the logo. It didn't feel as good without the border.
New Header with border and more whitespace.
Sidebar
At least to me, I felt the sidebar was drawing too much attention. To fix that I,
290px
New 190px
Posts
I simplified the post footer and lightened the font. I want it to be there but not really an integral part of the post.
Old Footer
At least to me, these changes make a difference. Are these good choices for a super-n00b?
I learned 2 good lessons... create some time between your design iterations so that you can easily see the opportunities for change. Also, once you're done, look for elements to take out.
Let me know what you think.
Suppose you wanted to profit from price discrepancies between 2 markets(any 2 Red Dots)... The Blue Dots represent where you would optimally place a computer to process signals from those 2 markets.
Wissner-Gross, the professors who wrote of this approach, say they're "currently in talks with financial firms about licensing our technique".
Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
Update 1: I've hacked together a Posterous Sidebar Flair Hack Builder Tool here.
Notice the two pieces of "flair" in my posterous sidebar, "recent posts" and "flickr photos". Perhaps you've tried to embed some javascript in your custom posterous theme and found out that they simply don't allow it. That's probably a good thing. You can get crazy and buggy with this stuff. However, without javascript support, typical blog sidebar widgets won't work.
But... I googled some suggestions and customized them for my needs. Basically, some javascript in an iframe and you can build yourself a nice, safe sidebar widget. This is sort of how Google Gadgets on iGoogle work. I think I might eventually lose the flair, but in the meantime, I'll share how it's put together. My widget supports showing posterous posts, tweets, rss feeds, delicious feeds, and flickr photos.I built the "recent posts" widget using my posterous rss feed. The two iframes I embedded in my theme are<div class="sidebar-block">
<iframe marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"
src="http://files.martinruiz.com/files/
martinruiz-posterous-sidebar-widget.htm?method=rss&
feedurl=http://martinruiz.posterous.com/rss.xml
frameborder="0" style="border:0;height:525px;width:290px;">
</iframe>
</div>
<div class="sidebar-block">
<iframe marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"
src="http://files.martinruiz.com/files/
martinruiz-posterous-sidebar-widget.htm?method=flickr&
username=martinruiz&
user=8335702%40N03&
count=3&layout=v&size=m" frameborder="0"
style="border:0;height:600px;width:290px;">
</iframe>
</div>
Checkout more example here.
Update 1: I've hacked together a Posterous Sidebar Flair Builder based on this post here.
You need to set the width and length of the iframe to fit your theme's sidebar. It might require a little trial-and-error to get it right.
About the Parameters
"method" parameter can be set to "posterous", "twitter", "rss", "delicious", or "flickr".
"css" parameter can be set to the path of your CSS file. Otherwise it uses defaults that I like:)
"style" parameter can be set to "posterous" --- this uses "posterous" default theme
"header" parameter can be set to the Header text for the widget, i.e., "Recent Posts"
"count" parameter is the number of items to display
<div class="sidebar-block"></div> <div class="sidebar-block"></div>
Update 1: I've hacked together a Posterous Sidebar Flair Builder based on this post here.
