Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Upgraded to WordPress 3.4

WordPress 3.4 was released a few days ago.  I didn’t have the time to take a better look at it, but once I read through the new features today, I got excited.  Theme options preview and embeding tweets are the two sweetest features.  Here is a test for the tweet embed.

Which features are your favorite?

WordPress + Tumblr, and thinking behind

Matt Mullenweg, insightful as always:

While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality is that all are growing rapidly and services feed each other and cross-pollinate more than anyone gives them credit for. Tumblr built a dashboard reader product that has tons of pageviews and lots of followers, which can provide distribution for blogs much in the same way Facebook and Twitter do. (Its 85%-on-dashboard-centric usage looks more like a social network than a blogging network, actually.) WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

It’s true that we’re becoming simpler and more streamlined and it’s a process driven by our design vision and our community, not what any particular competitor is doing. WordPress has always flourished because it’s a hassle-free digital hub — a home on the web you can control, customize, and truly own due to the fact that it’s Open Source software. WordPress is the antidote to walled gardens.

Judge.me – Internet arbitration

For years now I’ve heard (and said) that the legal system is lagging behind, that it needs to catch up and provide answers to some of those questions raised by the recent technological advances.  Given how complex and large our current legal system is, that’s not an easy task.  But the need is there.  And, as always, where there is a need, there is a business.

I’ve actually been wondering when we’ll see more and more lawyer start-ups, figuring out problems and providing solutions.  Today I’ve learned about one such start-up via this Slashdot post. It’s called Judge.me and it provides arbitration services over the Internet:

It’s not unusual for a freelance Web designer or developer to be burnt when a client refuses to pay up, citing one excuse or another. And what can you do about it? If a contract only amounts to a few thousand dollars, litigation to recover your fee can be far too expensive, and an increasingly vituperative exchange of emails is often not enough for client and contractor to come to agreement over who owes whom what. Into this gap steps judge.me: A start-up founded by Peter-Jan Celis that aims to provide internet-based, legally binding arbitration services — a ‘small claims court’ for the internet — with a particular eye on settling the conflicts that arise over freelance development and Web design.

The start-up is utilizing the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards that is recognized by 146 countries (yes, including US, most of European Union, Cyprus, and Russian Federation).  Read more on how it works.

There are still questions and doubts on whether Judge.me is the solution or a milestone on the road to one.  Some people are skeptical, yet others seemed to have tried it and got the results. But regardless of how good this particular service is, I’m glad to see some activity in this area.

The new Bit.ly – a Delicious déjà vu

Bit.ly is a famous and widely used URL shortening service.  Or at least it used to be until a few days ago, when a new Bit.ly was introduced.  I managed to miss the announcement, so it was only today that I saw it.  Being a fan of (almost) all new and shiny, I looked around.  And within seconds I had this strong feeling of déjà vu.  And this time I didn’t even have to think hard to guess where I saw this before.  The answer was obvious and it was staring at me – the good old Delicious, social bookmarking service.

From a simple URL shortening service with popular API and some stats on clicks, Bit.ly is transforming into a social bookmarking service.  Here are just a few things that stood out for me:

  • More and more ways to add bookmarks – browser addons, mobile applications, etc.
  • Social aspect of bookmarking – bit.ly now integrates Twitter and Facebook friend’s public bookmarks into your network stream.
  • Bundles – I think that’s one of the major differences between a URL shortening service and a bookmarking service.  With URL shortening there is no need (or it is really small) of organizing URLs – you can always just shorten it again.  With bookmarks some sort of organization is a must.
  • Bookmark notes – these are pretty much identical to those of Delicious.

Responsive typography

I’ve recently made yet another attempt to do so some web design myself.  Of course that ended up being a total fiasco, like every single time before that.  But as every single time before that, I’ve learned something new.  This time, my focus was around typography.  The current trend towards a gadzillion web fonts is probably one of the biggest changes in web design that I see.  Google Web Fonts alone is a resource one could spend countless hours at.

And just as I’ve wrapped up and threw away my web design attempt, I came across an article on responsive typography.  And the very first paragraph of it confirmed what I have realized myself.

With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. Now, screens are changing not just in size, but also in pixel density. In other words: we do not just need responsive layouts, we also need responsive typefaces.

Unlike me though, the authors seems to have a pretty good idea of what they are talking about.