04 Jan 2012
In last year’s review, I was fairly open about the fact that it wasn’t a good year businesswise. Not terrible, but more stressful and less productive than it should’ve been.
Over the past year there were additional business (major hardware & software upgrades) and personal (wedding) expenses to deal with, so the balance of work was skewed by this, but overall it went really well and the business is in better shape than ever. The only downsides were that I was too busy to blog much, and most of the interesting & challenging projects were confidential. That’s the problem with anonymous freelancing for other agencies: if you do too much of it your portfolio can start to wither, so it’s important to try to include ‘indie’ sites & personal projects.
Anyway, I’m still enjoying the office (not many landlords invite you to a slap-up Christmas lunch and let you have the dog under your desk), and looking forward to working with a couple of new clients on an interesting mix of projects. I’m also planning to change my company branding, revamp this site, and launch one or two quirky little sites.
A selection of blog posts from the past year:
- Cheap’n’Geeky Office Art
- Not to everyone’s taste.
- View Source (Code)
- ASCII-based marketing is the future.
- Using The Flash Right-Click Menu For Version And Credits
- A simple ActionScript tip.
- Web Font Embedding Fully Arrives
- After a long, slow journey.
- Wedding Photography Copyright Revisited
- Attitudes are changing, but slowly.
- Why Twitter Really Works
- #itsallaboutthefollowing
And here are all of the ‘link dumps’, in case you want to rummage through everything that caught my eye online in 2011:
01 Dec 2011
There are various reasons why Twitter has grown and continues to be popular, but one seems to be often overlooked.
When the 140-character limit is discussed, it’s almost always from the writing side: how it forces users to be succinct, suits trivial chat, etc. And it’s sometimes seen as a vestigial annoyance from the days of SMS, with the lack of such a limitation touted as an advantage for other platforms.
But it’s actually on the reading side that the enforced brevity has a huge positive impact. By keeping updates short, Twitter allows a user to follow at least a hundred or so active accounts without it becoming too burdensome, spreading the social net wider, giving a better overview of activity, allowing consumption in tiny chunks, and making it harder for a small minority to flood activity streams. I suppose you could say that Twitter offers broad insight by forcing everyone to be shallow.
(I don’t think I could follow hundreds of people actively using Google+; if even just a dozen or so regularly posted long updates it would unbalance the whole stream and make it feel awkward, especially on a mobile device.)
14 Nov 2011
Last week I launched the ‘Green Christmas’ page for The Green Apple, offering a simple competition and showcasing some of the quirky products. There was also a bit of business matchmaking involved, arranging for it to be promoted via the b3ta newsletter.
The competition runs for a couple of weeks, so I’ll be fully analysing the stats after that, but it’s already proving to be a successful campaign.
10 Nov 2011
It’s over 2 years now since Janey Thomson’s Marathon went live and then was featured at Retro Reunited, but it seems masochistic gamers are still taking up the challenge.
YouTube user KartSeven recently posted a video of an entire run. Yes, you can sit and watch someone punish their fingers for almost two hours.
Morpion Solitaire
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment
