Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Yes - another small rant here on a sunny Monday Morning in West Michigan, after a long weekend that was totally off-line.

I don’t get our whole fascination, as a culture, with sports - either at the local or professional level.

Continue reading…

I know…lets throw a whole bunch of words/phrases on the screen, slammed together in different sizes, call it a tag cloud, sit back, prop our feet up on the table and pat ourselves on the back for a good “Web 2.0” job well done.

I find tag clouds useless.  They look messy.  I scan over them and only the largest/boldest tags stick out, in which case it seems like the presentation of the cloud is going to reinforce the content by encouraging more clicks on the already most popular links.

Give me well-structured information architecture backed up with a search engine any day.

For technology professionals, one of the results of the Web 2.0 explosion is a realization of the potential for ambitious, talented, and experienced people to start their own companies and create their own Web products without spending very much money. Article on DigitalWeb.com >>

OK - ran across a nice list of website related resources this AM, via a post in the pMachine Forums.

The full is list on Listable.com.  I spend a few minutes going through it, here’s my hit-or-miss reactions:

• CSSCreator.com
  Looks good - maybe a replacement for the Layout O Matic which seems buggy lately.
• Search Position Checker
  A quick check of the position of my CJ6 Blog brought back results that weren’t accurate—showing no position on Google when a direct search puts me at #3.  I’ll stick with the similar tools available at MarketLeap.com, although the link popularity tool looks to be down there today.
• Feed43.com
  This site will create an RSS feed for a site that doesn’t have one.  I didn’t try it, but it sounds interesting.
• Tabifier
  This tool goes through your HTML and CSS and formats it with tabs.  I’m very exited about this and know I’ll be using it often as the template editing tools in ExpressionEngine are just form text fields and don’t really let you format code nicely.  Figures I’d find this after spending a half hour cleaning up my code on a site I’m building.  Doesn’t handle EE tags as well as native HTML and CSS, but it’s results are more quickly cleaned up than starting from scratch.
• MetaTag Analyzer
  This tool does more than it’s name would imply, also analyzing the size and load time of your page, how it would display in search results, keywords found, and links found.
• Accessible Form Generator
  You specify your form elements and labels required, the tool outputs the necessary HTML code.
• Domain Name Generator
  Give it a list of keywords, and it looks for availability of domain names for all the different combinations of keywords.
• CSS Form Maker
  You specify colors of form elements and it creates a form styled with CSS rather than a table.  I didn’t like how the outputted text fields weren’t nicely aligned in Firefox, so would pass on this one.
• Background Image Maker
  Another hit for me - create subtle striped and gradient backgrounds in about 1/10 the time of creating them in Photoshop Elements.
• Another Gradient Tool
  No backgrounds, but other types of gradients available.
• CSS Rounded Box Generator
  I know rounded corners are “all the rage” and by the time I get to redesigning Boyink.com they’ll probably be passe’, but in the rough sketch I have in my head a more bouncy, rounded design with more “boyink” to it is in order.

I just noticed it’s been over a week since I posted.  Rest assured, I’m still here and engaged.  I’ve just been swamped this week, and because of it having a hard time finding anything interesting to say about anything….