Fabulously Handmade Art at Etsy

Okay... so I've joined Etsy.com (see my shop with its one test painting in it... more to come soon!). Etsy is an DIY ecommerce platform where you can sell your handmade wares (art, clothing, jewelry... anything you make with your own hands), and sell online. It's an easy setup for someone like me. While the contents of my own shop are a bit slim at the moment, I've got an extensive list of favorite items being sold by other people:

PodCamp Montreal, 2008: My Weekend.

I'm back from PodCamp Montreal, 2008. Here were a few pics, taken during this morning's sessions. It wasn't as crowded this morning, as it was yesterday. My head is swirling with information that I need to sort out, so I can write about it.

Browser Usage - Web Statistics & Trends

In my pursuit to update my internet knowledge, I thought it would be important to check out some web stats... but where? And how accurate would those stats be? Would they be up-to-date? I found what I was looking for on the W3Schools web site. Not only am I able to brush up on my coding, but the web site provides a monthly breakdown on web statistics and trends, dating back for the past six years. There's also info about OS Platform statistics. Oh, and being part of W3, it's free.

XML-Sitemaps for Web Page Ranking

Moving right along... The photo in the last fascinating post about the dinosaur discovery looks more like something my dog makes, that I must pick up and dispose of. Time now for a little web technology...

My page ranking had slipped a point, and I am looking for help. The best remedy, I've found, is to actually post every day, but if you've ever tried writing 70-100 words to write, EVERY day, you know it's not that easy.

I realized I needed to submit an XML sitemap for the robots to better crawl my site. I'm a so-so at coding, so for that reason, I sought out an XML sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com. Just plug in the code, and away it goes, generating an XML map to all your pages. Download the new file, then upload it into your site's root folder, and submit it to Google's Webmaster Tools... Voilà! (I'll let you know how my page ranking turns out).

Test JavaScript in IE, on Multiple Platforms

Need to test your JavaScript in Internet Explorer on various platforms? DebugBar has an alpha release of IETester. It's still in the alpha stages of testing, but maybe we're on to a good thing here.

Praizing the Praized

Praize 'n Raize is gaining ground. It was started by some guys in Montreal, one of which is my blogger friend, Harry, an ideas guy. I recently decided to try my hand at this app, now nicely integrated into Facebook, cool graphics and all. It's a way to bookmark your favorite hot spots around town, and share this information with other users... Kind of a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" review, of sorts.

What's Your Visual DNA?

Personality tests abound on the internet... everything from the Dr. Phil personality test, available on Facebook, to online dating services, like eHarmony, that claim to match you up, according to your personality test results. Here's a personality test with a new twist, from Youniverse.com (catchy URL): the Visual DNA test. It consists of a series of open-ended statements, starting with, "Art is...", and shows a series of thumbnail photos. You respond by clicking on the photo that you most feel best corresponds to the statement. As one friend put it, "not exactly CSI, but an entertaining diversion". I'm a Sophisticat. What are you? Find out.

Here's a handy dandy little tool for for the eager CSS learner: it's CSS Zen Garden... a series of CSS templates (read: cheat sheets), that allow you to completely alter the look and feel of a web site, by simply changing the style sheet. Examples are downloadable... Once again, the word "clever" comes to mind.

What Color is That Anyhow?

As a designer, I spend my days dreaming up fabulous color combinations. I'm intrigued by the way colors play with one another, when placed next to each other. Opposite colors have a sort of "electric" effect, while those in the same hue but of different tones can have a calming effect. Of all the possible elements of design, color is my very favorite.

Now, imagine not being able to see color the way you do... if you were color blind. I confess, I'd not given that much thought to it, beyond basic accessibility issues... until I found this web site: Vischeck.

Check individual images, or feed a URL into their form, and see what it comes up with. I tried it on StudioClaire.com (my portfolio site), and was surprised by what I saw!

I guess that until the day when someone recovers from color blindness and is able to compare before and after versions, we will never know exactly how differently we each view the same colors, tones and hues, but this online tool might give us a sneak peek at visual impairment!

Watch Your Users' Every Move

Watch users navigate through your site, by recording their mouse clicks, with a simple line of JavaScript added to the code, to make it go.

RobotReplay allows you to view your users' activity on your site, and learn where they do and don't go. This could very well take the guesswork out of some usability issues that lead to stagnant marketing efforts. It's anonymous, so Big Brother remains out of the picture, at least for now, and it's relatively effortless... It's like usability research, but without putting in the time.

Check out this nail-biting example.

2008 Web Trend Map

It looks like a metro map of a large city, but it's not. It is a map of the internet, documenting user trends, and is aptly named the 2008 Web Trend Map. The clickable online version actually allows users to select Snap Shots, which allows you to mouse over the various sites, getting a little screenshot of each!

Contemporary Character Design and Art

"Enter the playground" ... these words beckon at Pictoplasma's friendly, colorful and interactive "Colour Me! Playground", where one can scribble and doodle the day away (after signing up).

Once you get past all the "Enter" screens, the friendly CMYK colors greet you with their uber-modern cheer, and sound effects make the drawing experience all the more... well, colorful.

Google Maps Gone Creepy

Two dudes in a pad. One needs to know where the picture frame store is. The other guy Google maps it, and inspired by curiosity, discovers much more than the store in question!

A short b-styled, YouTube vid by a couple of college aged guys pushes the limits and made my hair stand on end, if only for a moment. How much does Big Brother really know about us? ... Really? How far will technology go? Weird.

Flash Cheat Sheet... Coult it Be So?

If you're like me, you love to see fluid creativity in motion, but you may not be so adept at the programming side of things... enter, Sprout, "the quick and easy way to create sophisticated multi-media content". A user-friendly, pre-built WYSIWYG Flash programming claims to make Flash programming easy and breezy. Here's the Youtube video.

The Sprout web site proudly boasts a launch date of January 28, 2008... Well, we know that date is past. Akin to most software companies, I suppose they have run into unforseen delays before their product launch. I thought I'd try clicking on their "Get Started" page, but received a message saying that they're in the closed beta stage (code for: they're testing their software, and they have enough testers already, thank you very much).

From a programming-challenged designer's perspective, it looks like a promising solution, so I've signed up to be notified of their launch... I'll keep you posted!

FEB. 19 UPDATE... Get your Sprout here: www.sproutbuilder.com/friendsofsprout

How to Block Facebook Apps

Handy. That's all I can say.

How many times a week, in Facebook, do I get asked to join a virtual snowball fight, or perhaps get involved in a Vampires chase, become a zombie, grow a garden, care for an aquarium, and on and on and on?... Most of the time, I add the applications, because I don't want to hurt the sender's feelings. I want my friends to know that I like them, and that includes their ideas. That said, every time I get another useless application sent my way, I cringe. Wouldn't it be nice if they just never came my way in the first place? Well, here's a useful "how to", on how to block specific Facebook applications, so that you NEVER have to see another invitation to "all these games that most people don't want to join", as narrator Jeff Lange puts it, so matter-of-factly. Right on.

Test Tube

Youtube has a little secret spot, known as "Test tube". It's where they experiment with different ideas, including this one, called Warp. It looks like Cheerios floating in outter space. When you mouse over the O's, other little O's spawn from the bigger O, showing what's related. As you listen to the videos, it draws a line from one watched vid to the next. Clicking the colour-coded dots on the top right of the page brings you back to the associated video that you watched.

I'm not sure how useful this is, but it sure is pretty design. And kind of fun, in a bored, poke-around-the-internet kind of way. Check out the "Top 10" Super Bowl ads here.

Going Back in Cyber Time

Ever wonder what web sites looked like in the 1990's? Want to check out the various version of your own web site(s), throughout the years? Well, I wanted to. That's when I re-discovered a long-lost tool, the "Wayback Machine". Unbelievably, this archival site can reference almost every single iteration of every web site online, dating back to... well, at least '96.

I wanted to checked out StudioClaire.com (my serious site), to remind myself of the various changes I've made. Quite miraculously, this "machine" is able to summon up almost every change I have ever made to my web site. I say "almost every change", for it has broken links where there should be images, in some (many) cases. Cool though.

Dating's Not What it Used to Be

How would you like to go on a date with the boy next door? what if I told you that the boy next door had his head squeezed in an elevator door, and suffers from permanent head trauma. Or, as Daniel Murphy so aptly puts it, "... for some people you just get the feeling that given the opportunity they might squeeze love a little too tight and kill it."

Murphy comments on society's latest trend: self-marketing in the world of online dating, in his article, The Five Worst Online Dating Video Profiles. Take a read. Just be sure to go pee first.