Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

My Poker News Aggregator

My obsession with poker has returned. I had quit playing for about a year-and-a-half because I had gone on life tilt from the game. (If you don’t play poker, tilt is when something unbalances your game and makes you play poorly. Usually angrily.) I’m a smart guy and I thought I should be a winning player against the average small stakes player and I wasn’t. So I stopped.

Enough time passed that I had calmed down. Having a toddler will teach you a patience that playing a game never could. I was drawn back to the game. Initially playing only about an hour a week. Then two nights, then more. I was still a losing player but a trip to Vegas helped me sort that out (honest!).

But simply playing the game isn’t enough for me anymore. I’ve always wanted to combine my love of the game with my skills as a design technologist. As a result, I’ve begun to roll out my own poker news aggregator.

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The Times They Are a Changing

I think my time with Project 52 has come to an end. The idea was noble: get a bunch of people to commit to blogging at least once a week for an entire year. However, the project itself seems to have fallen down on the job.

Writing is a personal goal of mine and one that I will continue, but the artificial nature of the once a week construct has inhibited me. I structured the blog around the concept and the way I feature the current post dissuades me from posting shorter content that my time allows. At the other end of the spectrum there is some longer form content I’d like to write that simply can’t be completed in a week.

It’s also hampered the other goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year and, I suspect, making progress toward those goals will provide plenty of things to talk about. At the end of the day I simply don’t have much time to devote to my personal projects so if I pick one it’s at the expense of the others. Between my job and my family I struggle the way most everybody else does, but sometimes it feels like I struggle a bit more.

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Tips for Running an Online Contest

From awesome prizes to using social media to clearly stating the rules, these tips will help you use your contest to create a more passionate audience.

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I’m Very Comfortable With Who I Am

The following conversation took place between Twitter, Facebook, email and in-person.
Me: The iPhone should be able to play random songs for ringtones. For confident people who aren’t afraid of ABBA’s Dancing Queen popping up.
Myshell: You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine
You can dance, you can [...]

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Nothing to see here… Today.

No post today other than this update that I won’t be posting. I should have posts up this Wednesday and Friday.

Upcoming topics over the next month or two will include some infographics, me weighing in on the Adobe/Apple fight, a lesson on the stupidity of crippling browser functionality and images in order to “protect” them, samples of things I’m working on, a look at some WordPress plugins, and a few other topics. I’ll also undoubtedly weigh in on a few discussions as they’re taking place. Real-time web FTW.

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Reader Question About Online Businesses

Okay, this isn’t actually a reader question. It’s a question from a friend of mine and I thought it would be worthwhile to share my reply:

Chat, do you know anyone who consults with small businesses on how to make their website make more money for them?

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Helping Passionate Users

The key to viral (or social) marketing is to make it easy for your users to help you. To do that, you need to give them the tools to help you. And to do that, you probably have to put a little bit of thought into what the best tools are.

Over at Spiceworks we have a user group called Spread Spiceworks. It’s grown organically over time and I thought I’d share some of the tools we’ve created to help our users evangelize us.

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Phototuts+ “Memories” Contest

Phototuts+ is running a contest this week called “The ‘Memories’ Photography Project,” and they’re giving away a Canon EOS 550D camera to the winner! You can read all of the contest details on their site but the short version is:

Upload up to three pictures that represent “memories” to you. Include 150-350 words describing each photo. Afterwards they’ll post the entries for people to vote on.

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Typography Flowchart

Need to choose the right font for your next project? Look no further.

Complex Flowchart

Complex Flowchart

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Summer Reading

I have a lot of books I want to read.

I always have a lot of books I want to read. But I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret: I tend to buy them and not read them. I want to. I just don’t. It’s for a variety of reasons: I have a toddler, I work at a startup, I have personal goals to achieve in those rare moments that I have time to myself, and the list goes on.

A side effect of this is that my summer reading list involves a lot of books that I already own, including…

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