My mates at A List Apart are conducting a survey for people who make websites. If you are a designer, developer, information architect, project manager, writer, editor, marketer, or in any way/shape/form involved in making websites, go now and spend five-to-ten minutes and take the survey. Last year nearly 33,000 people took the survey and loads of really important information came out of it. For 2008, A List Apart gave the survey a good overhaul, tweaking/fixing/improving lots of things, especially for us freelancers out there.
This is an important time for this industry, as large companies are considering that maybe the website isn’t just an extension of the IT department, and maybe I can stop just checking “Other” for what industry I’m in when I’m filling out pretty much any form online. Data collected from The Survey goes a long way toward showing the world what’s going on behind the scenes of this internet people are so excited about.
I wrote an Expression Engine plugin to give some administrative ability on the front-end of the site for both members and super-users of a website.
I first wrote this plugin for Animal Internet, a website that we built earlier this year.
The Admin Comments plugin gives users the ability to delete their own comments on a site, super-users the ability to delete anybody’s comment, and also a super-user can choose to close comments instead of deleting them.
View the documentation and download the plugin on the Admin Comments Plugin Page.
It’s pretty handy. I’m using it on this site now. It even gets a cooler if you add in some javascript to make the experience a bit more fluid. I didn’t incorporate that into the released version of the plugin as the javascript is fairly specific to my needs and website, but I’ll include a little video here so you can see what the possibilities are.
Let me know what you think, and send me …
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I had no idea what I was in for when Anna sent me a link to the site for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The name alone is fantastic, and then I’m greeted by a glorious graphic of Neil Patrick Harris donned in evil villain garb. Who could resist digging further?
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is the creation of Joss Whedon. It’s a 45-minute film he co-wrote and directed starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. Whedon basically got a bunch of his friends to pitch in, and, without the aid of studios or major (even minor) funding, made a movie and put it up on the internet. It was free for about five days, and now it’s available on iTunes for a mere $3.99.
It’s a fantastic, funny story, and also happens to be a musical (I kid you not). You can tell it’s not heavily-funded, but honestly, more money would have just added a bit of polish. The brilliance, talent and entertainment is all there. It’s a great example of how much can be done with very little.
I …
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Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.