A few useful resource sites

Here's a short list of some sites that might be useful to you:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com
A blog featuring tips, tricks, techniques and tutorials.

http://www.cpluv.com/
Good showcase of new and experimental design work

http://bestwebgallery.com/
Collection of all the nicest new sites/flash/ajax etc

Brand Tags

See what people think about brands:

http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php

Try guessing the brand from the tags - many funz0rz and internet points if you win!

Sharing cool stuff you find on the web

Cool stuff. The web is choc full of it. And we, as a team, should be sharing any cool stuff we find with each other.

The problem is how; email is great and instantaneous, but not always convenient and often gets ignored. A better solution would be to leverage some of the news aggregators' sharing functionality and have someone else do the hard work for you.

Google Reader is my first choice - I can share stories and append my own notes, even when I am not currently logged into the app, through using a handy shortcut in my shortcuts bar. This creates a web page that is dynamically updated with all the items I choose to share from my feeds.

If I add you as friends to my account, then I can view all your shared items when I log into Reader, so we can all share in the goodness (and the badness) of the web.

There are some other options that I haven't explored in any depth yet: del.icio.us, Twine; which introduces tagging and a pseudo-semantic element into the mix.

So, don't be shy: set yourselve up with Google Reader and add 'richard.fort@carlson-europe.com' to your buddies (you have to do this by adding me as a contact in GMail or in Google Chat), and I'll start sharing my favourite LOLCATs and FAILs...

Midweek fun

The Agency and M&C Saatchi are battling it out as to who can sell better. See for yourself and decide.

Trust advertising - NEVER! Advertising men are the Devil's spawn.

W

Litmus Apps - web page and email testing

http://litmusapp.com/

Cleverly renders as JPEGs your web page or HTML email as they would appear in all the major browsers (IE7/7, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.) and email clients (Outlook 2003/2007, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Entourage etc.)

Beats loading multiple browsers onto your machine any day of the week - blegh! There's a 1 hour trial version available, so go forth and...err...testify!

Facebook and psychology

Interesting article here on the psychology behind Facebook. Whilst my opinion may differ from the article, it is an interesting read none the less.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7357934.stm

AJAX things

AJAX and Web2.0
Easy to say but not always easy to figure out or explain. I think we need to make it more simple. To that end, we are going to be building up a library of AJAX/Web2.0 'thingys' to make our sites better.

Examples would be:
Calendar that updates on click without refreshing the page
Image swapping without refresh
Postcode lookups
Collapsing/Hiding forms (yes, we did this one!)

Each time we see one we like it should be logged here and we'll work towards building something similar that we can easily re-use and re-brand. Web2.0 - it's all about enabling. :-)