Phil Wylie

WordPress developer, Code Club volunteer & Staffs Web Meetup organiser

September 29, 2006 — 5

Moo.com – Flickr MiniCards!

Got to say, these cards are definitely the best free stuff I’ve ever ordered from the webernets. They arrived this morning after a short wait. Basically Moo takes your Flickr photos and turns them into tiny cards. The personalisation process lets you choose which photos to print, but more importantly, which area of the photo should be printed, as the cards are fairly slim, you have to choose what parts to chop off!

The back of the cards can be used to add text, I decided to make them into mini business cards. With the free cards, you couldn’t remove the flickr logo, but the premium service allows you to do this.

Moo.com Flickr card

Moo’s promotion – ten free cards for the first 10,000 Flickr pro users. A great way to market their service, by only offering the prints to pro users, they’ve instantly saved buckets of advertising money, and instead invested in giveaway cards, which are well targeted to an audience guaranteed to have the ability to purchase online.

The cards themselves are printed on think, high quality, satin finish paper, definitely worth investing in the 100 pack, except I can’t! They’ve limited themselves by choosing not to accept a more mainstream payment gateway, such as PayPal or NoChex. Moo currently only accepts Visa and MasterCard 😐

Still, it’s well worth a look.

September 19, 2006 — 3

International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2006

Ahoy! As you may be aware its International Talk Like A Pirate Day! I ordered a couple hundred eye patches to distribute for charity:

Talk Like A Pirate Day 2006!

There are eye patches in aid of the Jubilee Sailing Trust available around Shrewsbury:

  • The Jolly Roger Card Craft shop at the top of the high street
  • Currys on the Meole Brace Retail Park
  • Shrewsbury Sixth Form college students can get an eye patch from student services

Cosnett proudly wearing his eye patch

More information:

September 5, 2006 — 0

Google testing redesigned results page?

While carrying out my day to day searching with Google, I’ve noticed occasionally the results page appears to be of a different design. It would seem Google’s at it again, testing new layouts!

The recent designs all seem to keep to a three column layout, with search options (web, images, groups, news, ect) removed from above the search box, and moved to a left column, these options are now also repeated at the bottom of the results page.

Google Search Results

The traditionally blue coloured information bar underneath the logo and search box has been simplified and altered to a dull beige colour. Originally displaying the number of results on the current page, as well as the total number of results discovered, the bar now only displays which set of results you are viewing (“Results 1 – 10” for example). The information lost from this location is now located at the bottom of the results page, next to the page selector.

Google Search Results

Clicking though to search images, simply returns the standard images results page. The changes don’t seem to make a real difference to usability unless you take into account the repeated search options being displayed at the bottom of the screen, however it’s never seemed like too much of a task to scroll back up to select image results! The colour choice doesn’t make any sense to me, I much preferred the blue layout 🙂

Google Definitions

September 1, 2006 — 0

Code-a-thon

The setup of equipment was pretty painless, the most frustration was caused by the lack of an internet connection! After some investigation, we rang the Tiscalli technical support line, who kindly informed us, the service in our area was currently down for maintenance. Since finishing, connectivity has been restored! 😐

Without the internet, our code-a-thon “live” webcam was redundant, however the software still captured images every 30 seconds onto hard disk, which means, thanks to the wonder that is technology, you can watch our entire 24 hours in only 1 minutes, 30 seconds! Enjoy:

During the time, we also played a fair bit of Nexuiz, an open source FPS and Doom 2 over the LAN! As for real work, without the internet, we couldn’t access our test servers, but still we made a decent start on Delta CMS’s overall design/layout.

I have uploaded some photos to Flickr, check out the cable management!

August 31, 2006 — 0

24 hour Code-a-thon

So finally I’ve gotten round to blogging our crazy event! The basic motivation behind the 24 hour coding extravaganza is to finally get some work done! Nick and I are always planning new projects which never seem to take off, maybe because we are serial procrastinators (or at least I am)! 😀

From Thursday 31st August, midday till Friday the 1st September midday, we plan to spend our time working on various different programming related projects.

You can catch up on the action by watching our almost live (one frame every five seconds!) webcam. Expect special guest appearances from Adam Cosnett and Tom Vickers!

Things I hope to start work on: HowToUseA.com and Delta CMS.

I might make a few posts here throughout, and as usual, a flurry of random photos will appear on Flickr during or more likely, after the 24 hours.

Nicks blog entry »

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