Outside Instragram

Instagram is easily my favorite iPhone app right now and I’m certainly not alone. It’s a fun, easy way to take and share great photos and the massive community that has developed around mobile photography is what keeps us all improving. As happy as I was to read the Mashable article this morning about Instagram coming to Android, I was much more excited to see the bonus segment with interviews from 15 of the app’s most prominent photographers.

Don’t get me wrong, expanding the Instagram community beyond the iPhone is pretty big news, but what makes that bonus segment so great has little to do with the app itself. It’s about taking better, more interesting and more artistic pictures…

FOWD 2011 Cliff Notes

I tend to live tweet little snippets of the talks I attend at conferences. The problem is that, out of context, those tweets mean very little. For the 2 main conference days here at FOWD, I’m going to take a cue from Luke Wroblewski & try to give a cliff notes style overview of the talks I attend. Ready, set, go!

A Tribute to Items

I’ve been a fan of Gowalla for a very long time. I’m sure many people know the application simply as a check-in service. To me though, Gowalla has always been about the items. Over the last 2 years, I’ve taken different routes home, gone out of my way on trips and arranged swap meets with fellow Gowalla users nerds to collect all the items. In it’s heyday last year, Gowalla was introducing a new item every week (New-item Tuesday!) and sometimes even did surprise, real-item giveaways like a new AT&T Smartphone or a pair of TOMS Shoes. At that point in Gowalla’s history, every user was an item collector, or at least paid attention to them for the chance of winning real items. Since then, Gowalla has made lots of incremental changes to their service to appeal to a wider audience…

Bring Out Your Dead

There’s been a lot of talk lately surrounding the future of client services since Khoi Vinh casted them as the man who didn’t want to go on the cart in his The End of Client Services post. Khoi was essentially saying that if you want to do great work, you either have to go “in-house” as he did at The New York Times or be a part of a company that owns a product. The conversation continues this week after Khoi posted a follow-up, In Defense of Client Services yesterday. In it, he essentially says, “Ok, fine. Client services will still exist. Do not want.”

Here We Go Again

When Amy and I were planning our move from Florida to South Carolina in 2005, we knew that we wanted to buy. Having lived in 3 different tiny apartments during our last 2 years in Gainesville, we were fed up with renting and desperate for a place of our own. Knowing that the PhD program at USC was going to be a 5 year commitment, we forked over every penny we had toward a down payment and dove head first into home ownership.

Given our still-fresh-out-of-college budget, most of the properties we found needed work – a lot of work. I don’t think a single house we looked at was staged to sell and many of them were, well, pretty boring…

Wanna see my link bg?

I have this sad tendency lately to reduce an announcement down to a tweet that I would have previously written a full blog post about. You know, little things like updating a Firefox extension so that it actually works again. That was almost a month ago, and I was about to share a link to my little plugin this afternoon and realized that the last time I posted anything here about it was February…of 2010.

So yea, this blog is sorely neglected, but if you’ve ever wanted to right-click on a link in Firefox and see the background image of said link (or the background of it’s parent element or multiple background images), I made an extension just for you…

Email Jitsu…It's On!

A few months ago I designed a concept site for a fictional HTML email workshop as part of .net Magazine’s regular “build-off” feature. It was inspired by my favorite MailChimp guide, titled Email Jitsu which teaches “combat tips” for HTML email coding and design. For fun, I wrote a post for the MailChimp blog about the possibility of making the workshop a reality. Several people expressed interest, so I quietly signed myself up for one of the workshop slots at this year’s ConvergeSE conference on June 24th in Columbia, SC…

Less is More

There was a time when I considered myself to be just a nerdy, introverted, quiet designer who had a hard time relating to my non-webbie human counterparts. Then I attended my first web conference, SXSW 2007 and it really changed my perspective. I met a lot of designers and developers who I considered to be celebrities in their respective fields, most of whom were very approachable and genuinely happy to get to know a fellow web nerd. When I say that attending SXSW changed my perspective, what I mean is that it made me realize that I have a lot in common with anyone who works on designing and building the web…

Tres Cero

The last couple months have really been a blur for Amy and I. We’ve spent every free weekend and almost every evening sanding, spackling, painting, caulking, sorting, packing and cleaning. We won’t be making the move to Atlanta till the 1st weekend of April but we want to make sure the house is in the best condition possible before we put it on the market.

With all that constant work it was nice to take an evening off last night to celebrate my 30th birthday with a few close friends at Miyabi. It had been a few years since the last time I ate at a Japanese Steak House and I forgot how much fun it was…

10 Tips for SXSWi Noobs

Over the past month I’ve been asked at least a dozen times if I’m going to SXSW Interactive 2011. This would have been my 5th consecutive trek to Austin and while I’m sad to miss it, I’ll be relocating to Atlanta at the end of March and desperately need that week to get packed for the move. So, to the friends I see there every year, have an extra drink at one of the sponsored, open-bar parties…it’s on me.

For those of you who are heading to Southby for this fist time this year, you’re in for an exciting ride. From the buzz I’ve heard, SXSWi 2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year. A friend of mine asked on Twitter last night if I had any tips for first-timers. I figured it’d make a good blog post too, so here are my top 10 tips for enjoying SXSWi…