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…