jordesign is a design studio based in Sydney, Australia.
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There are three basic components to my online (and in some cases real-world) life. Well there are probably more than that, but for the sake of simplicity let’s say there are three; Consuming, Curating and Creating.
A few days ago at EECI2010 Ellis Labs (creators of Expression Engine) announced the immanent launch of a new CMS product - MojoMotor.
It looks to be a relatively lightweigh alternative to Expression Engine and is targeted at developers doing work for Small to Medium Business. It lacks supports for complexities like categorisation, multiple user types (Admin and Editor only) and other things you would get in EE. However it looks like it will shine for those sites where the most that needs to be done is add/change pages and edit content.
The CMS itself actually appears inline within the site. A header bar gives page creation/editing options and all the editable content can be edited within the page using AJAX.
This looks like a really schmick effort, and would be perfect for the sorts of sites that I routinely do for clients. Pricing is supposed to be set at about $49.95 US when it is released sometime next month. Check it Out!
I was pointed to Merlin Mann’s article Making the Clackity Noise the other day.
He makes an interesting point about the internet being about telling stories. Actually, that may not have been exactly the point he was making, but it was certainly a part of it, and it was the part i took away.
Telling stories is hard, but it is also easy.
I need to practice it more.
There is a great article over at the 99 percent on How to Budget for an Irregular Income.
This has been, for me, one of the difficult things about working freelance for the past year and a bit. Your income from month to month can vary greatly and it can sometimes be struggle to know when you can and can’t use money.
I can, however, testify to the value of some of the suggestions in the article. Having a separate account for freelancing fees to be paid into has been a great way to do it. Money goes into the “business” account and stays there. I pay myself a fortnightly wage from that account into our transaction account in an attempt to keep my pay regular.
There’s lots of other little tips in the article for anyone who is in a similar situation, so check it out.
Get ready to lose a couple of hours… 2010 REBRAND 100 Global Awards Winners Showcase on Effective Rebranding.
Yesterday another major debate on the web was started by an innocuous little comment from Elliot Jay Stocks on Twitter.
Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.
Since then people with much greater expertise and talent than myself (Richard, Mark, Mike, and Elliot himself) have weighed in on the topic. I highly recommend you go and check out what they have to say, but what do I think?
Ligature, Loop and Stem are “Creators and curators of fine typography-related products”. Before Christmas they released a beautiful range of Ampersand related products. I was thrilled and astounded that one of my gifts from Chan at Christmas was a set of their ampersand buttons.
Now LL+S have taken things a step further and are mapping where the deliveries of the Limited Edition releases have been shipped to. If you take a look, you can see there are only a few spots in Australia, and I am one of them.
Very exciting.
I Have No Talent // This is a fantastic article I stumbled across the other day. John Nunemaker is a Rails developer who is of some acclaim within the Rails community. This is a post pointing out he wasn’t amazingly gifted with the things he can do - it came from hard work and lots and lots of practice.
“Then, one day, I ran into something I did not understand and instead of giving up, I pushed through.”
That’s what it is all about.