The creative linguist - Views of a graphic designer residing in Cape Town.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Our new site

I have been working hard on a new project I have just launched. It's called FeedSwoop, and its basically a single page rss aggregator. It swoops up the newest feeds from over 28 sites in a range of different categories. Be sure to check it out!

Thursday, March 29, 2007

So whats the hold up?

Yes I know, things have been quiet around here lately, but to be honest, I've been really busy. I haven't forgotten about my blog don't worry. I will be starting a new job soon, which I am extremely chuffed about, so once I get settled down there, the blog posts and other cool shizzle will continue!

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

SOAP: A great blogging initiative you should know about



So if you don't know what SOAP is (Scratch One Another Program), it's an initiative thought up by Easton Ellsworth from Know More Media. You sign up, and Easton will provide you with a blog to review. In return, your blog will go to someone else to review (and by Easton himself). That, in a nut-shell, is the general process.

Personally I think it's great. It's a sublime way to get some tips from fellow bloggers on your own blog, and to offer some constructive critique or helpful tips to a lucky blogger out there in the blogosphere. I reviewed Lisa Gate's site and provided her with quite an in-depth review of her blog. She was thrilled with my tips. Hopefully I will post my review here, on my blog shortly, if Lisa doesn't mind of course.

So if you've got some spare time, go check out the project and fill out the questionnaire. It won't take you long, and it will definitely be worth your while.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Google Reader crashing Firefox?

So it seems like I'm not the only one who has this problem. I have Google Reader open all day in one of my firefox tabs, but it's causing firefox to crash all day long, with the very informative "illegal operation" error. Thank goodness for firefox's little "restore your previous open tabs" feature, otherwise I would of moved to another browser by now.

Firefox is on thin ice actually. Apart from the random crashing (which I can deal with), it also seems to eat up system memory like crazy and the newer versions of firefox haven't really resolved this problem, which tons of people seem to be having.

Currently, I have 6 tabs open, Gmail, Blogger CP, Design-feed, Google Reader, a page with google search results and a random html website. Firefox is using 84mb of my precious ram. If I add another site to the list, this time a full on flash site, it jumps to 110mb. Crazy really, but it seems there isn't much you can do about it.

Yes I have tried Opera, but that too has its own flaws, like randomly refreshing the page before its fully loaded and seemingly limiting you to the amount of flash sites open in tabs you can run simultaneously.

I'm hoping the guys at GReader will sort out this crashing issue, they seem to be working on the site all the time which is refreshing to see. If anyone has any temporary fix's for the crashing problem (or the firefox memory leak) I'd love to hear them!

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Andy Rutledge on web standards

I must say Andy sums it up really well in this article about web standards and quality. Here's an excerpt:

In spite of the widespread acceptance of Web standards by a specific segment of the design and development community, hosts of professionals – those out there right now creating the Web – are working in direct opposition to these standards. A significant reason for why this is happening and how those not working with Web standards justify their activity boils down, I believe, to something regrettably simple: nomenclature.


Read the rest of this well-written article here