Not exactly, but close. Google is now hosting “millions” of images from the archives of LIFE magazine, the vast majority of which were never before published. The best part: the scans are wallpaper-makingly ginormously huge. Some of them suffer from some halftone issues, but hey, what do you expect?
Obviously, there’s no Creative Commons license on these images, so keep these out of your next car commercial, but they’re a great source of design inspiration. It’s great to see the mistakes too—the bad exposures and soft-focuses that give these photos some humanity (and make you think twice about deleting your bad photos).
Here are some of my favorites (There’s a NASA-overload in this list, but anyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised):
I like LaterThis a lot, because I work on two computers and I like to access my bookmarks on both of them. It works like this: Find a page you want to save, click on the LaterThis bookmarklet in your browser toolbar (or bookmarks list) and walla-it’s automatically saved to your account. As an extra bonus, LaterThis creates an RSS feed of all your saved pages, which we will be using here.
If you want to see this widget in action, check out the bottom of the sidebar on this page.
There are lots of ways to have an RSS feed display in your sidebar, but I think the best and most flexible is based on a great NETTUTS tutorial by Jeffery Way that uses PHP to parse the feed.
How great is this? Iyaz and Rob from Channelflip (The UK’s Finest Video Magazine) take a pretty detailed look at Rifflet.com, our project site for lonely musicians to upload and remix unfinished songs. If you like a good creation story, you can read Part I and Part II of “Making a Social Music Site in Drupal” which chronicles building Rifflet out of the open-source scrapheap.
Never mind that this album is completely great. From the titles written in one of those old push-pin on velvet signs to the delicately laid out “letter to science,” the artwork is one of my favorites from this year.
A few days ago, Hajas Tamás was kind enough to read my post about Making a Social Music Site in Drupal and mention it on his blog. The catch is that, two years of college Spanish notwithstanding, I am uni-language; if it ain’t in English, I got nothing. I recognize exactly three words in the post: Rifflet, guitar and Drupal. So how do I read what he/she wrote?
Google Translator
According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to Google Translate, which I thought would be the best bet, but I’m still missing a crucial piece of information: I have no idea what language this is in. I tried with no luck choosing the ‘Romanian’ or ‘Bulgarian’ options. There was a ‘Detect Language’ option (hidden) at the top of the list, which revealed that the page is written in Hungarian, but I got the error message “We are not yet able to translate from Hungarian into English.” Fair enough.
I Googled “Hungarian to English webpage translator” and found Webforditas.hu, which did exactly what I want, but the results were less than stellar:
At the end of Part I, we had decided on Drupal as the CMS of choice for Rifflet.com, a site where users can upload and share unfinished music they’ve recorded. Here’s where the problems started:
I initially installed Drupal 6.2 because GoDaddy, our hosting company, offered it as part of their 1-Click installation program. If you’re not familiar, here’s how it works: instead of going to Drupal’s site, downloading the latest version, setting up a mysql database, uploading the files and running the installer script, you can just tell Godaddy to install Drupal and let you know when it’s ready. It’s nice, although to be honest, doing it the hard way only takes about 5-10 minutes.
I found these handmade greeting cards at the MacArthur Artist’s Market here in Springfield. They were made by Good Behavior and feature found art from school textbooks and other recycled stuff.
Bonus: I also bought the greatest thing ever–a little bound notebook featuring a ’70s drawing of the Mercury spacecraft.
I’ve been finding a bunch of typography-related videos on the YouTube. Here are some of my favorites. There are definitely some similarities between the entries based on movie dialog, but they’re still amazing to watch.
We’ve been looking for an online substitute for Quickbooks for some time now, mostly because we run our business off of three computers and the one that has all the invoice info. always seems to be the one that’s 1) farthest away and 2) not turned on. Here’s a great list of online invoicing services, but they all function pretty similarly: You get a free account that allows you to have either a very limited (3-5) number of clients or only be able to send out a small number of invoices per month. After that, you gotta pay. Most sites have multi-tiered setups that allow you to incrementally add clients and invoices, depending on the size of your business.
There are two things I don’t like about doing invoices this way:
All the information is on someone else’s server, which could be a problem if your chosen service went away or became otherwise unavailable.
I just don’t wanna pay for it. Isn’t there an open-source alternative? (Isn’t there always?)
I had an idea for a website the other day: I play the guitar, and I have a terrible memory. So, when I come up with a song idea, I usually record it on the computer before I forget it. I assume I’m not alone, and a lot of other people have a bunch of half-done songs on their computers too. So here’s the idea for the site: it’s a place where people can upload their half-written parts of songs and combine them with other people’s half-written parts of songs, like a giant imaginary website band. I also added a Twitter-like brevity requirement to keep the Zepplin-esque wanking to a minimum: every upload must be less than 60 seconds.
SPOILER ALERT: If you want to see the (in-progress) site, head to Rifflet.com.
I don’t use CNN.com on my phone, because it sucks. I’ve sort of given up on news sites in general, but that’s a different story. The real reason I don’t use CNN.com is that after every line or two, I have to click a ‘more’ link to go to the next line. It’s super awkward, it makes reading a story take forever and it’s the old way of looking at the pay-per-kilobyte mobile web.
Smartphones and unlimited data plans are getting super cheap–I won’t tell you how much I overpaid for the Blackjack over there about a year ago, but it arrived at the photoshoot in a hovercraft made out of golden baby seals. I understand however, it would get annoying if you just skim your news and don’t want to wait for the whole thing to load.
And the record industry suckers me out of another $10. From the gatefold packaging to the actually hand-drawn typeface (I always compare similar letters to see if it’s just a fancy font or not), this album is one of my favorites this year. The highlight is the fresh-from-a-foodfight photo cards packaged away on the inside, complete with Tiger Beat-style questions on the back: “What’s your favorite food in a can, spray or otherwise?”
P.S. If you don’t want to feel old, don’t look at the birthdates. One of these guys was born in the nineties. I’m gonna go do some situps. No I’m not.
According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to 
I found these handmade greeting cards at the 
computers and the one that has all the invoice info. always seems to be the one that’s 1) farthest away and 2) not turned on. Here’s a great list of 
I don’t use CNN.com on my phone, because it sucks. I’ve sort of given up on news sites in general, but that’s a different story. The real reason I don’t use CNN.com is that after every line or two, I have to click a ‘more’ link to go to the next line. It’s super awkward, it makes reading a story take forever and it’s the old way of looking at the pay-per-kilobyte mobile web.
