When I first heard about gdgt.com, I thought the startup founded by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block was terribly clever, and right up my alley. The idea of having gadget freaks keep “had”, “have” and “want” lists makes sense both from a user’s perspective and from an advertiser’s. When the website opened to the public I was quick to register and started adding things to my lists. Some stuff that wasn’t in there yet. It was amazing to see how much stuff was entered by users.

But I don’t buy a new gadget every day, so keeping the lists up-to-date doesn’t require me to visit GDGT daily. Considering how Rojas and Block were also involved in Engadget and Gizmodo, I was hoping their new effort would replace both those blogs and become a one-stop shop for technology enthusiasts. So far, at least for me, it hasn’t.
More Why do I still not love GDGT?

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.
More Introducing Snapatar: Update your Twitter avatar from your webcam

I came across this post on Smashing Magazine yesterday, and while it offers some fine reasons for web developers to use a PC, I thought it missed a few too. Most of these venture into web designer territory somewhat, but I wanted to mention them nontheless.
More Why web designers should consider using a PC too

I’d been meaning to do a proper redesign of this blog for some time. The content part was reshuffled a couple of months ago, and I was pretty pleased with how that turned out. But the header was a watered down version of the old Papertrail theme and far too boring. That’s why I asked Blondmonster to help me out.

Suzanne’s a former colleague, and a fabulous designer. I really like the stuff she does, and ‘boring’ is simply not in her vocabulary. She came up with the underwater theme, did all the drawing and all I had to do was put it all together. Hope you like the result. The theme was tailor-made for this blog, so don’t expect it to become available for download any time soon.

Talk about picking a poor name for this project. I first considered giving it a catchy name, but decided to simply call it ‘Flickr widget’ becaused that best describes what it does. But then I found that Flickr itself has a Flash widget too. And now I’ve made it support Picasa feeds too, so the name doesn’t make any sense anymore.

The upside is of course that Picasa users can now use the widget to show off their favorite albums on their websites. It accepts the feeds from your ‘My Photos’ page and album pages. If you, like me, have only a couple of albums under ‘My Photos’, the feed from that page will only show the album covers, so it makes more sense to use an album feed (on the left is a trip to the zoo with my daughter in 2007). Like with Flickr, the total number of thumbs shown is limited to 20.

Fortunately, Google uses a very similar feed format to Flickr, so I was able to put support for both into one Flash movie. Please feel free to try it, and let me know if you run into anything.

Get the widget here

I never thought this to be possible, but Dawid Fatyga just emailed me about his ‘Stratus‘ project. He’s recreated the 3D Flash movie from WP-Cumulus in Javascript. Sure, it’s no match for Flash’s ultra-smooth anti-aliased scaling (yet?), but that doesn’t really make it any less impressive.

Dawid stressed that it’s still very much a work in progress, and there’s still a lot that can be optimized. I had no success running it in Chrome, but it does work in Firefox. I’m sure that can be fixed. And with Chrome’s ultra-fast Javascript engine it will probaly fly.

Dawid is working towards a possible WordPress plugin implementation, which might mean some healthy competition for WP-Cumulus. I’d love to see if Javascript can beat Flash at its own game (being animation).

P.S. Dawid just emailed me that he’s only been working with Javascript for a few days. Go figure.

One of the few websites that I visit daily has recently been redesigned. At first I thought it simply looked worse, but I decided to give the new designs a chance. Now, a couple of weeks on I still don’t like it, and I’ve also figured out why. Webwereld is in Dutch by the way, so don’t bother trying to read the text in the screenshots.
More On Webwereld’s recent redesign

I changed themes mid December, and according to googlebot’s stats, pages have been taking twice as long to load since then. This got me thinking. What was it I added that caused this? Surely I didn’t make the pages twice as heavy?
More What’s slowing down my blog?

Edward Terry’s Tweet3D lets you few any Twitter user’s most frequent topics as a 3D tag cloud. I’m not quite sure what kind of (undoubtably very clever) magic goes on behind the screens, but it appears that the topics are frequently used words. Somehow, Tweet3D extracts these from previous tweets and passes them to Cumulus to be displayed. Pretty nifty stuff!

Last week, when working on a game for a client, we decided raid the company’s snack machine and prototype the game using colour-sorted M&M’s in order to work out if was any fun and balance the game by adjusting variables. My random number generator supplied the randomness, Masterfoods the colourful candy. Great fun!

Thanks to Suzanne for the picture from her camphone.