For some time now I have struggled to find the right bag for my laptop and mobile gear. What started out as a problem for snooty businessmen in airpots and techies and has grown to be the bane of the common coffee-shop exile. We all need a bag for our stuff (hat tip to the late George Carlin), but find that bag can be a daunting task. Hopefully that’s where the Satchelist can help. We launched the Satchelist last week and are slowly building up a listing of reviews, insight and conversation about laptop bags, mobile gear and more. If you have ideas, reviews or thoughts let us know, we’d love to hear them. In the meantime check out the site, tell where were wrong or share a story or two. We’re looking forward to sharing our passion with you.
Just a subtle reminder, there’s a set of 60 Tiny + Free Icons in the downloads area. Grab them and use them as you see fit. I’m working on a much cooler set as time allows, and if there’s demand. So vote with your downloads…
Grab ‘em
I was fortunate enough to make it out to the Des Moines, IA ‘tweetup‘ on Monday night. I had a blast even though a headcold had me feeling like a whipped dog. There was a ton of energy and I felt like I was among people really looking to do some cool things. I was fortunate living in Orlando to meet some pretty cool people and be ‘in the mix’ so to speak. I realized the only reason I was lacking that back in Iowa wasn’t because other people aren’t out there, but because I wasn’t out there meeting people.
Well I’m hoping to be better at that (well as much as I can with everything on my plate). Life is short and as cool as social networks are, the real meat and potatoes of these relationships is face-time and meeting the people behind the avatars (although mine still rules). There’s a community blossoming here and I feel fortunate to have met some of the people working hard to grow it.
As a follow up I”ll be doing some brain-dumping about conversations that were had about BlogOrlando and if that model works in a setting like ours. I think it could, but only with the right mix of people, topics and weather.
Coworker Rob has a great site new that’s really taking off. CSS Newbie is focused on giving folks new to CSS some real world examples and tutorials. Rob has a background in both writing and technology and fuses those worlds seamlessly and elevates code-nerdy writing to a pleasurable experience, and I know only more cool stuff is on the way.
Latest post is a real winner - 7 Tips for Print Style Sheets. Check it out.
UPDATE - Derek and his crew deserved the benefit of the doubt Scott mentioned in the comments below. They have deleted all design-oriented assignments and focusing completely on photos and illustrations. That’s a tremendous response, hats off to that group.
Adam Howell sums it up much better than I can in his Pixish is Spec Work pork. I get tired of going over and over this ground, but the truth is damn simple. Spec is evil, it’s not a good deal for any of the parties involved and ultimately hurts design/designers across the board.
Young designers are being preyed upon by unsuspecting ‘Johns’ looking for some cheap, quick design work. No one is fulfilled and we all lose a little something along the way - designers no longer value their work, hell they are giving it away after all, clients don’t value the work since they are paying nothing for it and the community exacerbates the problems of commodity content which extends to wholesale website design piracy, uncredited photo use, etc. Why not it’s not worth anything anyway right? Wrong.
I’ve had the privilege to work with cnp_studio and Josh Hallet on some widget work for the Sony Playstation blog and saw that they have some exciting news to announce today. The blog is a big hit with the Playstation community, with part of the its success being the great functionality and features it provides to readers and authors alike. Two of the custom Wordpress plugins developed by Nick and the cnp_studio group to accomplish this are now being released back to the WordPress community. I think both of these plugins (one for rotating featured images and a comment reply mechanism) will find a receptive audience in the WP world. Nice work by all those involved, and kudos to the Playstation folks for having the foresight to give these back.
Ethan posted a tidbit last week about Scoble-gate. I ran across this article on North Korean prison camps, worth the read if you’re up for it. If not that’s fine too, I’m sure Scoble will be banned from something tomorrow that’ll be all over the web.
Jake’s latest post points out something many folks have probably seen and been to timid or too concerned with the fallout to mention - the hypocrisy of the social media ‘expert’. Kudos to Jake for calling these folks out (although they are certainly not the only known experts to not practice what they sell.) I’d love to see some thoughtful discourse around this topic.
Well it looks like I’m going to be a Happy Webby! Thanks to Josh for the nomination and the ngen works crew for such a cool gift. Man I hope they have some super-slim down mojo for my mug or we’ll all be getting a dose of the post-holidays Jabba-the-Webby that I have become.
