bigskysquid

The del.icio.us possibilities

Thanks to Chris for introducing me to this before the weekend started.  I ended up running back to my computer every chance I got just to tool around and see where I could go with this thing.  I had heard of del.icio.us but never really got it until now.  Here's a short description from  del.icio.us' about page...

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Once you've registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you'd like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you'll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.

You can access your list of links from any web browser. By default, your links are shown to you in reverse chronological order, with those you've added most recently at the top. In addition to viewing by date, you can also view all links in a specific category (you define your own categories as you add the links), or search your links for keywords.

What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

So, imagine that you could have access to thousands of people's favorites list and you could surf around those lists by keywords or tags and extend your own favorites by finding those people who have something in common with you.

I have a couple of sites that I consider golden little nuggets.  They're usually tutorial sites or somewhere I go first when I'm trying to do something different with Photoshop, Flash, etc...  Once I got the link into del.icio.us I saw that there were about 14,000 other people that had those sites on their lists.  So then I started clicking around in there lists and it wasn't long before my favorites had doubled.  Basically, my resources had doubled.

The possibilities are obviously endless and definitely worth checking out.  If you would like to see my del.icio.us links I've added a links TypeList in the right column.

Get set up with your own del.icio.us links at the del.icio.us site.

It lives!!! One of My Summer Projects Goes Live

Over the summer I worked with Case Management Connections on getting their web site up and running.  I think it turned out pretty well.  It was really nice doing their photo and graphic work since I didn't have to beg, borrow and/or steal stuff from somwhere else.

It's a Dreamweaver shell with mostly Flash content.  Nothing too fancy.  If you get a chance check it out.  If you feel the urge, link to it too... it needs the traffic.

Oh, and my other summer project, besides drinking lots of Bud Light, was the 2005 Native News site.

COLOURlovers - palettes of colour love

Here's a link to a site that I don't know if I could live without. 

COLOURlovers is a great starting point when you need to start picking colors for a project.  If you do a little design you've probably felt a little overwhelmed when things aren't gelling just right.  Whether its a logo, web site, buisness card, or maybe even you want to paint your room, chances are a good color pallete will get you off on the right foot.

You can look at submitted palettes or create your own.  I find it useful just cruising through them and seeing what schemes catch my eye.  When you click on a scheme you get all the values you need to reuse it in whatever you're doing.  All you have to do is cut and paste the color's HEX # into Photoshop's color picker and away you go.

Hope you enjoy.  Let me know if anybody post's a color or a pallete.

Flash Navy Portfolio

So, if my last post didn't give it away... I was in the Navy for a little while.  Actually it was five long years that flew by.  My job was journalist but I cleaned more toilets than I wrote stories.  Actually, that sounds bad.  Truthfully, we did pretty much everything you could imagine.  I was a radio DJ, webmaster, media escort, editor, video editor... pretty much everything.  Oh, and I made a pretty mean cup of coffee. An inch deep and a mile wide... that's me.

Anyways, my last tour was with Commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/ Commander FIFTH Fleet in Manama, Bahrain.  In normal people terms: I worked for the public affairs people for the guy who was in charge of all the boats shooting missiles into Iraq.  I spent 1 1/2 years on the lovely desert island and these are some of the pictures I took during that last tour.  As you can imagine, there's a long story behind each one.  Next time I put together a Flash gallery I'm going to have to get some caption information up there.  Hope you enjoy.

Adobe Photoshop CS2: It's a Love Hate Thing

I love it... but at the same time I hate it.

Tonight CS2 stole my heart away from 7.  For those of you who actually know what that means you won't think me a big wierdo for explaining why.

I've had CS2 for a couple of weeks now but just haven't sat down to spend any quality time with it.  After getting my feet wet editing up some studio shots, I decided to try out the new Flash "web photo galleries."  So, I picked a couple of my images and a folder and whoosh... that was it.  I had tried 7's and Dreameweaver's galleries before and... well they were always lame.  They took more time to fix up then it took to take the pictures in the first place.

Then, there it was.  Not only is it a slick looking interface.  It's hardly buggy at all and would take me a week to do in Flash on my own.  I hate it.... no, I love it.

So, as you can see I'm confused. Check out the gallery. It real purty.