The Blog - Archive for fun

Bugs are not spoons

by Mark P. Filed under: Community

After thoroughly washing up this morning I still managed to find a spoon at the bottom of the bowl once I’d drained the water away. There’s always at least one bloody tea spoon left. Always.

This last spoon also appears in development… When we’ve “finished” a sprint or even a whole project. It’s time to go spoon hunting. Those little bastard spoons hiding in the Fairy Liquid. Sometimes they’re obvious sometimes it takes some digging or looking at things differently than you would normally.

These spoons aren’t bugs, they’re the little things that make a big difference, whether UI, UX, feature tweaking, removing or adding. The hovers on a button “feel wrong”, “this image isn’t pixel perfect”, etc.

We’ve adopted the spoon metaphor and come to love it. We create spoon lists on a regular basis now. I think it originated from @iamkeir and since then we’ve fully embraced it as term for the final 10-20% of a project.

Mrzyk and Mariceau video. Style is priceless (NSFW)

by Mark P. Filed under: Community

This saucy little video by Mrzyk and Mariceau is one of the simplest, mesmerising music videos I’ve seen in a long while. Low budget, very simple to look at, making an average tune (Sébastien Tellier – Look) fantastic.

Simple is great and style is priceless.

To quote one of the comments from Youtube:

I’m a woman, i just watched another woman’s butt for 4min, and i found it the most beautiful thing evar. félicitations monsieur Tellier, félicitations Mrzyk et Moriceau

Link Goodness – August 11th

by Julia Filed under: Knowledge

Looting celebrities, pink sombreros and social chimps are just some of the things we’ve been checking out!

Here are this week’s top links.

Lootalikes

Celebs caught looting in the UK riots? Surely not..

Make your own video game system with Arduino and a Wii Nunchuck

This post teaches you how to connect the Arduino, highjack your Nunchuck controller and build the light cycle races from Tron.

If you’re feeling adventurous learn how to create Tetris with the Video Game Shield add on.

Get Social with Mailchimp

Mailchimp introduce a new social plugin for WordPress that seamlessly integrates your blog with social apps. 

LESS.js

This “dynamic stylesheet language” lets you extend CSS with behaviour such as variables, mixins, operations and functions.

Cowboy Coding and the Pink Sombrero

Find out why these guys have to wear a pink sombrero when changing code directly on production servers.

Good Trial Conversion Rates: The ticket to success?

Is your company driven by free trials? Make sure you read these 5 top tips for converting your free trial users into paying customers.

Website features you don’t want!

Conversion rates seem to be a popular topic in blog posts this week.

Here are 10 website features which Dave Cain thinks will lower your conversion rates as well as annoy your users.

A little monkey love

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

We all like cakes. We all like a bit of love. So when a mysterious box arrived at the office on Friday from a client with the most beautiful cup cakes in, we were super chuffed.

The sparkly cakes from the lovely folk at Go Ape were to thank us for delivering their summer campaign with such brevity and fabulousness!

We built the social competition using the pro version of our new Rusic.com product, enabling us to build the competition in days instead of weeks (or months). We think it’s pretty awesome and after only a few days it’s already got some amazing stories going on.

Craziness by Go Ape, design by Refreshed, social and tech by Simpleweb, and of course the CAKES by Rachaels Kitchen. Awesome.

Random people in Google + Circles

by Mark P. Filed under: Knowledge

Google + is good. It could possibly replace many of the social networks that we already use. I’ll leave that debate for hindsight. One thing that I do keep seeing is how people want to make it tight knit and just have “close people” in their circles. This is missing the point of circles.

A few weeks ago having a way to share information with a large list of people on an ad-hoc basis would be based around Mailchimp or similar. Now with G+ you can do almost effortlessly and the people that engage with you the most can be “promoted” to a “closer circle”… It’s like a bloggers dream come true,

Create a new circle and call it “Random People”. Everybody that you don’t know what to do with, add them here. You can then use this circle as you see fit. I’ve got lots of people that I’ve heard of, or that over the years have connected to me randomly, through blogs, etc. It’s a useful list, you can share things with this circle such as a new product or an announcement. It becomes like a virtual newsletter (virtual virtual!) list.

I’m still not convinced that Google + is a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It is however a fantastic piece of technology that can only get better.