Australian born Ron Mueck has been creating waves in my sculpture newsfeed for a couple of weeks now, I must say I was pretty amazed at the life-like quality his works have. Pretty amazing!
Monthly Archive for July, 2006
A visit from the w3c inspector would have to be the worst thing for a bunch of creatives running a website, even an accessibility hardened web-monger might get a little worried.
And this is exactly how this series of fantastic pixel-art animations signifying iconfactory’s re-code starts. Everyday they have a new animation on the temporary spash page, which sorta guarantees I will be visiting tomorrow. It is so rare that I actually laugh out loud at pixel-art…
from kottke.org. A perfect example of how info graphics can be used to make the maximum point.
Over the past few weeks I have been heavily involved with creating, tweaking and all too often just reading rss feeds. It all started with my desire to put an rss feed on the sculpture website for the newly designed news section. This meant that I had to code the rss myself, and validate, test etc…
This was actually quite entertaining, as I didn’t really know that much about how rss was structured and what standards need to be adhered to. Although at times it was rather frustrating, as I found that most rss readers really don’t give any leeway for bad characters, or bad structure. Literally one & in a item would stop the whole thing from displaying…with no error message either.
Of course the most difficult part was actually explaining to people what I was doing and why it was worth the time and effort to do it…hopefully it will become evident as time goes on. I kept trying to simplify and simplify, but as soon as I mentioned rss, their eyes glazed and drool began to drip from the corner of their mouth. Ahh well…
Anyway, the main point of this is that once I got a validated, workable rss xml document up and going, I discovered feedburner. Quite a few popular blogs use it, and I had always assumed it didn’t really do much which was useful to me. How wrong I was!
Not only is it a complete doddle to setup, it also has some neat little features. The first and best is the way it presents your feed. No longer are newbie IE users sent to a bewildering xml document when they click the subscribe button, feedburner has a nice gui for your feed, allowing you to automatically add it to almost all the popular readers. Personally I do think the landing page could be a little more newbie-friendly though, perhaps a brief non-tech explanation as to why rss is good as well as some download links to popular readers, or links to web-based services.
It also has a nice statistics engine, as you may have noticed by now I kind of have a statistic addiction…the business model for feedburner is based around the need for more statistics, you pay $5 per month to get all sorts of extra info about your readers…seems quite a good plan.
Some of the other benefits are the feedflares, which add little links to the bottom of each entry (’email this’, ‘add to del.icio.us’, ‘digg it’ etc). and possibly most useful for the sculpture site is the ability to subscribe via email, perfect for the non-rss-enlightened reader. You can also chuck in your del.icio.us bookmarks or diggs for the day into the feed, although for some reason not both yet.
All in, feedburner is a fantastic service, adds value and costs nothing…which is what we like!
Met this guy the other day who sells little (mass-produced) sculptures out of laser-cut stainless-steel. The fun part is that they come as just sheets cut in the right places, and you fold them up yourself. I actually saw him making the one pictured above, it took about 5 minutes…
Pretty cool gift idea for someone who has everything, bet they wont have one of these.
Sam also has possibly the best business card ever, a single sheet of fantastically designed laser-cut stainless-steel, with his details etched on.
Realistically, if you have £250 to spend on a single coathanger…is this not the one you would get?
This is a collection of the most entertaining error messages generated by lazy/overworked coders…I particularly like the one that asks the user to ‘Contact Henrik !!!’.
This is a conceptualisation by Adam Benton commissioned by MacFormat magazine of the iMac of the future.
The iMac features a 30″ utra-thin LCD screen, which is totally transparent when the iMac is not in use. The screen can also be set to various levels of translucency, and can fade during sleep modes etc. The keyboard is also totally tramsparent, low profile and a curved ergonomic design, with light sensitive illuminated keys. Everything is of course, wireless.
But I want one now!
green stuff the better. He trades his life for greenbacks. And so it looked the Troika; yet, in retrospect, one realizes that one has experienced a off the track and ended up between two ditches. He couldn’t go right or Jonathan was not alert to listen. It’s pretty, he thought. The moon
This turned up in my much-spammed inbox yesterday from Kermit Castro (nice!), and I will be the first to say that I don’t get it…why bother? there were no links and not even a mention of a sex-enhancing drug…the text is obviously generated by a computer, is this just spamming for the sake of spamming? or some kind of experiment with spam-fed literature that I haven’t heard about?
I would love to create an artistic installation generated by spam, my previous odd experience with korean spam has shown there is quite a bit of creativity in this field.
Some say windmills are a blot on the landscape, thats probably true in some cases…so why not make it an interesting blot? These are some fantastic (excuse the pun) windmill designs from those forward-thinking Netherlanders, somehow I cant see Devon council going for them though.
Just found some really nice, and slightly surreal drawings by a polish artist. What can I say, they are weird…but interesting.
This is a nice installation next to a busy road in melbourne. Tetris…skill fully recreated in crate form. Check out some more images. There isn’t enough nerd art in the world…!