Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Twitter is:

• Pithy, straight to the point.
  140 Characters. That’s it.
• A good networking tool
  Yes, yet another one, but probably one of the better ones
• There are better ways to Tweet other than the website
  Its API means you can use Twitter lots of ways other than the website. I don’t like to use the Twitter website very often, I much prefer to use Tweetdeck (an Air desktop app) on my lappy and Tweetie on my iPhone. There are lots of other apps for using Twitter on your PC or phone. That plus support for good ol’ SMS make Twitter super convenient. You usually get better features on the other platforms too (like re-tweeting, URL shortening, and linking to images via Twitpic.

Why Twitter and not Facebook?

Twitter is:

• Open and public, like a blog (unless you lock your updates);
• Able to reach and network with people you don’t already know.

Twitter and Facebook do different things. Facebook is brilliant for keeping up with my friends and family all over the world, seeing their photos, videos and updates. I don’t use Twitter for that.

Why Twitter instead of blogging?

Twitter is:

• More conversational, not so much one person writing long passages of text followed by comments;
• It requires less time than blogging. 140 characters does not allow for lengthy research and background information.

However Twitter doesn’t replace blogging, it’s the more frequent little brother of blogging. They go quite well together. If you’re marketing yourself or your business, it’s another useful channel and quite helpful in driving further traffic to your site.

In general, I find Twitter a great source of information (as well as entertainment). I get as much or possibly more news and information via Twitter as I do via my RSS feeds. Twitter is a great tool, as useful and enjoyable as the people you follow.

As an aside, I plan to shuffle a lot of things around this site in the upcoming redesign. Seeing I’m on Twitter more I’m going to try to simplify this site a bit. A bit less emphasis on the blogging (seeing as I’m not doing it regularly anyway) and just more of a landing page aggregating feeds from Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, etc. The blogroll (“Elsewhere”) column will be deactivated and replaced with Delicious for ease of RSS subscription (and ease of updating for me).

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

• Finally got a new UK Work permit visa! An incredible amount of preparation and bureaucratic delays, after which I had to travel to Australia. In the end it took a couple of months to finalise! I can now live and work in the UK for a couple more years. It was great to catch up with everyone while I was back home, thanks to all who generously shared their time with me.
• Work is going crazy, have been working feverishly on T.M Lewin and Lipsy’s sites at full steam…
• Mr Speaker and I have been spending every spare hour on a side-project. I’m very glad to say that Mr Speaker will be giving our prototype a test run at Webjam 8 later this week! More news on that very soon…

Subsequently, my site redesign has taken a back seat, and now I’m thinking I want to redesign my redesign.

More news soon!

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

So, as far as a redesign goes, I’m at the sketching stage at the moment, but I’m thinking even cleaner while improving the visual hierarchy, less cruft around the edges and more focus on typography and a very strict grid structure. I also plan to post more design-related bits and bobs.

Now I know I’ve promised a few people some more travel stuff so I’m going to mix it up a bit and keep posting photos up here. I particularly want to put a few more shots taken in Mexico and South America as well as the other stops around the place.

I’ll leave yas with this fun little piece of motion graphics – What if the opening titles of Star Wars were designed by Saul Bass:

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

The significant other and I are still living it large in London-town. We’ve just returned from a little play over in Portugal with Em and Ads, having visited Lisbon, Evora and Porto, where port originated (but not a whole lot of BBQ chicken).

I’ve not long ago got my RSS feeds going again and have been feverishly trying to digest the Internet… The latest from my feeds:

Mr Speaker comes to terms with the Gregorian calendar (in his own inimitable way) and Laura got a pasta machine (*ahem* dinner invite). This news is a few weeks old now, but I still think it is worthy of a mention, Kris is now a granny in blog years, having recently celebrated her 7th blog-birthday. Amazing!

Elsewhere, the ever useful Smashing Magazine continues dealing good web-geek gear with it’s list of Shopping cart examples (very useful to me in my current line of work), David Airey recently having retrieved his site back from the hands of an unscrupulous cracker makes it into How Design’s top 10 websites for designers and the very instructive Digital Web lays out some tips (and fine examples) on creating the perfect portfolio. Awesome.

Meanwhile at work, Snow Valley has relaunched Majestic Wines (cited as a good example of a shopping cart at Smashing Magazine), the online stores of Levi’s Europe (lot’s of Mootools and AJAX goodness!), MFI furniture and a host of others. It’s been busy as hell these last few months.

So, what’s happening in your world then? Do share…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

During the name server change over, I’ve had to slightly reconfigure my blog database and mailbox settings, so I’ve only just realised that I’ve missed a couple of days of mail, plus a an extra “w” in “www” (“wwww”) when I was playing around with the database broke the blog for a little while, but all should be in a reasonably tidy state now. Just cleaning up a few loose ends (like a few odd characters showing up on the blog here and there) and catching up on the last couple of days worth of emails.

Now for a post or two…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

This blog sees another year… yes that’s 3 years of half-arsed blogging.

It’s August again…

(And I *did* get that redesign done!)

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

I’m still ironing out the odd issue here and there, but it’s pretty much all there so have a squiz about the place…

A few features:

• Much more customised Wordpress implementation, different page templates rather than the usual Wordpress one size-fits-all approach
• Liquid/elastic layout. The layout reflows based on the available browser space, capped at a maximum width. This maximum width is based on the user’s font size. (Yes the menu bar goes weird if you size your text up too much. And the max-width thing doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 plus it has little jumpy bits here and there…)
• Shiny new Google map page.

Please get in touch if you find any bugs or if you just want to say hello!

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Here he is. I think he’s cool! You can look forward to seeing more of him in the coming weeks…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

So for anyone interested, here’s our itinerary.. Subject to last minute changes:

• November 06 – Manila, Philippines
• December 06 – Hong Kong, China
• December 06 – Bangkok, Thailand
• December 06 – Koh Samui, Thailand. Then back to Bangkok
• December 06 – Siem Reap, Cambodia.
• December 06/January 07 – Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Then we figure out a way back to Hong Kong…
• January 07 – San Francisco, USA
• March 07 – Dallas, USA . Dates adjusted to allow for my attendance at SxSW Interactive in Austin.
• March 07 – Mexico City, Mexico – Might also stay a bit longer here…
• April 07 – Guatemala City, Guatemala – transfer directly to Antigua, avoiding Guatemala City…
• April 07 – ChicagoMiami, USA – I think we’re sticking with the summer wardrobe a bit more…
• April 07 – New York, USA
• May 07 – La Paz, Bolivia, then overland to Cusco, Peru
• May 07 – Arequipa, Peru
• May 07 – Lima, Peru overland to Bolivia then Ecuador
• May 07 – Quito, Ecuador
• June 07 – Madrid, Spain
• June 07 – London, UK

We then settle in at London for a while, get some work and a place to live (easier said than done!) and then some short trips to the continent from there… PHEW!

There’ll be plenty of photos here and at my Flickr page. Any words of advice, places to see or anything else most definitely appreciated…

Update 17/10/06

We just finalised our bookings on the weekend and I’ve updated the itinerary accordingly, with Cambodia, Guatemala and Bolivia added to the itinerary. Now that’s a PHAT trip!

Update 30/10/06

How on earth did I forget to mention almost a whole month in Vietnam? Updated now…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Prior to leaving, there are many loose ends to wrap up. One major loose end is the overhaul of henrytapia.com. I’ve been quite busily hacking away at it and am getting excited about showing off some of the neat bits and pieces of it that are starting to come together… Thanks for the encouragement and all the “where’s the new site already?”. I really do appreciate it.

More news (including itineraries, destinations and the new website) as it comes to hand.

And here’s some tips for travelling with your partner…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

That’s 2 years of blogging. What have I learned? Probably not a lot other than comment spam never sleeps…

I’m yet to figure out much about the audience of this site. What sort of content are you interested in? I am currently working on the next version so I’m definitely interested in any feedback – so feel free to comment… and if you’ve been lurking in the shadows, now’s a good a time as any to say hello.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things