Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

“‘Post-digital’ is a term coined by planner/blogger Russell Davies to describe the way in which smart digital and online behaviours have begun to make their presence felt in the real world, on real, tangible objects. It’s not hard to see the appeal of this concept after years of flash-heavy microsites, and of ‘traditional’ vs. ‘digital’ silos: a distinction rendered increasingly obsolete by the swelling ranks of a younger generation for whom such boundaries are meaningless.”

– Most Contagious 2009 – Contagious Magazine (PDF)

Gritty, grainy, rustling old newspaper.

Now to get some people and content together…

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

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

A short list of highlights (and the odd low point):

• Travelling through 11 countries spanning four continents (so far)
• Scuba diving in Thailand and Vietnam
• Like, pretty much all of Mexico
• Having my laptop stolen in Peru
• Still in Peru, kicking arse on the Inca Trail to get to Machu Picchu
• Getting set up in London. It’s already been 5 months here now!
• Getting a new job doing challenging new work
• Making about no. 53 on David Airey’s top 50 list of design blogs. LOL. That’s pretty good for the amount of effort I put in around here. If I work hard I think I can make it to number 51 next time.

I’d like to keep adding more photos and stories of the last few months of travel prior to arriving in London, so I’ll probably be mixing that in with the usual design and geek stuff.

To all my friends and family back home, missing you guys heaps, please stay well, I’ll be home soon to share a drink! In the meantime, any of you from the Oz crew want to doss in my lounge room, the airbed is yours.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

PS Don’t forget to sponsor a mo for Movember!

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

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

I have had a few stop-starts on a redesign for Gradient Dropshadow Curve. The latest stop sees me leaving the design aside for a while and looking into technology, specifically, upgrading Wordpress. Actually the real reason is the unrelenting barrage of comment-spam I get on this site on a daily basis. The spam demon has even figured out how to get around moderation. So to get around this, I’m going to try out Akismet, a Wordpress plugin that a good mate put me onto that simply makes them go away. But it requires Wordpress 2.0 to work, so that’s that. 2.0 it is.

For this process, I’ve decided to upgrade the nice way, on my own local dev server, rather than try a major upgrade on the live site and screw everything up. So I’ve installed Apache/MySQL/PHP on my XP box. XAMPP is the easy all-in-one distribution for this, not being the sys admin type myself. So I have a nice easy dev server running Wordpress 2 at home now.

Now I just need to get on with the redesign… I think I will skip the whole Gradient Dropshadow Curve 2.0 thing and jump straight to 3.0.

More news as it comes to hand…

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things

Nah… time for celebration, drinking up with friends and enjoying the present. Just another birthday really, but one where perhaps more people notice than usual. And time for grandiose affirmations:

Bring it on I say, let the next chapter begin.

Published at HenryTapia.com – Experiencing and designing things