Winding Down for the Week
This week tested our organization with its organization. Homiera, our project management superstar, said “Ciao!” and hopped a flight to Italy for 2 weeks. It’s week one and the building hasn’t burnt down yet, but it’s testing the mettle of our team. We’re certainly feeling the burn which is why this weekly post is being written on Saturday instead of Friday. Without further digression, I present a list of things we learned this week.
Resources
WP Automatic Cache Manifest (or App cache) for WordPress.
Serve your site from the cache manifest for cool features like offline browsing, faster load times and lower usage of server resources.
Design Style Tiles are a medium between a mood board and a prototype.
It’s difficult to show a client your thought process without putting together a full design. Style Tiles aims to solve that problem.
WP WPThumb – SUPER thumbnail awesomesauce.
All the features you could possibly want for customizing the creation of image thumbnails.
WP Auto-Attachments – Better handling of doc, pdf, audio and video.
The media library does a great job of managing media. This plugin extends that functionality for docs, audio and video.
WP WP Migrate DB – find and replace before exporting the DB.
Simplify the process of migrating a database to the production server by replacing the url before export.
Articles
Design Changing the design process to better handle responsive design.
The tried-and-true design process does not well handle the extent of mock ups that need to be created for all the different device sizes.
Design Time to start designing in the browser.
An argument for designing in the browser.
Design Content prototyping for responsive web design.
We need content to design. The more complex the system the further in advanced we need to lay this content out before we start the design.
Development Yak Shaving – explaining tangents.
Simplifying the complexity of tangents with a simple metaphor. Similar to Complicator’s Gloves.
Development WordPress Post Formats in detail.
Are Post Formats just a way for WordPress to stab back at Tumblr or is this a useful feature?
Technology I just saw the future of transportation. It’s gyroscopic.
Plenty of companies are putting up their version of what the future will hold for transportation (hint: it doesn’t fly). I believe this is the top candidate.
Technology MIT creates a crazy-strange liquid-coating.
Leave it to MIT to figure out how to get the ketchup out of the bottle better.
Fun
Inspiration Texting level: expert.
If you think you are the master texter you are wrong. These guys do it with pictures.
Comedy Trustworthiness of Beards.
A handy chart to keep around. Matt, developer of the web and of beards at WDG, falls in the green zone.
Inspiration Google shows off their maps via a 3d browser-based game.
Google shows the web how best to show off an app and a browser technology at the same time.
Inspiration Astronaut tweets images from space.
Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut on the International Space Station, has been taking pictures and tweeting them to the world.
Video Soccer celebrations TO THE MAX.
Surrender Monkeys puts together a showcase of the best soccer celebrations that never happened.
Music
RIYL = Recommended If You Like
Pop Emmy The Great – Virtue.
RIYL Florence & The Machine, Regina Spektor, Anna Ternheim.
Hip Hop I Self Devine – The Sound of Low Class Amerika.
RIYL Flobots, DJ Shadow + rap, Chiddy Bang.
Country The Oak Ridge Boys – Back Home Again.
RIYL Charlie Daniels, gospel country without the hokeyness.
Folk The Imagined Village – Bending the Dark.
RIYL Emmerson, Billy Bragg, Tiger Moth, Johnny Kalsi, Sheila Chandra, the Copper Family, etc because they’re all on this album.
Rock The Delta Riggs – Talupo Mountain Music Vol. II.
RIYL The Dead Weather, The Black Keys, The Duke Spirit.
Alternative Like Pioneers – Oh, Magic.
RIYL Animal Collective, Miniature Tigers, We Landed On The Moon!
Electronica Suff Daddy – Suff Sells.
RIYL Hubert Daviz, FS Green, Slow jam beats.
Metal Fear Nuttin Band – Yardcore.
RIYL This isn’t new. It was the result of a Friday discussion between Grant, who wanted to listen to Reggae, and Mike, who wanted to listen to metal.
I hope you’re enjoying as much gorgeous weather as we are. Remember, it’s June now (where did May go?).
