Open Sourcing Your Creativity
Creativity is something that’s not easily contained. In fact, it’s contagious. When creative people start putting their heads together, some amazing things happen. It’s a rare occasion when an incredible idea is solely created by one person.
There’s that little creativity myth that says that keeping our ideas to ourself is much better than sharing them. After all, what if someone steals them?!
ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard.
99% of the time the problem isn’t someone stealing your idea, it’s you not actually doing it.
The Internet is a great way to share information, and it’s becoming easier and easier. Instead of using traditional methods like emailing ideas back and forth, try using one of the many online collaboration apps that have sprung up over the years.
The important thing to remember is that the sharing of ideas is quick, is a low-barrier of entry for other collaborators, and is easy to share.
It’s important to start changing the way you think about your ideas if you’re going to start letting other people work on them. Pretty soon you’ll have people questioning every aspect of your idea. This is a necessary and healthy aspect of collaboration
Realize you can’t do everything on your own
Allow for the free exchange of ideas
Remember: The idea is now bigger than just you. You have to be willing to be accept that someone else may have an even better idea than yours.
Trust other people
The best part about unleashing your idea and letting a community take hold of it is the fact that now the idea is bigger than you. You’ve created something that other people have worked on, talked about and added value to. That’s something special by itself.

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Create a maintainable extensible XML format

Tags: howto, linux, ibm, developerworks, xml, help, tips, webdesign on 2008-08-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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15 Quick Ways to Shrink Page Load Times

Tags: howto, web, site, webdesign, performance, fast, speed, help on 2008-08-25 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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15 Quick Ways to Shrink Page Load Times
Faster pages make a better user experience.
Here are some great methods and tools to ensure your site is running quickly and smoothly.
1. A basic site analyzer
Web Page Analyzer to check for general errors and seeing the “health” of my site in terms of load times. The analyzer shows tons of information about how many scripts you have, total file size, and many other things that factor into load time.
2. Pingdom
Pingdom is a nifty site that allows you to check for broken images and paths, as well as loading time for all of your images and scripts. Broken paths and images can be a major load time killer.
3. Host files locally
While this may take a bit more bandwidth for your servers, you’ll gain a lot of speed by not having to go out into the web to find the image. Instead of using services like Flickr to host your images, put them on your own server and save the time spent for the browser to travel to flickr.com and download the image. Local files almost always load faster than external files
4. Use image heights and widths
Here’s a sample of a correctly tagged image with height and width tags:

<img src="images/mine.gif" border="0" alt="my image" width=”125″ height=”250″ />

Adding width and height tags to images can make a huge difference when the web browser loads the page. If the browser knows the width and height, it can go right on past the image and let it load in the background while it renders the rest of the page. If an image doesn’t have these tags, the browser has to wait until the image loads before it can go on loading the rest of the page.
5. Reduce widgets
6. Use static caching
Taking pages written in dynamic languages like php and turning the result into a static web page. Web servers are incredibly good at serving static files. By turning your dynamic pages into static pages, you’ll reduce load on your server and greatly improve page loading times.
7. Accelerators
8. Firebug
Firebug is a Firefox extension that offers tons of reporting tools for a Web site, right inside the browser frame.
9. CSS shrinker
10. Server from multiple domains
If you’re serving a lot of web objects on a page, it might be a good idea to utilize multiple domains for serving the content, like server.example.com, server2.example.com, etc. You can only have a limited number of connections sent to the web browser at a time. By using multiple domains (even if they’re using the same IP address) you can download objects at the same time, where on a single server you’d have to load one at a time.
11. Cut back on cookies
Extra cookies that are set on the user’s browser adds time to each page load. Make sure that you’re only using the smallest possible number of cookies, and also try optimizing cookie usage
12. Use a different domain for cookie-free resources
13. Shrink your javascript
Using services like Dean Edward’s packer can strip out unwanted line breaks, characters, and other redundant code in your javascript files.
14. Combine javascript files
15. Use a content delivery network
CDNs allow you to use servers from around the world, depending on where the user is from.

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Taking Back the Homepage: 12 Ways to Design For the Fickle Web User

Tags: site, homepage, tips, howto, blog, blogging on 2008-08-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Taking Back the Homepage: 12 Ways to Design For the Fickle Web User
we need to ultimately gain the web users’ trust so that they’ll want to see more of the site. Once they trust the Web site to give them excellent, informative information without plastering them with popups and ads, then we encourage them to complete a goal for the page they’re on.
Every Page Needs a Goal

Each second that that the browser spends on your web page is precious. Every page on your Web site should work towards an actionable goal. A goal could be:
1. Offer quality content on the homepage
A savvy web user is going to see pretty quickly through snake oil copy, or even content that’s fluffy and doesn’t add value to the site. Use high-quality content that is updated frequently to get people back to the homepage.
2. Get to the point
Web users have little patience for content that doesn’t help them. Meandering, long-winded content on the homepage is a sure way to turn away site visitors.
3. Use Promotions
4. Weigh every link in the navigation
Navigation systems are crucial to allowing the user to quicky find more information, once on the homepage. Giving the users lots of links to different parts of the website only clouds the mission of the smart web user. Make sure your navigation system is simple, but has enough information.
5. Make sure the design doesn’t break
6. Don’t go overboard with Ads
7. Speed - Make sure the site is snappy
Use good practices for fast-loading page design, and check it with web page analyzers to ensure that the pages are loading as quickly as possible. If your site is heavy with css and javascript, you might try out this nifty script that combines your files and reduces load time drastically.
8. Keep the design clean and clutter-free
Keeping your page design clutter-free is a great way to help the user find the content quicker. If your site’s design is clean and relaxing, the user will be more inclined to stay longer.
9. Give them just enough information
Only show the user what they need to know, and nothing more. This is one of the most difficult aspects of development and design, but also one of the most important. Giving visitors too little information confuses them, so they leave. Giving them too much information bores the visitor, and they leave. So it’s incredibly important to give them just enough information, and never more.
10. Checking validation helps
check your html and css validation.
11. Create awesome product pages
12. Keep their trust

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What Makes for a Good Blog? | 43 Folders

Tags: blog, blogging, howto, tips, list, help, biz on 2008-08-25 and saved by22 people -All Annotations (5) -About

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What Makes for a Good Blog?
Good blogs have a voice.
reflect focused obsessions.
are the product of “Attention times Interest.”
posts are made of paragraphs.
“non-post” blogs have style and curation.
are weird.
make you want to start your own blog.
Good blogs try.
know when to break their own rules.

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Dynamics of Cats : So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 0.

Tags: science, howto on 2008-08-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 0.
1) Take all the math that is offered, and do well in it.
2) Take all the science on offer, and do well in that.
3) Get good grades overall; preferably straight A, but B+ will do
4) Do all of this without overextending yourself
5) Jump through whatever hoops are needed, try to enjoy the process, or just grit your teeth and do it; the real world is worse that way.
6) Enjoy life.
7) Read. Lots. Of everything.
8) Apply broadly, and aim for good universities
9) Go to a university you feel comfortable with, but that is academically strong. Reputation does count unfairly or not.
10) There's these whacky things calles SATs. You may have heard of them.

Do well on them.

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What's the Fastest Way to Code a Loop in JavaScript? - Gregory Reimer's Weblog

Tags: programming, script, scripting, javascript, howto, fast, performance, loop, help, list on 2008-08-23 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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From scripting to object-oriented Python programming

Tags: programming, scripting, python, oo, object, howto, ibm, article on 2008-08-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: Ik Zoek Werk

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TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Startup in the sticks - Top 10 tips on how to be an isolated Entrepreneur in the UK

Tags: howto, tips, biz, work, startup on 2008-08-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Startup in the sticks - Top 10 tips on how to be an isolated Entrepreneur in the UK
People still work with people – so concentrate on building contacts, and sustaining them
publish yourself via a blog, Twitter, IM, LinkedIn and other appropriate sites
post comments on other people’s blogs to draw attention back to yourself and show off your knowledge and wit.
Ensure you are using the right channels – Twitter is great for letting people know you are around, blogs are great for showing your thinking skills, but nothing beats a phone call for direct contact.
defining your communications goals – do you want customers, guru status, consulting gigs, a job? Each needs the right comms style.
pick your core audience to match these goals and don’t spread yourself too thin.
Establish a rhythm, don’t post five entries one day then none for a month - it’s better to post infrequently but regularly. Keep some topics in reserve so you always have something to say.
Remember that if you are an entrepreneur your goal is to make money, not to spend all your time posting and commenting. That’s being a professional blogger and you’d better make sure that you are getting enough ad revenue to pay the bills. Remember to keep the real work flowing as well.
Face to face meetings are still important. Take the train or plane and go to the big smoke and attend some networking events and press the flesh. Always hold project kick-off meetings face to fac