via smashingmagazine.com

Here’s a good list of things to check through this year regarding your career, your web presence, your social network(s), and even your desk. And if you missed it, check your web site’s copyright year!

I think it is time for some spring cleaning around here. Stay tuned. We’re going to be updating a few things around here.

Posted via web from I work for Infamia.com

Africa Gathering, a conference for social entrepreneurs and innovators who are passionate about technology and development in Africa, was a perfect venue for introducing my concepts for what makes a great start-up business.  I traveled to Kenya along with the National Peace Corps Association’s Africa Rural Connect (ARC) Project Manager, Molly Mattessich, to meet people like us who were interested in and impacted by the ARC website and wanted to make a difference in rural communities in Africa.

Giving a workshop at Africa Gathering

Similar to the collaboration platform that I helped to develop for the National Peace Corps Association’s Africa Rural Connect community, I wanted to get the Africa Gathering workshop participants thinking about networking with other people and offering any advice that they could to assist someone else with their project or business idea.  We did what I like to call “low-tech social networking,” and shared ideas on notes that we posted on the wall in the conference room so that everyone could see them.

Also at the Africa Gathering conference, Molly presented the story of the Africa Rural Connect community and told how we were able to build the site with a tight budget and even tighter deadline and still achieve our goals for getting lots of people from around the world to participate and helping them to collaborate, meet each other, and generate creative and practical project plans.

It was great to meet so many people interested in ideas for Africa, and see the presentations that others gave, like Kenyans for Change, Access Kenya, Essential Africa, Movirtu and Kenya Imagine.  Of course, I enjoyed meeting those folks with whom I’d only interacted with on Twitter prior to the conference.  I’m glad that I was able to make connections with people in Nairobi because I am passionate about helping out great startups that can make a difference in people’s lives.

Africa Gathering is coming to my hometown, Washington, DC, in April 2010, and I’m looking forward to getting people together again to discuss innovative tech ideas for Africa.

Additional pictures of Africa Gathering in Nairobi, Kenya

via nation.co.ke

Posted via web from I work for Infamia.com

via mashable.com

An article on Twitter’s growth stats flatlining Ben Parr caught my attention. According to one Twitter stat, the number of unique visitors per month has dropped to a measly 1.45% growth. That is in December, Twitter got approximately 22.81 million uniques, down from 22.48 million the prior month.

Parr lists a few interesting reasons as to why it could be that Twitter has flatlined, but I think he missed one; Twitter has been overexposed in the media.

Forget Comscore & Quantcast numbers, we need to ask E-Poll guys to include “Twitter” when they do their next “Overexposed Celebrities” poll.

Is this really a big deal? Is this the end of Twitter?

No, not really. Kind of like the housing market bubble, when the media caught Twitter-mania, it artificially inflated the monthly usage stats. Now that everyone and their mother knows about Twitter, and it’s fallen of mainstream media’s new cycle (hey, they got Palin and McGwire to talk about now) I think the stats are simply slipping back to a baseline usage and growth.

Facebook by comparison grew almost 3% according to Compete, that is 1.5% or so more than Twitter.

Hey, how about that? IS that a big deal?

I guess to some (geeks) but not to me. Look, consider the fact that Facebook usage between July and August actually shrank, while Twitter’s usage grew, no one I knew was calling out the demise of Facebook.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+facebook.com/

Along with Snuggies and the ShamWow, Twitter has gotten a little too much attention this past summer. But when the dust settles, Twitter is going to continue to grow steadily.

Posted via web from I work for Infamia.com

via smashingmagazine.com

Louis Lazaris wrote this great article making a strong case against using those vertical navbars on your website. The above image shows eye tracking diagrams of users visiting various websites, and just like banner ads, you can see how the eye naturally avoids reading into those areas. They’re not even look at your vertical navbars! Note the last screen capture on the right is a Google search results page with no vertical navbars.

Like Lazaris explains, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, your primary form of navigation should be horizontal, with three to five elements to choose form. Less is more, if you want your website visitors to click through as well as digest the content you are providing, you need to get in the habit of teasing them and not just try to force everything front and center.

Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Vertical navbars are okay for simple lists or calls to action, contextualized as a secondary navigation. And as Lazaris points out, sometimes the exception is simply, “a client who insists on it.”

Why do designers still use vertical navbars? Most of the time is just an indicator of a novice designer that is lacking some fundamentals. We shouldn’t see the use of vertical navbars as site’s primary navigation if you except your website to be considered professional designed… unless of course, you really know what you’re doing.

Posted via web from I work for Infamia.com

Our Africa Rural Connect project with the National Peace Corps Association has gone into its fourth round of the competition. We have been really pleased for our client as they continue to receive national and international media attention for this project; recently the Washington Post and The Seattle Times mentioned the ARC project, and it was featured on the radio across the African continent on Voice of America.

So, what’s Africa Rural Connect?

Africa Rural Connect introduces and encourages a new form of global collaboration. It uses technology to enable anyone in the world to build upon the ideas of others. When you read someone’s idea for Africa, not only can you comment on it and endorse it, you can rewrite it by adding information from your own personal experience and insight.

We also have been working to roll out new updates for wegora. A version of wegora is actually what is powering Africa Rural Connect, and it’s the secret sauce that made this challenging project even possible.

Sssh! You didn’t hear this from me, but the ARC project was developed and deployed in three months, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. Typically a project of this kind takes 6 to 12 months but the requirements of this project dictated a very aggressive schedule.  Several of my professional peers (aka competitors) expressed the view that we were crazy for taking it on, but that’s what we do at Infamia. We take big risks for great projects, and we make it happen.

And, if you’re going to do that as a contractor, you better really believe in the project! Of course, this project resonated with Mickey and me, and it resonated with our client, wegora. The vision there was to make this happen. Everyone got passionately on-board and we got it done.

If you haven’t yet signed up for Africa Rural Connect, please do. No idea is too small, no plan too elaborate. Just get on and take a look around and let us know what you think.

Related articles

• Bring your Ideas to Africa (ONE.org)
• Former Peace Corps Volunteers Called Back to Service (U.S. News & World Report)
• Africa Collaboration Goes Global (Change.org)

Typically, they have a speaker give a short talk about their company, nonprofit or project (of course, Green-related).   This time around it was Casey Trees, an interesting nonprofit that along with other programs, I know them best for going around the city and planting trees.

I spoke to their Director Jared Powell just before he presented, and he shared that they do approximately 1,000 trees a year in DC alone.  They need volunteers and of course property owners interested in having a tree planted on their property.

I ran into my friend Monika Thiele, of The DC Green Connection.  It’s been several months since I last spoke with her, but it sounds like things are going great.

The DC Green Connection’s mission is to grow the green economy locally and promote sustainable living widely through fun and informative events, green business promotions, networking, and social media marketing.

The DC Green Connection already have a Meetup group of 177 members!  They have sponsors lining up and it’s great opportunity to get involved with something Green in the city.  It’s no secret that Mickey has managed to convert my bad habits and I have also become passionate about Green-related technologies.   Anything that helps move the needle in protecting this ball of dirt we live on, Infamia is in support of.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cycling Tree-Care Crews Hit D.C. Streets (treehugger.com)

wordpress

I am picky.  I like substance rather than sensationalistic drivel. I get irritated by bad prose.  I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar.  And I actually spell out “you” and “our” when I text.  As thus, I rarely find a blog post I’m willing to pass on.  (Oh, the foreshadowing!) голова болит секс

голова болит секс

Of course, now I’m going to tell you that I did find a blog post worth passing on.  It’s from Matt, over at wordpress.org, on how to keep wordpress secure.  But don’t just stay on the first paragraph.  This is more about wordpress.  If you’ve ever been online, if you are now online, or if you intend to be online ever, you owe it to yourself to read that, and take it to heart.  This applies to car maintenance as much as it applies to wordpress or to any other online thing you do.  Matt doesn’t sew (I dabble at it), but the premise is ageless:  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I’ve expounded on this before.  Coincidentally, I just read some examples in a magazine that continue to car analogy.  Tales of a forgotten oil change costing the owner the price tag of a new engine; ignored brake pads that ended up ruining the rotors; ruined transmissions; the list goes on.

• голова болит секс

This post brings it down to earth: regular maintenance is a known cost. Budget for it. Lack of regular maintenance (leading to a hacked site, for example) can cost many thousands of dollars.  I was looking at a hacked site just this week:  Over eight hours at emergency rates just to investigate.  The site may require tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to make sure that all vulnerabilities are closed.

голова болит секс

I guess routine maintenance is your “business decision”.  Just call me when you get hacked. I may even be nice and not add the “I told you so” tax.

More info here and a neat video here.

Update: crews are expected to dig up the streets over the next few days to fix the main.

фото оральное порно

Gull-wing, of course

Oh, and thanks for asking…Yes, it does come in electric!  In the form of four nearly-100-kw electric motors for combined power of over 500 hp.

Crunchgear has all the info.  Sorry about the off-topic post, but electric propulsion is a bit of an interest of mine. эротические лесбиянок мой муж занимается анальной мастурбацией

In other news, my birthday’s in December…

окончил волгоградский государственный педагогический институт