Snowtweet

I don’t even go skiing or snowboarding but I’m impressed with the gorgeous design and functionality of SnowTweet, which uses the power of Twitter to give real-time updates from real people regarding all things snow. Top marks Jon Moss and Andreas Carlson!

Screenflow

I’ve been really enjoying playing with the simple but powerful screencasting software for Mac OSX. I’m particularly thinking of the possibilities for client training after delivery of a website, be great to leave clients with little ‘how-to’ videos to refer to at any time. See the Screenflow website.

The Potter’s Field Project

My mate Joe Solo has put together a stunning album of original compositions based on the forgotten stories of World War I. Visit the Potter’s Field MySpace page, and better still, buy a copy of the CD.

Grand Perspective

I’d recently become alarmed at the dwindling amount of space I had on my MacBook Pro’s hard drive. While I’ve got a few external and off-site backups and storage, it was still worrying to see how little space I had left. Eek!

Grand Perspective to the rescue, a small application which gives a graphical representation of the stuff that’s clogging up your hard drive. I’ve used similar applications in the past but none have been as useful at showing what was taking up the space. Recommended.

Get Noded

I love the whole philosophy behind the concept of Noded teams as an alternative to the traditional approach to office-based employee teams. See the Noded website.

Dropbox

Others have ably covered why Dropbox is such a genius idea so I won’t go into the details again here. Suffice to say I do often wonder how I ever did without it. An excellent all-purpose back-up system, it also allows for easy access to files on multiple machines and makes sharing files amongst other people (Dropbox users or not) an absolute doddle.

5 Simple Steps

I really enjoyed reading Mark Boulton’s ‘5 Simple Steps – a practical guide to designing for the web‘ PDF book. Well worth £12 and highly recommended, even if it only reassures you that you’re doing things right :)

1Password

How on earth have I ever managed without 1Password? Really simple but very powerful way of handling the increasing number of passwords I have to remember. Highly recommended.

SL Developer Info extension

ExpressionEngine developers out there would do well to go post haste to grab Stephen Lewis’ SL Developer Info extension and install it sharpish. Invaluable.

iStat for iPhone

Brilliant iPhone app allowing one to remotely monitor any number of Macs directly from the iPhone. Beautifully done.

And I think that’ll do for now.

How much for a website?
We’re often asked how much we charge for a website, and it’s frustrating not to be able to always give a straight answer. The article gives some reasons why.

Recession busting tips
Having your website budget slashed due to the recession is not the time to get despondent; it’s time to get creative! Here are our top 5 recession-busting tips.

Enjoy!

Founded by the irrepressible Jon Moss, Hull Digital is a new website that aims to be the hub of the digital community in the city of Hull. If you live in or around Hull and work on the web or otherwise with digital technologies, we’d love you to get involved. Whether you’re a web developer, digital marketer, or are involved in any way with digital technologies for business or pleasure, you’re most welcome.

What’s the point? Following the principle of ‘together we stand’, Hull Digital aims to be a means of sharing ideas, networking, and even getting us off our backsides from behind a monitor screen and meeting the people with who we share a contribution to the local digital economy.

Particularly, the group intends to make lots of noise about the monopoly enjoyed by our local ISP, and campaigning for ways to bring alternative broadband providers into the city, including fibre optics.

The first Hull Digital meet-up happens today and will be the first of many. Get involved, spread the word, see you there!

Virtual hosts? When developing locally on the Mac (or indeed any platform) it’s essential to be able to set up a web server environment (such as Apache) similar to the one used at a web host. It’s even handier to be able to access the site locally at a proper domain name in your browser (e.g. dev.clientname)

The ‘get your hands dirty’ way

For years I followed Blane Warrene’s instructions from a 2003 article for SitePoint. Dead easy, but requires not only opening up and altering Apache’s httpd.conf file and making amendements there, but also delving into /etc/hosts which isn’t for the beginner or faint of heart.

Headdress, wherefore art thou?!

I then used Headdress for a few years. Headdress was a small OSX application (sadly no longer available – the company who produced it seem to have disappeared) that allowed you to create virtual hosts easily via a nice GUI. However, it didn’t directly access /etc/hosts, so could only ever create websites at localhost ports (e.g. 10.0.0.15:9000). Not ideal.

MAMP Pro. Umm… no.

I recently dabbled with MAMP Pro. Having used basic MAMP for quite a while now (a most excellent way of handling Apache and PHP on a Mac, by the way), the possibility of being able to easily set up virtual domain name hosts via MAMP Pro’s GUI appealed. However, I wasn’t really impressed with the implementation in practice, it seemed pretty buggy. I gave that up and went happily back to regular MAMP.

VirtualHostX to the rescue!

Whilst scratching my head just now trying to remember again how to set up virtual hosts manually (digging into Evernote…) I did a last ditch Google search and found VirtualHostX.

10 second download. 10 second installation. 30 seconds to have first virtual host up and running, with domain name of my choice. It even offered to back up my current Apache settings separately (one click) and detected I was using MAMP, so offered to set that up too (again, one click). Very, very impressive.

A steal at $9 (£6). Highly recommended (in case you already couldn’t tell…)

Also available as a free desktop wallpaper.

This year has been a great one for many reasons, aside from the momentous victory of the USA’s first black president:

Professionally

The small web design agency I started over 5 years ago has gone from strength to strength, and particularly this year seems to have been even better than the previous ones. My clients seem to have gone a bit global, working on websites for folks as far afield as Greenland, Australia and the Middle East, as well as for high profile clients within the NHS and education.

I’m thoroughly enjoying more than ever the role I’ve worked so hard to forge for myself these last few years. I certainly barely remember being a teacher now, seems so long ago!

My personal skillset has increased a great deal too, taking time to really get to grips with jQuery and develop some advanced ninja ExpressionEngine skills. I’ve been using EE since 2004 and am very much looking forward to v2.0.

Personally

It’s been more ‘all work and no play’ than ever before this year, which I intend to get to grips with next year. Having said that, I’ve been loving getting back into recording again recently, having invested in Logic, some decent-ish monitors and the muchos funos Toneport UX2.

I’ve fulfilled a long-standing ambition to take singing lessons too, and am really starting to see results, as well as cranking up the songwriting too, after a good long break. It feels good.

Social media blah blah blah

The biggest change personally has been the effect social media has had on my relationships. I’d always resisted the lure of Twitter and Facebook strongly, to my regret. Twitter has become a constant source of amusement, humour, assistance with web development problems, and new friendships, while Facebook has brought me back in contact and kept me in touch with more people than I could possibly imagine. In that sense, social media has made 2008 a great year all round.

Read this book

Best book I’ve read this year: hands down, it’s Wasted by Mark Johnson. I urge you to grab a copy as fast as you can, you won’t regret it. I rarely have the experience of simply not being able to put a book down, but to say this one affected me deeply would be an understatement. You can thank me later.

Apple

The Apple Mac is such an integral part of everything I do it’s hard to ignore how excited I’ve been about some developments this year. The iPhone continues to shine, of course.

Dropbox has been a very recent revelation, leading me to ditch using Jungle Disk and my own Amazon S3 bucket, at least for now. The ability to have shared app databases (e.g. iPhoto, Things, etc.) across all my machines is nothing short of miraculous.

Speaking of Things: that application continues to take pride of place as THE master piece of software that keeps my world organised and under control. I still cannot praise it enough.

I haven’t been as impressed in a long time as I have been with Spotify over the last week or so. I’ll be writing more on it soon, but just to say for now that I truly think it’s the internet music revolution we’ve all been waiting for. It truly makes my head spin.

Merry Christmas and happy new year

All the best and see you all in 2009.

The fix: cut out a small piece of tin foil, place it on your desk/dashboard, then put the iPhone on top of it. Instantly stops the racket. Marvellous.

To make my saviour tin foil more aesthetically pleasing I’ve cut it the same size as the cleaning cloth that came with the iPhone, and placed the cloth over the top of it. Looks pretty nice :)