Jason Lancaster

I found an interesting article on Twitter as a business today, which explains a bit of how they became successful and their problems with success. It wasn’t what got me into Twitter but it might be enough to convince a reader or two that it’s something worthwhile to investigate and/or try. Adam, I’m looking at you.

Quite a few people I know use applications like Adium, Meebo, or Pidgin to connect to various IM services, including AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Facebook. While this is great for 1-on-1 messaging, it isn’t effective for viewing the public, “what are you doing” social concept that Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook status all have in common. Eventually, those clients I named will come up with a solution. But until then, there is some room for a can-do-all social status application that groups Twitter and its clones together. There are lots of service-specific applications out there that post to Twitter or identi.ca but there is no superb knock-out application that groups everything together the way I want it to be done. I’ve been pondering creating something like this for either the iPhone or Mac OS X (or both). There’s lots to be learned from what already exists but there’s also a lot to be desired.

I struggled for a while on the concept of Twitter. It’s a company I’ve known about for a long time but I’ve always asked myself why it would ever be useful. I figured it would just be a waste of time.

Then I realized people are already doing this sort of update all the time on places, for example Facebook. I just logged into my account and within the past 8 hours I have had 21 updates from friends. That’s 6% of my friends! Pretty good, considering the 8 hour timeframe and the fact that most of these people aren’t bloggers or hip with that kind of stuff. If you expand my timeframe, I have 71 updates within the past week. That’s more than half my friends. Impressive, powerful, and not to be underestimated.

It took some “using” to convince me of Twitter’s value but I’m beginning to get it, understand it, and even become a fan of it. My twitter updates are posted directly onto my website as well as Facebook. If you’re a fan of updating your status on Facebook, or have simply wanted a way to shout to the world something interesting but don’t want to take the time to write a blog post about it, Twitter might be for you.

Here’s a great video expressing the value of Twitter and how you can use it:

I spent about an hour yesterday looking up URL’s on my site that have been archived or moved over the years and redirecting them via .htaccess to the appropriate sections. The problem was, I could only get proxy rules to work within Wordpress.

I kept trying the following, which I assumed would work after reading the apache mod_rewrite documentation:

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [R=301,L]

I finally gave up and went with a proxy rule that worked fine, but wasn’t exactly what I wanted (because the url didn’t get changed — ie, proxy).

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [P]

Just a second ago though, I thought to myself, “I wonder if the order of the flags plays a role.” And of course, it does… though I can’t find any documentation to support this.

So if you’re driven nuts trying to create a custom rewrite rule which won’t work for you, remember that order matters. Give the rule the last flag first, then the redirect flag.

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [L,R=301]

I suppose that might make a lot of sense to mod_rewrite veterans but not for me. I’m very glad I figured this out and hope this post can help someone (or me again) in the future.

I’ve been a bit bothered recently by something: people calling themselves web designers when all they do is create designs for weblogs. Not that the particular process of creating a design for a weblog isn’t designing — I don’t argue that it is design. But people who have never created a site for a corporation, or a product, or anything outside of the realm of blogs just don’t seem like real designers to me. It’s kind of like the whole late 90’s thing where anyone with notepad and an ftp client somehow became a “web designer”. Or anyone without a job after the tech boom became a “consultant.”

All of this then over-saturates the market. Not only do I question their design concepts and portfolio, but I ask if they are legitimate or not. Legitimate being a certain set of rules which may or may not be flexible, but in the end allow me to make a snap decision on the person I’m looking at because I can’t stand wasting my time on a fake.

I think there’s something inherently wrong with a snap decision based on that criteria. Blogs are important and invaluable in today’s web world. They’re the popular newcomer. Both hip and cool. I understand all this yet can’t wrap my head beyond it. It simply comes down to a, “They only design blogs. Next.”

And maybe that’s OK for corporate sites and similar situations where you don’t see what you need conceptualized in their portfolio. But maybe not. Some of these people have great designs, just nothing beyond the weblog medium. Being progressive is a good thing. I absolutely want a progressive designer to design for me.

I can’t be the only person out there that does this. The real question is, is it bad practice? Or is it the designers fault for not having a more well-rounded portfolio?