July 09th, 2007
LuckyOliver is another entry into the stock-photo market. They’ve been around for a bit of time now. I first heard about them when I was down at South by Southwest, where they gave out these nifty beer coasters as promotional giveaways. So what makes them different then the venerable iStock? Well, they’re both stock photo sites, so you’d expect similarities. iStock seems to have generally higher quality work, but you can find some great pictures on LuckyOliver.
iStock also has videos now, which is something not available at LuckyOliver. Then again, videos are generally only useful if you’re doing very specific Flash work, and even then the video selection from iStock leaves a little be be desired (although, to their credit it is growing every day, and finding high-quality video clips is getting easier and easier).
So what does LuckyOliver have over iStock? In a word, attitude. They still exude that “small team of guys trying to make a run of this” feel. Their blog is candid, and fun. The site is designed to look worn, but the interface remains clean and clear - but still “flirty”. Running a search? They offer you the option of “no nudies”. Your “control panel” is called the “Big Top”, and also offer the “Odditorium”. Cute. There are other interface niceties there as well. When you first sign up, they give you a simple 2 option choice box. “Ready to buy, or read to sell” - attractively presented. I have no interest in uploading or selling images, and the presentation left me feeling like I knew what I needed to do next. Even when they nag you for money, its well presented. “Interested? You’ll need to get yourself some tokens”. Oh yeah, continuing on the carnival theme, they call credits “tokens”.
The search tool looks really promising, but isn’t giving me as accurate of results as I had hoped for yet. A search for “old people” gave me a bikini Ms. Santa Claus and about 8 Shakespeare actors, a police cruiser… a toilet? Um… ok. If they can get that sorted out, they have great ideas. You can search by orientation, be specific about illustrations or photos, licenses and many other options. Nice.
While it doesn’t mean much to me, they do a photo commenting not unlike Flickr, and also offer image tagging, lightboxes, and the other standard fares.
Finally, they seem to offer types of photos that I don’t see too much on other stock sites. Worn, risque type imagery. LuckyOliver has intrigued me enough to add it to my stable of resources, and I’m hopeful it won’t let me down.
Continue reading “Quick Link: LuckyOliver.com”. Posted in
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July 07th, 2007
Kevin Yank has an article posted on Sitepoint entitled ”Simply JavaScript: The Three Layers of the Web”. What I love about it, is that he does a masterful job of outlining the separation of content from presentation from behaviour. I was just talking about this the other day, how HTML, CSS and Javascript make up the 3 legged table of the web; each is required if you are trying to build something stable.
These days, everyone seems to understand separating presentation from markup, but I still see <a href="#" onclick="doSomething();"> all over the place. Hopefully, as more and more people keep repeating the message, separating behaviour, the same way we separate presentation, will work its way into our collective folk-knowledge.
If you are a beginning webmaster, spend some serious time reading about these separations - you’ll be a better webmaster for it.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Three Layers of the Web”. Posted in
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June 08th, 2007
Courtesy of lifehacker comes this brilliant Firefox tip.
If you’ve ever tried copying and pasting a multi-line address into Google Maps just to realize that an input box will only take one line at a time—meaning that you have to copy and paste each line individually—there’s a simple Firefox tweak that will solve this problem:
Type “about:config” in the location bar. In the “Filter” field type “singleline.”
You can set the value to 2 for editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines, which will allow pasting of multiple lines to input boxes.
Continue reading “Firefox line paste trick”. Posted in
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February 02nd, 2007
A beautiful piece of work! Bas Wenneker has written Plotr, a charting engine in Prototype that uses canvas. Now if only IE would support SVG, my world would be complete (until I found something else to complain about). The library is released under a BSD license, and requires prototype to run.
The rendered graphs are not bitmap graphics (no GIFs or PNGs here), but rather plotted using SVG or Explorer Canvas, as is appropriate. And if I may say so, the output is sexy as hell.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Plotr javascript graphing library”. Posted in
Javascript, Quick Links with 5 comments
January 11th, 2007
One of the more innovative things I’ve seen lately for Firefox is the Tab Effect Extension. It adds an interesting transition between tabs reminiscent of how Suse handles desktop transitions.
I’ve got to admit it does look sexy, but after living with it for 5 minutes, I’ve already removed it. The authors should be commended for creating this wonderful extension, but to me this is a clear case of eye-candy getting in the way of practicality.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Tab Effect for Firefox”. Posted in
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December 04th, 2006
One of my favourite Firefox extensions has just released a new version. Firebug announced today that the 1.0 version is out now in beta, and even more importantly, has been released under the same open source license as Firefox itself. From the site: Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Fancy-pants DOM features abound, and the usual AJAX debugging goodness is in there. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Firebug 1.0 is out in beta”. Posted in
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October 24th, 2006
Get it now. http://www.mozilla.com/
Good God I hate the new location of the tab closing button.
Continue reading “Quick Link: Firefox 2 is out”. Posted in
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September 26th, 2006
Joe Mathlete has created an absolutley hilarious blog entitled Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke. A great 5 mintue break when you should really be coding.
… get back to work!
Continue reading “Quick Link: Explaining Today’s Marmaduke in 500 words or less”. Posted in
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June 05th, 2006
A very playful Flash animation about a Flash animation battling the animator.
Clever, witty, and um… educational… or something.
Animator vs Animation
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LuckyOliver is another entry into the stock-photo market. They’ve been around for a bit of time now. I first heard about them when I was down at South by Southwest, where they gave out these nifty beer coasters as promotional giveaways. So what makes them different then the venerable iStock? Well, they’re both stock photo sites, so you’d expect similarities. iStock seems to have generally higher quality work, but you can find some great pictures on LuckyOliver.
The search tool looks really promising, but isn’t giving me as accurate of results as I had hoped for yet. A search for “old people” gave me a bikini Ms. Santa Claus and about 8 Shakespeare actors, a police cruiser… a toilet? Um… ok. If they can get that sorted out, they have great ideas. You can search by orientation, be specific about illustrations or photos, licenses and many other options. Nice.
