see more here.
i want to be here.
so i'm tempted to go to hawaii for my 30th bday. anyone want to join? plan tickets and lodging are reasonably priced now.
addthis. new face lift. new features.
new grid: we've locked everything to a 960 grid. the entire site follows a really nice grid system which has made design and development much easier. the site is also much cleaner since everything is aligned perfectly.
navigation: we've revisited the site architecture to accommodate for new pages. you'll notice the footer at the bottom has been introduced (but simplified dramatically compared to the original design).
visual styling: we've flattened the entire site—minimizing any use of gradients, drop shadows, etc. we've tried to keep the styling as simple and utilitarian as possible. this means the site loads faster and overall performance is better. we've made slight tweaks to type color and sizes as well. for example, we darkened the blue links as well as made all body copy darker. we're aiming to make sure everything is as legible as possible.
new features page: this page talks about all the benefits and features addthis offers for your blog and page. it also shows a list of ton of large publishers that use our product. you'll notice the call to action is clear in the top right corner with a small video in the sidebar. this is going to be a new convention we're hoping to include on all page. the videos should be a nice feature for people who don't like reading. heheh, and i just like having small videos sprinkled throughout a site. we're taking advantage of youtube to host our videos, which is so much easier than hosting it yourself.
updated get the code page: we've made some tweaks to this page. "what type of button" used to be a drop down menu, but we decided to change it to a tab. i believe it's much easier for a user to see their options with this convention versus the drop down menu.
new toolbox: we've launched a new product called "toolbox", which is offered on this page. i'm actually using a customized version of it on my page. it's a really nice feature of our product which allows the publisher to customize their sharing tools. i really love the way it works on my page. this was something i designed with the team 6 months ago. it's awesome to finally see it come to life and on my blog! i have a good feeling we'll see alot of people using this product for their page.
updated analytics: we've finally added a date picker for the analytics. this allows you to select a specific date range to generate a report. i've been waiting for this feature for ages. this will make it so much easier break down my analytics and zoom in on specific time periods.
new logos page: this page gives the user access to all the source files for our logo and button. the idea is to make our logo as open as possible. traditionally, i've been trained not to do this... but i believe that the more open you can make your brand, the more people will embrace it. twitter is a great example of a company being open with their brand and product. afterall, a brand is not what you say it is... it's what the people say it is. so let the people be as involved as possible and let them help you create it.
new help pages: this is probably one of the largest improvements we've made to our site... we've spent alot of time reorganizing our help section to make it easier for users use. we've added more docs, more visual guides, etc.
new visual guides: as part of making our help section better, we've added visual guides that walk a user of any experience through the process of adding a button their the page.
simplified code: the code above is so much more simple than what it looked like before. this is a simple little change, but our developers have done such a nice job of making this easier to digest. i have very little css coding experience... and editing the API was so easy. i would say i represent the largest common denominator for inexperienced. the fact that i could do most of it without using the docs was amazing.
address book with typedown addresses. if you use the email feature, you can use your address book. it also has a type down email feature which makes it so much easier to find an email address.
there's a ton more stuff we've done in this release, but this is a quick highlight of some things we've touched off the top of my head. i'll be blogging about more specific features and design rationale soon.
addthis memorial day logo.
here's the addthis memorial day logo we were supposed to release yesterday. unfortunately it didn't go out because of a little hiccup. bummer. either way, it was a salute to all those who have fought for this country. perhaps it's something we can use for next year.
you might also like:
addthis mother's day logo
why 140 url shortner sites will become obsolete.
there's a big rush to start the be-all-end-all url shortner... but really, do you really need it? does it really add value? it's great for twitter, but it's really useless for everything else. i'm not sure if anyone cares if my URL is less than 140 characters unless it's in a tweet.
twitter could release a paid upgrade for an unlimited character count. wouldn't that be nice? as an unpaid user, you could only view 140 characters. as a paid viewer, you can read the entire message. this would probably make twitter more useful... and they'd make $$. eventually 140 characters will be obsolete.
btw, i was playing around today and found out that it's possible to "shorten" a tinyurl URL. they shouldn't allow this... this totally breaks the user experience of this system. plus, someone could crash their server if they wrote a simple script.
in fact, why would i want to shorten an already shortened URL? i could technically grab an ow.ly URL, squish it with tinyurl, and then try squishing it again with bit.ly. i know this is a corner case, but the whole idea of tinyurls is silly. it only serves twitter. i only like them b/c i like twitter. the question is, will these URL shortners become obsolete if twitter bites the dust in the future?
twitterfeed. transforms blogs into tweets.
i though this was a great tool. it takes your RSS blog feed and converts each new post into a feed. this makes my life a little easier...
but the problem is, i can't measure click-backs to my site. if they could integrate that into my google analytics, i'd be a happy camper. i'm also surprised they didn't do some sort of take away toolbar and build their own url shorting service (ala tinyurl or bit.ly).
try it yourself here.
how do i tell...
i used the firefox search and started typing in "how do i tell if i have an older version of wordpress?". when i started typing "how do i tell...", this is what was suggested.
frank lloyd wright legos!
Pictured above, Falling Water. Frank Lloyd Wright Lego collection. Brilliant.
mario medley on piano.
this is an old one, but this guy blew me away when i first saw it. i felt like sharing it again.
metroid memories. piano medley.
i had this bookmarked a while ago... this is such a great song. brings back so many memories. i'm going to see if i can learn some new songs. any requests?
is a journal by 
