7 days of The 140 Characters Webapp Challenge - wrapped up!

You may have hard of The 140 Characters Webapp Challenge. It made quite a buzz and I’m happy to report that the response was a pleasant surprise to me. Here’s a report from the middle of The Challenge — there’s still a week left!

Some statistics: 19 coders (including me), who have produced 28 webapps in PHP, Perl, Ruby and JS — all but 4 are less than 140 characters of code! Impressive work so far, everybody! Thanks! I managed to wrap up all your work into one list.

The 140 character webapp challenge!

How many interesting webapps can you code in one Twitter message? I have one — a micro-twitter. I want to see many!

Back at Twitter I read this message on 222 character Wikis, by Arun Shroff. I thought — why not — and replied with a challenge: Make a 140 chars webapp in 2 weeks! Whatever language, library or module included, as long as it’s standard. I made an example micro-twitter, described later in the post. If you think you can do better — I dare you. You’ve got 2 weeks again. Post your webapp here in the comments! (complete code, link or anything such that we can see it at its best)

UPDATE! 32 WebApps under 140 Characters — Finale of The Challenge wrapped up!

24 WebApps under 140 Characters — 7 days of The Challenge wrapped up!
Test my example micro-twitter online
Download the micro-twitter source code

#Favlogo roundup number 1

A while ago on Twitter I started to post links to exceptional logotypes, day by day. You can monitor my picks by searching the #favlogo hashtag or simply by following me. After about two weeks, it’s time to make a roundup and select my favorite five! Let’s start.

A blog must evolve! 6 ways to improve it

I made some layout changes over the weekend, intended to make this blog more readable for new users. I think the new arrangement is better to navigate, and contents of the website are easier to find. I included some social bookmarking elements (Go, Digg this post! Thanks!). All this sums up to this article on how to improve a blog, step by step.

And the Spam Design Award goes to (sponsored by Viagra, Levitra and Cialis)

Spam is the cancer of the Internet — and I am repeating myself. I get almost 100 spam comments every week, but thanks to Akismet plug-in I described before, I don’t have to deal with them by hand. But today in my mailbox I’ve found an odd little one, which really caught my eye. This will be the first design post on the blog, but I mean, just look at it — for a moment I thought it was something from Apple Inc.

5 tips on being smart with HTML and CSS

Remember — always code your site in the most simple and flexible manner. Once you’ve designed and developed your website, and put it online, you can be quite proud of yourself. However, when you come back later to make some changes or improvements, you can discover, to your surprise, that you would spend less time making it all over again, than just updating the current code. Either way, it’s just waste of time and brains. Here are some small tips that may save you lots of time in the future.

Read luggage conditions before flights - you may be positively surprised

In an era of cheap flights over Europe, the one not cheap thing about them is the luggage transport. In most cases, you are entitled to just one piece of hand baggage, and they really mean one — if you wish to have a purse with you, then you can’t have anything else. Also, check-in baggage is normally restricted to 20 KG, and you have to pay for each piece, plus the overweight. However, before your departure, always read the fine print about luggage conditions, as sometimes the airlines (both cheap and regular) have interesting rules.

Real “nofollow” links using simple JavaScript

Today’s web is all about being in the search engines, i said that before. And since Google is the biggest search engine, I can safely say that today’s web is all about being in Google — which then again all breaks down to having a high PageRank (PR). It’s magically calculated basing on inbound and outbound links to the given site. And often having bad links brings your PR down. That’s why it’s good practice to use nofollow. But I will show you how to make it even more No.

Display Twitter timeline in Expression Engine - Part 2

Last time I explained how to display your Twitter timeline in Expression Engine (EE) using a simple plugin. Today, I will show how to achieve the same and even more using Twitter timeline feed. This approach gives a bit more flexibility and some advantages over the method described in Part 1. We use it on ProcessOne website to push our CEO’s latest tweets.

Roundup on Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

So I am leaving Paris today, coming back home to the busy times of the Holidays (oh the irony). The blog will return to normal in 2 weeks time, for now just leave your laptop and go have fun, I think. That’s what I’ll do at least. Until next time - I wish you all Merry Christmas with your family and a really full blown New Year party! Happy New Year, let the 2009 be at least not worse than this one. And an annual blog roundup below, with the most interesting posts so far.