Blog for March 2007

simplebits.com vs logomaid.com - update

Dan Cederholm is one of the better know web designers on the planet given that he is an author (Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS - which is a great book and well worth the read for anyone in web development - and Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook), a web designer (simplebits.com) and icon designer (http://iconshoppe.com).

Well, Dan has been ripped off by logomaid.com. Not cool.

As if people needed another reason NOT to use wholesale, chop shop design for their business. logomaid.com has proved they are worthy of your scorn.

Please, if you are in need of a logo and materials for your company, or a web site, or both, stay away from sites like these. If $200 dollars is all you can afford and you want something professional, it would be better spent getting a student to work on something for you.

Update - logomaid.com has pulled Dan’s logo and apologized for the situation. A little late, but still a decent move from a company that could use the boost to PR.

Slacker.com launches

Slacker.com has just launched out of alpha. You can now visit their site, sign up and start your own radio station through their service. If you recall, we like music around here. Any new music service will get our attention pretty quickly. The nice part about slacker.com so far is the music selection. I tuned into the SXSW 2007 radio station and have already ♥’d 4 tracks out of the 8 I have heard.

As of right now Slacker plans to release the following over the next year or two:

  • online music radio - already available
  • online music service for music sales - announced but no information yet
  • personal audio player (like an iPod or Zune)
  • satellite radio transmission service which would give you access to all of your radio stations when you are away from your computer (and of course compete against XM and Sirius for music listeners)

We like choice here at visuallizard.com, so any new music service that has some legs and offers something new is great by us. We wish Slacker.com all the best and hope they succeed in a crowded market place.

Finally RSS Feed

Firstly, we love getting email. So thanks to everyone who emailed and asked us about where our RSS feed was. A big thank you to the guy that told us we were #$%^ for not having an RSS feed. We liked that email.

Anyhow, we have rolled up an RSS 2.0 feed. You can find it at http://www.visuallizard.com/rss/. Happy day!

Making Strides to a Green Energy World

There are several technologies that are starting to look to the ocean as a source of electricity generation. In this article, a new technology is being tested by a Scottish Engineering Firm off the coast of Portugal. One of the statistics to take note of is the idea that in this design’s current form the United States could potentially produce the same amount of power per year which all of its current Hydro projects produce.

By harnessing the power of the ocean, the European Union could take a very large step toward their goal of 20% power production via renewable sources by 2020.

I say any step toward green power generation is a good step.

(Graphic courtesy of BBC News Online)



Realignment Part 1

Needless to say we have been busy. So busy in fact that our web site has been horribly neglected over the last 5 months. This is not a bad thing. Just the way things go around here.

Anyhow you might have noticed that we have shifted some pixels around. This version of the our site is running on the latest version of Catalyst, our content management system that we have been developing for the last 6 years.

We WILL be posting more on our site. We promise. We also intend to launch a new design for visuallizard.com in time for the May 1st CSSREBOOT ... or maybe November 1st, but there will definitely be more posting around here. We promise.

Feel free to use the comments at the end of this post to let us know what you think of the realignment. Talk to you soon!