Carsonified

Amazon is not only one of the biggest online consumer brands, its Web Services now take up more bandwidth than all of its global sites combined. Leah Culver, from Pownce, will be talking about cloud services at FOWA Miami in a month.

Google has recently released some amazing new functionality for it’s free (!) service Google Analytics. If you’re already using GA, make sure to update your tracking code to the new version.

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If you haven’t seen this video on data portability, it’s worth watching. It’ll be interested to see if we can get everyone to agree on this (I hope so!)

I just finished my first episode of How to Build a Web Start-up, where I share tips for starting quickly and cheaply, and how to create your first cashflow spreadsheet.

Ryan’s original presentation - essential reading for all those thinking about building a web app, is now available on SlideShare.

You can also listen to the audio that goes with the presentation.

Check it out!

I think humans have an real need for creativity - we must have space to express our thoughts without being worried about whether they’re perfectly formed or precisely measured.

I thought a great way to encourage that creativity and open discussion would be to paint one of our walls with blackboard paint and turn it into a massive chalkboard, and BAM, the Carsonified Blackboard was born.

The best thing about a chalkboard is that it’s positively analogue. It’s dusty. It’s messy. It’s beautiful. You can’t capture it and put it on Google Docs - I love that.

Now that we’ve been in the office for a couple weeks (videos coming soon - don’t worry), we’ve used the board for several meetings, brainstorms and just screwing around - and it’s worked really well. I’m hoping that it gets used more for fun stuff than meeting stuff, but only time will tell.

How do you guys keep creativity fresh in your life?

This week the interwebs have been alive with the sound of the so-called ‘touch icons’… a low hum possibly produced by them gently jiggling away on your homescreen.

Like many a designer looking for the frequent digital distraction, I’ve been creating some icons for the Carsonified sites. Earlier in the week, almost right after the iPhone / iPod Touch software update was announced, Dan was on the case and his walkthrough was a more extensive guide than the one on the Apple Developer Connection. Shortly after, Nathan experimented with larger image dimensions than the 57×57 recommended by Apple, and - after a few experiements from and on behalf of readers - found that 60×60 was the ideal size. Huzzah! Cue a lot of happy web designers, all making shiny new icons for their sites.

However, this was only the first stage. Drew came up with a bookmarlet to address the fact that we wouldn’t normally be able to edit icons for sites we don’t manage, only to have it improved upon by Rob to override websites’ existing icons (and then re-tweaked by Drew). Then, just when we thought we’d achieved the highest possible state of ecstatic icon-induced nirvana, Cameron modified the bookmarklet even further and made the whole process a doddle for the average user. (His article is also a rather nice summary of the work done by others.) Finally, we’re now seeing all kinds of sites pop up (such as Andy’s iclypso.com) that offer a number of icons ready for the end-user to install.

Phew! Now that I’ve worn myself out with a blow-by-blow account of that week - which will no doubt be out of date by tomorrow - I thought I’d show you the Carsonified icons (styled here so as to mimic their final rendering on the iPhone / iPod Touch) that I’m in the process of rolling out. They should be on all of the relevant sites by the end of the week.