Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-12-22

  • Lord Vader commands you to turn to the Dark Side. Will you be able to resist as he guides you to your destination? Obi-Wan has taught you well but now it is time to choose your path. Light sabers at the ready!
  • Social bookmarking service Delicious is for the chop, it seems: owner Yahoo reckons it's one of its "underperforming or off-strategy products", and that it's not part of the firm's future. So what do you do if you really need to keep track of interesting things you've spotted online? Here are five favourites.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-21

  • Helping people like you learn to use Comic Sans appropriately.
  • This is my final blog post for The Atlantic. Five years ago, as a way to boost the competitive metabolism of The Hotline, Chuck Todd hired me away from ABC News to create "Hotline On Call." I was to be the first political reporter working for a mainstream news organization whose output would be exclusively online. "On Call" made its debut in early September, the same week that Chris Cillizza began "The Fix." Back then, reporters didn't blog. Newspapers and magazines hired curators to update their websites, and reporters would occasionally post online, but there was a strict separation based on platform. You were considered legitimate only if your byline appeared in print. You were considered a blogger if it didn't. And you didn't want to be a blogger, because bloggers back then were second-class citizens of the country of journalism. Bloggers were partisan activists, yellers, provocateurs and upstarts.
  • It was announced today that Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious. So we thought we’d help you out with some solutions to export the bookmarks to other services. Users have a few different choices. You can choose to export your bookmarks into an html file and import them into your browser or directly import using services like Diigo, Xmarks and Faviki. Export Your HTML After logging into Delicious users can export the bookmarks along with their tags into a single html file. This file can then be added to most browsers by opening the bookmarks tool bar and locating the “import “ feature. On Firefox an import can be achieved by going to Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > click on the icon with the star> import.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-16

  • First things first, I love Photoshop. It is the world’s best program for image editing. I do not intend to say Photoshop is a bad program, I just wish to clear up the misunderstanding that Photoshop is the right tool to use for web and screen design. Photoshop was designed to be used for image manipulation. It was not designed to create effective pixel-precise layouts for computer screens, or to make quick changes to screen layouts. Photoshop tends to be used for this purpose however, because users are familiar with the program, and are not aware that Fireworks was designed for this specific purpose. Users generally try to compare Fireworks with Photoshop. Of course you can do a lot of things you can do in Fireworks somehow in Photoshop. It is also possible to do the same tasks in InDesign as you can do in Photoshop, but is this effective and efficient way to work?
  • For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others. In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier. Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks Under “Merge” are: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search. It also looks like sundry Yahoo properties like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar will be made into features.
  • Del.icio.us, a beloved social bookmarking service, is being killed off as part of some "organizational streamlining" by Yahoo and we're already in tears. Here's some advice on how to preserve the memories—and bookmarks—we have with the service. Simply head over to this link and you'll be offered the option to export all your bookmarks—you'll be provided with the option of including your tags and notes as well. Once you're done exporting those bookmarks and mourning, you can check out this list for some alternative bookmark management tools. [TechCrunch]
  • Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.
  • Compositing is a skill and process that spans the entire spectrum of creative industries. At the high end, compositing boasts its own specialized profession in film and television post production and visual effects. Dedicated software such as NUKE and Shake have taken the craft to powerful levels of its own, leaving behind the relatively basic compositing toolset of Adobe Photoshop. However, for many graphics practitioners compositing is a vital everyday process — and as with all pixel-pushing endeavors, Photoshop remains the entry point and hub to learning and ultimately mastering the fundamentals of this important skill. In this article, I’ll share some of my own time-saving tips for compositing in Photoshop. Tips such as these should never replace a solid understanding of your craft; however, being able to adapt a technique to make it work for you is part of being a creative professional. I encourage you to share your own creative compositing tips in the comments to this article
  • Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009.
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