This week, we have updated our portfolio with some of the work we’ve been doing over the past few months. Thanks to all the agencies that have kindly allowed us to show the work we have been doing for them. There have been some great projects recently and we are really excited about showing them off.
Also, Mike has added his new Widget to the labs page, so go and have a play. More to come in the lab soon, so keep ‘em peeled..
I found this post the other day about how to evaluate if your business ideas / grand schemes for world domination / next big things are actually viable and likely to succeed.
The author has rated various famously succesful applications Twitter, Ebay, Google etc against the following criteria…
Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?� Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it? Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver? Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it? Discoverability: How will people learn about your product? Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?
We’ve just developed a new widget for Zone Magazine.
It shows you the latest edition of the magazine, links to the website, allows you to sign up & links to the magazine pdf.
Some Background:
I needed a project to get my teeth fully into Widgets, and how they can be grabbed, shared & tracked on Facebook, IGoogle, MySpace, Wordpress, Bebo etc..
We had recently worked on a web site for Zone Magazine, which is a lifestyle magazine, publishing through PDF Downloads.
The site templates we built, lets Zone update their microsite every month, to display an overview of the latest edition.
From the homepage, you can view the cover image, downlaod the PDF, view an XML/Flash slideshow of the pages and sign up as a subscriber to the magazine.
So I decided to see how quickly I could develop a widget that hooks into this existing content, and so, as Zone change their monthly information, so the widget would update wih the latest content feeds, and also allow widget users to signup and download the latest edition directly.
Well, it turns out, after I had it designed, it took a day to build and about half a day to get to grips with the Clearspring interface, register the widget, publish it, set up it’s homepage and even convert it into a proper facebook application… nice!
Zone Magazine is the brainchild of Andy Newson, and is a free lifestyle monthly publication produced for Crowborough, Uckfield and Heathfield areas. It is a quality publication, full of great content, design & photography.
Feel free to grab, share and publish this widget to your own sites / blogs etc…Nice… feel free to grab it and place it on your blogs, myspace, facebook, website, whatever!!!
Today it rained & rained & rained. There was nothing good in the cupboards to lift our spirits so I made these.
I don’t think the quantities of ingredient have to be that accurate, I don’t usually bother weighing anything much
2 mushy bananas (mashed with a fork)
250g Plain Flour
150g Sugar
90ml Vegetable Oil
250ml Soya Milk (or cow’s milk I guess)
1 Egg (beaten)
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bircarbonate of soda
some chocolate broken into pieces
Heat up the oven to about 200 degrees. Put all the dry ingredients into one bowl, all the wet ingredients into another and then pour the contents of the wet bowl into the dry bowl and mix it up enough to turn it into a lumpy batter. Pour into a muffin tray (prepopulated with muffin cases) and put it in the oven and leave it there for 20mins (or when the smoke alarm tells you the oven is on fire )
Make some tea or coffee. Place muffins in mouth and chew
Since becoming a freelancer about a year ago, I’ve noticed I’ve become far more obsessive about meal times. I think there is something comforting about the routine of regular meal times in an otherwise haphazard life of a freelancer. That and we are both incredibly greedy!! We tend to work to the following structure:
Breakfast
Second Breakfast (optional)
Elevensies
Lunch
Threesies
Dinner
To allow for plenty of work time around the main structure of our day, I’ve come up with the rapid development framework mfn:1.0 to make sure we’re fully nourished all day. Once you’ve got the hang of the basic structure, you can have a couple of days worth of ‘inbetween’ meals with about 5 mins development time.
The posts in this category are a few variations based on the basic mfin 1.0 structure and I encourage it be implemented in any well run home office.
Welcome to our new blog!! Whether or not it’s going to be one of those one entry diaries that we’ve all started on new years day and can’t quite keep the pace come 2nd January remains to be seen.
The plan is that we’ll both add some witty and informative posts about the goings on here at BD&D, but I suspect it is most likely to become a log of meals consumed throughout the day (banana & chocolate chip muffins today)
Anyway, here’s hoping that this is the first post of many…
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