Just a quick side note for everyone on this wonderful weekend. You may remember Iconsushi, a site I briefly talked about in Friday Focus two weeks ago. It’s my friend Prash’s (who helped create Devlounge with me) newest creation. It is now officially open for business, with two icon sets available for purchase. He’s hooking up Devlounge readers with a 40% discount by using the code DEVL07X when you order. Check them out!
Archives for October 2007
Friday Focus #51
We are now just one week out from the first anniversary of Friday Focus. It’s kind of weird to be sitting here thinking how quickly a year has really gone by…but I’ll get into all this reflection stuff next week. Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone. Next weekend is November.
Sites of the Week
DreamsDrive is the personal portfolio of Roy Ng. Small and compact is the best way to describe this baby. It could definitely qualify as one of the smallest portfolios as ever seen. What do you think?
Second this week is FutureFabric. Cool name, even cooler work. FutureFabric is the portfolio of Guy Moorhouse, who also works at Airside.
Wrapping up this week is the portfolio of Marius Roosendaal. This site makes the list because of its two themed designs. Based on what time of day it is, it will either show a day (light colored) or night (dark colored) version of the site. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Hot Spot: Jobberbase
Check out this cool piece of script I came across this week. Jobberbase is an open source Job board application that will give you the ability to run your own job board. I know there are already plenty of paid job boards out there, so why would I be encouraging you to start your own? Well, Jobberbase seems like a great solution for anyone who may be looking to add a job board to their own site specifically for their visitors and a specific category. If anyone has used or starts using this, let me know how it is.
Digg Weekly
Design – 99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
From the Digg description: I have used every one of these resources as a graphic designer and website developer and have hand picked all of these resources based on their usefulness and overall quality.
Programming – Protecting Your PHP/MySQL Applications from SQL Injection
From the Digg description: SQL injection is a serious concern for webmasters, as an experienced attacker can use this hacking technique to gain access to sensitive data and/or potentially cripple your database. Are you safe?
21 Album Art Covers for Inspiration
Design comes in many forms. Take album artwork, for example. Not only is it the packaging trying to sell the product, but many times, it is also being used to represent the style of the artist’s music on that album. Sometimes, album art can be so bad that people won’t purchase an actual physical copy of the album just because the packaging is horrible. Other times, people will already have every song on their computers, but yet they feel the need to go out and purchase a physical copy of the album and add it to their collection because it looks so good. I asked some members of Absolutepunk to list some of their favorite album artwork, and I’m now here to show off some true works of art to you.
The List
Below is a list of 21 (yes, odd number I know, but whatever) really cool album covers. Most were determined by the Absolutepunk members who participated in my thread (much thanks to them!), and some of the others were selected by myself. The list could have been a lot bigger (of course) but each of these covers has their own style, so I think it’s enough – at least for now.
Menomena – Friend & Foe
Say Anything – In Defense of the Genre
Jimmy Eat World – Futures
Punk Goes Acoustic 2
Mae – The Everglow
Underoath – Define the Great Line
Brand New – Deja Entendu
Mae – Destination: Beautiful
The Beatles – St. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club
Dashboard Confessional – The Shade of Poison Trees
O.A.R. – In Between Now and Then
Sugarcult – Lights Out
Finch – Say Hello to Sunshine
Switchfoot – Nothing is Sound
mewithoutYou – Brother, Sister
Armor for Sleep – What To Do When You Are Dead
Circa Survive – On Letting Go
The Early November – The Room’s Too Cold
Our Lady Peace – Spiritual Machines
Sum 41 – Chuck
Yellowcard – Paper Walls
I Want More!
While putting together this quick list, I stumbled upon a really cool site dedicated to album artwork and nothing else. Check out Sleevage if you are looking for more album art inspiration. Or, if you are looking to see what covers absolutely suck, you may want to check out the Museum of bad album covers.
More Cover Art Information
There is also a great article on AOL Music about the supposed “fading out” of album artwork because of the increased amounts of music that is downloaded. The article, titled “Picture Worth a Thousand Songs?“, shows that designers are still fairing just fine, with physical copies of the album still playing a major role in the music, and sometimes even the success of the album.
Friday Focus #50
Time to celebrate the big 5-0! I guess that’s why today’s focus is rather late compared to the last few weeks (we were out celebrating all night). But anyways, here we go with edition fifty.
Sites of the Week
Kicking things off this wonderful 50th edition of the focus is Sikker, the Portfolio of Nicolás Calabrese. It is nice to see a portfolio displayed in a different way, and the dimming / highlighting of work really works well here on this simple, dark portfolio.
Next up is IconSushi. IconSushi is new icon marketplace started by my buddy Prash (co-conspirator of Devlounge and owner of Mintpages), which he has been working on over the past few months. I had a chance a while back to check out the first icons from the first set, and they are looking very nice. The site is now up, but the service has not yet fully launched, but it will soon. Nothing like a little pre-launch hype.
And wrapping things up this week is Newsweek. The site was recently redesigned and features a very nice clean feeling to it. A bold reader header gives way to the simplistic, organized fashion of the rest of the layout – but it is nice.
Digg Weekly
Design – Flash-Based Galleries for Your Images
More list madness from our buddies at Smashing Magazine (I have another list in store sometime this weekend that they have yet to do). A large list of flash-based galleries you can use for your portfolios or simply to show off your images.
Programming – Preventing Spam without captcha
From Digg Description: “I hate CAPTCHAs because it discourages lots of users(specially in impulsive mood) if they make a single mistake on first try. Here is how I tackle SPAM attacks on the comment form of my blog without using a CAPTCHA. You can use this technique for any kind of form on your website.”
Still on the market..
The hunt for a suitable new owner continues. It has a been a rough couple of weeks, with myself struggling to find the time to do anything but school work. I’m sure you are all tired of hearing that, and believe me, I’m tired of saying it. But, as the owner of the site, I feel it is important to have a personal connection with you [the readers], and I’d rather share news like this with you then keep you in the dark. Today I made a post on Mashable about the site situation. So if you see this, please don’t get all too worried.
A Preview of TNX: A New Text Link Service
I was recently asked to review TNX, a new text link buying and selling service, similar to Textlinkads or other text link marketplaces. There have recently been a lot of reviews about this service, so rather than try to cover everything, I’m going to focus on the one side of TNX that would beneficial to people like me who own sites and are trying to monetize – the website publisher section.
Selling Ads on Your Site
Upon first visit to the TNX site (which I like to pronounce “Tee-N-Ex” although the actual pronunciation is “Thanks”), you are presented with two options: one for website publishers, and one for advertisers. Each link will take you to a FAQ about the service from the specific angle you might be interested in using the service for. Let’s take a look at a few of the Website Publisher FAQ’s:
Note: These are straight from the FAQ.
- Q:How do I benefit from adding a TNX system code on my website?
A: When system code is placed on your website all the links that are purchased by advertisers will be automatically displayed on all pages that have TNX system code included. Whenever link on your website is sold to one of our advertisers, you get paid. The more pages you have on your site, the more links you can sell. Price of each link sold to our advertisers is calculated upon you page’s search engine rating. Links on all pages of your website are sold automatically, all you need is to place the TNX system code on all pages you want to sell links from. - Q: What is TNX commission?
A: TNX charges its members just 12.5% both, advertiser and webmaster to cover all expenses including web hosting, moderators salary and the most important – advertising all over the Internet so more people join. - Q: Can I control link ads on my website?
A: Yes! Once ad space on your website is sold, you can see list of all links and URLs in your control panel. You will have an option to block ads, delete them or ban the entire website which advertising you don’t like. We guarantee you will never see advertising of pills, drugs or any kind of ads that do not follow advertising policy. Every day we deny over 10,000 ads that do not comply with our policy.
On the left side of the FAQ page, I happened to stumble upon a Profit Calculator. I figured, what the hell, let’s see what’s possible. Upon entering in your url, the tool will calculate the amount of pages on your site and the link popularity. Once that is done, you have to adjust the PR for those pages. I set all of ours at PR6 (although we recently slipped to PR5). The calculator estimated I could make $8971.88 a month if I sold 2 ads per page.
Enough messing around – it’s time to register.
After registering, either as a website publisher or advertiser, you are presented with the TNX Dashboard. From here, you can generate the code to add to your site, add a new site, sell your TNX Points (used to buy links), create a new campaign, and view and manage your current campaigns (among other things).
You may have noticed how I said you can sell your points. Well, what exactly do points have to do with all this? Points are how advertisers purchase links on your site. Points currently cost $1.20 for 1,000 points.
To get your site setup, you first need to ad the appropriate ad code to all your pages which you want to have ads on. The ads will be placed their dynamically, so once you ad the code to the pages you want, you won’t have to go back and manually edit them every time you have a new advertiser. Once you have added the code to your pages, you have to add your site to the system. It will take about 1-3 days to get approved.
Other ways to make money
Maybe you are not interested in having text links on your site. That’s alright, because TNX also has an affiliate system which will allow you to place banner ads or your own links to the TNX service, and earn “TNX Points”. Now, you might be thinking, what do I want points for, I want cash! You can either turn around and use those points to purchase some link ads for yourself, or you can sell the points, either back to TNX themselves, or to another user.
Concerns with the advertising policy?
Many people get nervous with text links, especially a dynamic service where the code controls what is and isn’t shown on your page. No one wants to see their pages littered with links to purchase Viagra pills or anything like that. TNX does have a good advertising policy, which states that they will not approve links that “have nothing to do with the chosen subject or contradict it. Also, we will not approve campaigns that advertise pharmaceutical products and gambling.” Plus, because you can manage what ads get approved or not for your website, you have even more control over what kind of ads will be shown on your valuable pages.
Overall, if you are looking for another link marketplace alternative, give TNX a try. Have you ever used them? Let me know in the comments below.
