The newest WordPress theme is now available for your pleasure. Scoop it up today, and use it for your site now! More information is available on the Particles page. Special thanks to Robert for helping me squash the final display bug yesterday. Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend.
Friday Focus #41
Friday focus…but it’s not even Friday!
Please excuse me for a rather late Friday Focus this week. It was the first time in a while that I didn’t pre-write the focus on Thursday, and when yesterday came around, I was out most of the day. Since I’ve wasted enough time getting this one going, let’s skip the pre-game pep talk and get right to the action.
Sites of the Week
Kicking off this week’s [late edition of] Friday Focus is 2G Media. I don’t know why, but I simply like this site. Maybe it’s the color combination, or some of the cool 3D work, but I just like it a lot.
Next up is Blog Action Day. A great design for an even better cause. Devlounge is being added as we speak. From the site: “On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.”
And finally this week is Problogger. Recently redesigned, Problogger now sports a very “portalish” look. It’s pretty neat if you ask me.
Design Float / Digg Weekly
Design – Hundreds of Free Icons for Webs and Desktops
Some really nice onces here. I like those gloss looking digg / technorati ones. I may put them to use. Just maybe ;).
Programming – Want to learn PHP? Easy!
A 15 part series that, according to the poster, are some of the best tutorials on php that they have ever read. I should probably look into some of these.
WordPress theme on the horizon
I’m working out one final css bug in my next upcoming WordPress theme, called Particles. It’s a very lightweight, speed and seo enhanced theme that allows you to quickly and easily build upon it. All together there are maybe six images used on the whole design, and it has a rather “unique” and different looking post setup than “most” standard designs. Watch for it in the coming days (possibly today if I get it fixed soon enough).
The Big Wall
A new and fun little project / initiative from Devlounge that allows you to submit your favorite work piece to our [soon to be] large wall / quilt (think Million Dollar Homepage meets a design gallery) has gone live. Hopefully, this will help boost forum activity around here, and allow everyone to have a little fun (and get a link back ;)). You’ll find that the forums have a lot more information about the project, so you might want to check it out once you get the chance.
Friday Focus #40
Here we are with week number 40, a little bit later than usual on your favorite night of the week – Friday. It was a good week for us, with quite a few really good articles, that you should probably consider looking through if you haven’t yet. Alright, enough chit chat, it’s time to kick off week 4-0.
Sites of the Week
You may remember that when GoPlan first launched, we featured them here on Friday Focus. The old design was white, with a lot of pastel color choices. The recent redesign took the darker route, but it still looks fairly nice.
Next up is Miingle, a one page, extremely vibrant design for a small advertising network. I think it is a very clean design, and perfect for the purpose of the site.
There was a rather small pool once again this week, leading up to a rather small Friday Focus. Hopefully we can come back big next week. Remember, if you want to get your site noticed and possibly featured here, please show it off in the forums!
Design Float / Digg Weekly
Design – Massive Collection of Photoshop Brushes
I know how most of you would probably want to make your own brushes, but if you are in need of a time saver, there are an abundance of brushes available from this site. Check them out.
Programming – Finally We Get New Elements in HTML 5
At look at some of the new things coming with HTML 5. It’s always good to stay ahead of the game.
Enjoy the weekend everyone!
No One Digs Us
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the somewhat “coveted” digg-effect, it’s that it can either come in bunches, or not come at all. We had our fair share of good excellent articles that still have yet to receive the amount of traffic and recognition they deserve to have. I find it somewhat surprising, especially considering the amount of shit crappy, pointless things that are dugg frantically by the digg user population everyday.
Let’s take a look at what received a massive overload of traffic this week:
Digg in the 90’s – 8,618 Diggs
A photo – yes a photo – that someone put together showing what digg could have looked like in the 90’s, using tables and no css. The description says “very funny” but maybe it’s just me, because I didn’t find myself “ROFLING” after looking at this.
Girl’s boyfriend *accidentally* cooks her laptop in the oven – 5,157 Diggs
Another amazing story. I guess stupidity is more important than a well researched article for example. This girl lives in a high crime area, so she keeps her laptop in the oven. Yes, an oven. I hope you marked that down, as I know I did. Ever since I read this, I decided it be a great place to keep my wallet, house key, and birth certificate. If her laptop can survive when he boyfriend burns the shit out of it, I guess all my goods can too!
CRASH IE6 with one line of code – 2,613 Diggs
Check out this beauty. One piece of code gets IE6 to crash! That one really threw me for a loop. Really, I didn’t know that any code existed that wouldn’t crash IE / cause it display wrong / not display at all / etc. I thought that other people would realize the same thing, but apparently not, as close to 3,000 people found this interesting enough to make the frontpage of Digg.
What’s Better than Mouseovers? How About Scrollovers – 2,760 Diggs
Want a new way to annoy your visitors? Get scrollovers, the modern way to make your links do flips when you hover over them! My favorite part of all this is that a lot of the comments are all negative, but yet people still kept digging away. Bad publicity rules!
I’ve also noticed that many Digg users are deeply into lists. (But will this one get any love – probably not). Smashing Magazine, which very well could be called ListMAG, gets thousands of diggs on almost everything they publish, which very frequently, is a list of some sort. Not that I’m bashing any of their lists, as some of them are extremely helpful and many of them have included us, but a list is still just a list. We’ve listed some things too, but to no avail.
Then there are the digg users with a sense of humor. You know, the ones that laughed historically at that funny digg 90’s picture above. I’ve tried the “humor” route, and even that didn’t succeed all too well. I guess I won’t be doing stand up any time soon.
Occasionally, you get an article that shows the author really knows what their talking about. More often then not, people enjoy this, and show their appreciation. In our case, all of our authors (with the exception of myself probably) have a pretty damn good understanding of what they’re saying. Take, for example, and extremely large, full-length article series on building a WordPress plugin. With the amount of WordPress users out there, you probably would have figured this baby would have rocketed to the Digg top five in less than 24 hours. We came pretty close to reaching the top five alright, with a record shattering 4 diggs.
And, it appears that even when we take the serious / commentary type route, we still get shut out. It appears that digg really shows no love for us.
Is the World Over?
No, of course not. Digg is nothing more than a burst of traffic and a status symbol, and for any one of our posts to ever make the front page, it’d be like us playing the part of Ronald McDonald and robbing the crown right off the BK King’s head. It is a bit disappointing, considering if you found any of our best articles anywhere else, say Vitamin, they would have been crowned with front page status a long time ago. Instead, we walk down the red carpet alongside the other stars, but the reporters and paparazzi ignore us. We’re okay with that, because hopefully, sometime soon, we’ll be due to break out – and if this is the article that does it – well it’s about damn time.
What this post just did
If you just read this post, than I can congratulate myself for a mission accomplished. And more importantly, if this is the post that finally gets a lot of diggs, it just pointed out a few prime articles – that are all fairly new – for people to look into. For first time visitors, this is a key way to try and get them to stay, and “dig” (no pun intended) further into the site. I played it pretty sneakily (I don’t really think that’s a word), by dropping in in-site links mixed with some random sarcasm and a whole lot of pointlessness (another non-word?) to [hopefully] keep people interested and entertained. It contains a mixture of what everyone seems to love on digg – comedy, a partial list, lots of links, and even an image. That makes for one hell of a complete article, ehh? For regular readers, hopefully you didn’t find this post too annoying. Actually, I hope it got you to laugh (at least once would have been nice). All in all, the main goal of this commentary post was to make it to the front of digg, and allow our other, actual articles to enjoy the same benefits, and get the same kind of exposure they deserve to have.
Disclaimer: Digg doesn’t matter all that much too me ;).