Smallgoodblog
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web design

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Aug 5 / 7:23am

Simple web placeholders // quick, elegant, brilliant

Could the concept be any simpler? If you're a designer / editor / web developer / whoever and need to place a grey box style placeholder on a web page, simply enter the source as placehold.it followed by the dimensions of the image. For example, enter "http://placehold.it/450x300" and you get the image above. Go on, try it in your browser bar now ...

Filed under  //  web design   web development  

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Jun 10 / 1:03am

A new blog! // Using Posterous

At last Smallgoodthing has a blog. (Cleverly sub-branded 'Smallgoodblog'. How could we resist?) After thinking about it for such a long time (such questions as 'Do we need a blog?' 'Isn't Twitter enough?' 'How should it look?' 'What platform to use?' etc etc) once the decision was made it came together in literally a morning -- and that's with tweaking the template to include SGT logo and colours. This minor miracle is thanks to the choice of the blogging platform -- Posterous.

I won't go into detail about Posterous (more info at posterous.com) but here's why it makes sense for SGT:

Part of the social networking scene
You can link your Twitter and Facebook accounts (as well as many others including existing blogs) to your Posterous account. That way you only post once and your post is distributed everywhere. Less work, more exposure, more opportunities to connect with people, etc. But that's not to say that Posterous isn't a community in itself: it has a large following and the process of finding and 'following' other blogs is similar to Twitter. And Posterous will accept many types of media and post the media intelligently -- for eg. images will be added to your Flickr account.

Ease of set-up
Literally one email. Send a mail to Posterous with your first blog post and your account is automatically set up and the email is posted. You can log in and tweak things further if you like, but you don't have to. Compare that to our other option -- self-installing WordPress on our own servers -- and there's no real contest.

Caveat: Having said that, it may also be too simple for some. Other blog platforms are more fully featured and have more plug-ins and themes. If you need a self-hosted and fully customisable blog/website then Posterous isn't for you.

Customisable URLs and themes
You can use your own domain or subdomain (as we have) or use the Posterous servers in the yourname.posterous.com format. Customising the themes is simple enough (if you know HTML and CSS). This made it possible to link, through the navigation, the blog (at blog.smallgoodthing.net) with our main website (at smallgoodthing.net) so that the user doesn't notice that they're jumping from one service to another and back again.

There's more (the inclusion of Typekit to open up typographic possibilities is pretty exciting) but I'll come back to some of these in later posts. For the moment it's just great to have this blog up and running, and to know that posting an entry needn't be a large investment of time -- just dashing off a quick email.

Filed under  //  blogging   posterous   web design   web development   wordpress  

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