Pixelated Opinions

The Markup Giveaway

Posted on the 12th of August, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyuElP_

Update: The giveaway has now ended. Congrats to Chris Stewart who won!

As you may know, I recently launched a couple of icon sets as a personal project. I then set about plugging the link at every opportunity but to save my followers from any more of the same, I thought I would do something to not only help me with traffic but to help you too.

The idea came to me whilst thinking of something I could offer in return for folks tweeting a link to my icons. I don’t have spare money to buy gifts for people but I do have time and a keen eye for markup. So, here’s the general idea - you would tweet a certain message containing a link to my icons and back to here as well as be following me and I would pick somebody at random after a week to receive some web development as a gift and a thank you.

The Terms

• As mentioned above you must be following me, at least for during the competition period. 
• You must tweet the message exactly as it is below.

In terms of markup, here’s what I mean and what I’ll be giving away. The chosen winner would provide a design, PSD preferred and I would mark that up into clean HTML & CSS. The design should be finished when you hand over the file(s) to me and I will develop up to 5 pages for the lucky winner. The deliverables will be a ZIP containing your HTML, CSS, images files and JS if applicable.

The closing time will be 9am on Friday August 20th and the winner will be announced by 5pm on the same day.

The Message

So here’s what you need to tweet once you’re following me:

Check out @davemcnally’s free icons, http://j.mp/a2p9bF and win some web development: http://tumblr.com/xcyflo326

And that’s about it. So good luck, pass it on and let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

Add Twitter Profiles To Your iPhone Contacts

Posted on the 24th of June, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyhaXEN

I posted a note about this on Twitter and it seems I wasn’t the only one who had not seen it before. My instructions weren’t too clear either as I only had 140 characters at a time. Basically, I noticed an option to add Twitter profile information to your iPhone contacts and it can be done a couple of ways.

The first of those is through the Twitter iPhone app. Look up the profile you wish to add to a contact and you should have a screen similar to this:

Tapping the contact card icon in the top right will take you to the following info screen:

You can then tap ‘Create New Contact’ or ‘Add to Existing Contact’ which will bring up your iPhone contacts. You would then choose the corresponding contact if one already exists and there you go. Their Twitter username along with their avatar will now be visible on the contact screen for that person:

The benefit of this technique is that tapping the Twitter username on a contact like that would open up their Twitter profile within the Twitter app. A possible downside of this though, is that it will also pull in their Twitter ‘short bio’ information too and add that as a note.

The other method of adding the information just involves adding a label to the URL field when editing a contact. You want to choose to edit a contact, then tap the label on the URL field. This will take you to the following page:

You can then tap ‘twitter’ at the bottom if it exists or choose ‘Add Custom Label’ and enter it there. After that, you want to add the Twitter username into the URL field. You should use the following convention so that it links the profile with the Twitter app and will open it when tapped:

“twitter:@yourtwitterusernamehere”

Enter that into the URL field and save your contact. The info will now link to the Twitter app but note that doing it manually, you won’t have their avatar or bio pulled in.

That’s about it. A nice, simple feature that it seems not everybody knows about!

My Take On Privacy - AKA The Facebook Post

Posted on the 01st of June, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyc_ZUN

Recently, it seems to be pretty popular to quit Facebook. Their privacy settings were too complicated for some people and subsequently, they never bothered changing them. The problem there is that Facebook naturally wants your data to be public. The more public you are, the more money they can make from you.

This is a bigger problem than just Facebook though. Quitting there won’t help you elsewhere. I think it’s something that a lot of people overlook when posting photos, videos and bits of text online - myself included. More and more location based apps and services are being used and others are already pointing out the dangers of being too specific when sharing your details with strangers.

Let’s not forget, if your information is online and not explicitly private, random strangers can and probably will come across it. Whether or not their intentions are malicious is beside the point - the fact that they found it should be something you’re thinking about when posting content online.

I’m fairly open with my online activities but have recently tightened up some of my settings such as having certain content private that just doesn’t need to be shared. When posting something publicly, you may not be handing out a link actively but that publish button is doing it for you.

My Follow Yearly Decision

Posted on the 14th of May, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyZhlwk

Earlier on, I recommended a group of people to follow on Twitter. This is typical and happens mostly on each Friday of the week.

The difference with my recommendation is that it was for the year, not the week.

At first glance, this may seem like a long time to limit my recommendations to, especially based on the immediacy of Twitter but my choices were not based on a weeks worth of content. Publishing a list of names for other people to follow isn’t something I take too lightly and so picking people weekly seems pretty pointless. Somebody could post a couple of decent links one week and a load of useless rants the next - Not something I want to endorse to my followers.

Basically, it takes a while to build up a relationship with people and it’s only those people I would recommend to others. I have plenty of acquaintances online but only a few that I would refer to as ‘friends’.

That list is a selection of the few.

Calling All Tumblr Users - Well, Not All Of You

Posted on the 21st of April, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyW3BR4

I’ve not set up cross posting to Twitter and Facebook so this should be showing up in those places. That said, if I’m going to start using the platform more, I think I should follow some other users and see how each of you are using it.

So, send me your Tumblr links! It will be easiest if you just @ or DM me on Twitter but feel free to email them or send on Facebook too if you must.