Month: December 2005

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Happy Birthday Natalie!

Today is my daughter Natalie’s 3rd birthday, last night we had a party and invited a few people over. Here’s a few photo highlights:

One happy Snow White...
Natalie was (and still is!) L O V I N G this dress! She really wanted to go to bed with it on, but I managed to persuade her it wasn’t a good idea!

Angels gotta eat...

Even Angels gotta eat! I think this is her ‘grumpy’ face, another Snow White vertically challenged character reference.

Ooh, candles!
Cake! Pink! Just as she requested! (‘Happy’)

Cinderella dress
Ooh, a Cinderella dress too! There were more costume changes than a Christmas pantomime!

Jemima, Natalie and Jay
A group shot: Jemima, Natalie and Jay. You can see Jay ‘helping’ Natalie open a present by operating her hand for her!

Thank you to everyone who bought Natalie a gift, she was deluged with pressies and had a great party!

~Rick

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What’s in a name?

I’ve just been doing some work revamping my blogging app and I’ve decided that I’d like to give it a name and brand it. So, what to call it? There’s so many applications out there, so many websites, how do you come up with a good name?

After doing a bit of googling for names I found this interesting article over on the Firewheel Design site, ‘Four Concentric Circles of a Web 2.0 Name‘.
Josh from Firewheel has come up with four categories of names used in applications:

  1. The Literal Name (DropSend, Meetup etc…)
  2. The Metaphor (Mint, Digg, Flock etc…)
  3. The Pseudo Abstract (Del.icio.us, Flickr, Odeo etc…)
  4. The Cab Calloway (Squidoo, Meebo, Rojo etc…)

It’s an interesting article, so it got me to thinking about names, in this particular case it’s for a blogging tool so it needs to ‘say’ something.

A couple of ideas…

A couple of names came to mind:

Blogorrhea:
The word ‘Logorrhea’ is defined in Wikipedia as an “excessive flow of words” and, when used medically, refers to incoherent talkativeness that occurs in certain kinds of mental illness, such as mania.

Examples of logorrhoea might include talking or mumbling monotonously either to others or more likely oneself. This may include the repetition of particular words of phrases, often incoherently.

I actually quite liked this one, but it just sounds a bit too much like ‘diarrhoea’ though. Fair enough as I guess logorrhea is a bit like verbal diarrhoea. So, close but not quite appropriate ;)

Captain’s Blog:
Mmm, what more needs to be said?

This last one was promptly discarded as an idea for obvious reasons! The two names I’m considering are simply, ‘Blurb‘ and ‘Blah‘. I like them because they’re short, simple and are obviously related to writing or speaking, which is what blogging is about I guess. They both fall into the Metaphor circle in Firewheel Design’s article.

Anyone got any other ideas?

I’d be pleased to hear anybody else’s thoughts / suggestions of names. I’ll try and come up with some kind of prize for the best suggestion.

~Rick

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Inspired design?

Sorry, poor title for this blog post! I just wanted to put an evangelistic web post up, by evangelistic in this case I’m meaning for both ‘standards based’ web design and also just good quality design.

If you’re involved in running a church website, or a site for any kind of Christian organisation or are involved with any kind of graphic design etc for church etc then you really should check out the next couple of websites.

The Godbit Project

Firstly, the Godbit Project, the mission statement of this site is:

The purpose of this site is to help the Church catch up with the rest of the world in adherence to standards given by the World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body of best-practices on the Internet. The majority of Christian web design agencies are using outmoded methods of coding to create websites that the rest of the world would scoff at. Basically, they are stuck in the 1990?s.

That kind of says it all really, and it’s why I’m posting it here. A bit of a call for Christians to be at the cutting edge of things. Hey, I know we’re all ‘followers’ but sometimes we gotta lead too! ;) Go checkout the site, there’s some interesting stuff, I hope you’ll ‘catch the fire’ of standards based design.

Church Marketing Sucks

This next site is one I found linked from Godbit.com, ‘Church Marketing Sucks.com‘ has a broader overall focus of marketing, their mission statement says:

Our mission is to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ…

…We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause. But snazzy marketing won’t save this ship, either. It’s not about being perfect, but there’s a better way to communicate. It’s authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell.

A lot of food for thought here whether you’re a designer, editor, writer, blogger, publisher, PR dude, whatever. Go check out the site, be challenged, surprised and inspired.

Oh yeah, thanks to those who visited this site recently after visiting Alyn’s blog, glad you could make it!

~Rick