Author: Georg Portenkirchner

MischMasch 2009-08-03

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Happy Cog and Airbag Industries, two important web design firms, announced the merger of the two companies. The resulting company Happy Cog will continue to work on client services, web design and development. Moreover Happy Cog will continue publishing A List Apart and organising design conference An Event Apart. (Via Happy Cog News and Jeffrey Zeldman)

Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors. As the two companies become rivals in several businesses there are more potential conflicts of interest. (Via Apple Press Release and Macworld)

Design Observer, a weblog focusing on writings about design and visual culture, announced its makeover. The new Design Observer Group serves four channels: Observatory (design essays), Change Observer (design for social innovation), Places (essays from the Places magazine) and Observer Media (audio and video). (Via Observatory: Design Observer)

TheTWiT Netcast Network started a new show called This Week in Google. Leo Laporte, Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, journalist Jeff Jarvis and guests talk about latest Google-related news and cloud computing.

Twitter starts blocking bad URLs. Unfortunately shortened malicious links are not identified. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

NewsGator announced Google Reader syncing for the new version of NetNewsWire. Moreover a send to Instapaper feature was added. NewsGator will stop NewsGator Online and some other services. The company recomends migrating to Google Reader before the end of August. (Via NewsGator Daily Blog)

What is new with portenkirchner.net

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It’s been more than a year since I decieded to leave my web site without any CSS after taking part in the CSS Naked Day. The idea was that maybe an unstyled web site would motivate me to work on a redesign. I had several ideas for portenkirchner.net, but mostly I did not have the time to work on it. When I had time, I prefered to do other things.

Every time I wrote a blog entry, what did not happen that often, I promised myself to begin with the redesign. Google Analytics tells me that although I don’t post very often, still visitors come to my site. And it is not very friendly of me to welcome them with a stripped down layout.

So finally I have updated my WordPress and bbPRess installations and decided to use a free WordPress theme again. After some time of search I remembered Alex King‘s Carrington Blog theme. When looking for it I stumbled upon Carrington Text, what is the theme for this web site for the time being. Carrington Text is a simple, text-only two colume theme using some jQuery.

In the near future I want to play around with this site again. I have a list of plugins I want to try out and want to fiddle about with the layout. I gathered several ideas and plans for portenkirchner.net and it’s design. The hard thing will be to bring them together to become the new look for portenkirchner.net.

MischMasch 2009-05-11

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German based business networking site XING announced their first two OpenSocial applications. XING News lets you discover news filtered by your XING network. Ask XING lets you ask questions and get answers. More applications by XING and by several partners will follow. XING News and Ask XING will will distribute virally on XING. (Via net.work.xing

270 participants took part in Yahoo!’s second Open Hack Day in London, submitting 51 hacks. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google is the title of a New York Times article on data-driven design, citing Douglas Bowman and other designers. (Via Doug Bowman (stop) on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-04-16

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Jon Hicks has a new and nice design for his journal / hicksdesign. As he says it is still work in progress

YIID, the service that helps you build a social identity, released some new features including activity streams for yourself and for your friends and one click registration in Communipedia.

Finally Apple started selling and renting movies in the German iTunes Store.

Taking Your Talent to the Web by Jeffrey Zeldman is now a free downloadable book. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman (zeldman) on Twitter)

MischMasch 2009-03-24

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Twitter celebrated it’s third birthday. Singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson made a song about Twitter that can be downloaded. There is a funny video on Current called Twouble with Twitters. OAuth appears in the API Wiki and the Firefox addon TwitterBar and Twitter directory WeFollow already use it. Twitter changed the title for the personal pages from Twitter / name to name (user name) on Twitter.

Douglas Bowman left Google and wrote a blog post about his experinces as Lead Visual Designer. Graham Jenkin wrote about how he sees design work at Google. Anne K. Halsall, another designer, explains her reasons why she has left Google.

Last.fm announced that subscription will be required to listen to Last.fm Radio execpt for USA, Canada and Germany. (Via Last.fm – the Blog)

Jonathan Snook will be leaving the life of freelance and will start working at Squarespace. (Via Snook.ca)

MischMasch 2009-03-17

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Twitter‘s API Lead Alex Payne sent out a tweet about OAuth beta being now open to all developers. (Via Twitter / Alex Payne)

Flickr has a new people-picker for FlickrMail and contact list page, that let’s you find someone faster. (Via Flickr Blog)

The WaSP InterAct Curriculum is an interesting and nice designed curriculum based upon web standards and best practices.

Google Chrome got updated and has some new features. It is 25% faster and has form autofill, full page zoom, autoscroll and tabs are dragable. (Via Google Chrome Blog)

MischMasch 2009-03-16

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Yahoo! released Friends on Fire, a Fire Eagle application for Facebook that lets you share your location with your friends. (Via Yodel Anecdotal)

WeFollow is a new, nice designed Twitter directory by Kevin Rose. (Via Twitter / Heiko Hebig)

Seesmic announced Seesmic for Facebook, an Adobe Air Facebook desktop client. Beside status updates it will support pictures and videos soon. Seesmic’s popular Twitter client twhirl will have Facebook support integrated in future. (Via Seesmic Blog)

After leaving FastCompany TV Robert Scoble‘s new project will be Building 43, a content and social networking community. (Via TechCrunch)

socialmedian, a social news service acquired by XING in December 2008, uses now Facebook Connect to let people login and participate on socialmedian. (Via socialmedian Blog)

Google Quick Search Box can now update your Twitter status. There is an instruction how to tweet on the Google Code site for Google Quick Search. (Via Twitter / steverubel)

MischMasch 2009-01-15

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Carol Bartz was appointed as new CEO of Yahoo!. (Via Yahoo! Press Release)

Apple has approved third party web browsers for the iPhone. (Via Mac Rumors)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave of absence until June, because health-related issues are more complex than he thought. Meanwhile Tim Cook will be responsible for Apple’s day to day operation. The company’s shares had dropped 7.8 percent after the announcement. (Via NYTimes.com)

Web design company Blueflavor launched 97bottles. It is a community site that lets you add, review and get to know different types of beer. It is for the ones who drink beer what is Corkd for wine lovers. 97bottles is very nice designed and supports OpenID. Would be nice if microformats would be supported too.

YouTube disables audio tracks that have not been authorized. It seems there will be a lot of silent movies like this one. (Via Twitter / Christian Heilmann)

Flickr launched the nearby-feature. For photos with geotags it is possible to see other photos that have been taken nearby this location. Just click on map link in the Additional Information section of a photograph, then click on the “See nearby photos and videos”-link on the bottom of the pop-up layer to see something like this. You can filter by whom and when the photos were taken. (Via Twitter / Dunstan Orchard)

Google is not only cutting stuff, but Google Catalog Search will be discontinued, Jaiku will be release as open source, dodgeball.com will be discontinued, developement on Google Notebook will stop and uploads to Google Video will no longe be allowed. (Via Search Engine Land, Inside Google Book Search, Jaikido Blog, Google Code Blog, Google Notebook Blog)

MischMasch 2009-01-13

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Qype CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher announced Stephen Taylor as his successor. Stephen Taylor worked for Yahoo! Europe and his experience will help social review site Qype to grow and expand and to compete against Yelp that launched Yelp UK last week. (Via Qype Vibes)

Google hired Joshua Schachter, who created the social bookmarking service Delicious and left Yahoo! some months ago. (Via ReadWriteWeb)

Think Vitamin, a site offering articles, interviews, reviews and more web related things, has a new layout and even a RSS feed. Think Vitamin is a produced by Carsonified. (Via Twitter / Brian Suda)

Full articles of Scroll Magazine number 1 are avaible online now. Scroll is a print, PDF and online magazine for web professionals by Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp and designed by Veerle Pieters.