RSS has changed the way we interact and find information on the web. If you are a developer, designer, or web entrepreneur its worth having access to good feeds. They help to understand whats hot, whats not and where the industry is heading. Below I have put together anything but a concise list of my favorite RSS feeds. These are just a few that I have subscribed to and found to be extremely useful, if your looking for tech talk or just some really great web inspiration why not check them out;

I hope that they will be as useful to you are they are to me!

I have been playing around with a firefox add-on called ubiquity just lately. Its been a lot of fun, and there has been a lot of noise over it in the web community.

What Is Ubiquity

The basic premise of ubiquity is to make simple tasks less laborious. The approach stems from something that google has been doing for some time already. if you have ever tried typing map: and then a postcode or address in google bar you will have found that google instantly knows that you are wanting to view a map of a location. Well ubiquity allows you to do this without even needing to open a new tab. by bringing up the ubiquity HUD you have a wealth of possibilities at your fingertips.

Commands

There are a wealth of commands available to you when you install ubiquity, for example:

• translate almost any language
• look up currency conversion
• check IMDB for your an actor/actress
• display maps of location
• minimize URL’s with tiny URL
• get email contact information from your address book

and trust me the list does go on. The real beatuy of ubiquity however lies in the developers abaility to write and be credited for plugins, If you cant interact with a current API, just write a plugin to do it, all the codiung can be done in javascript so you dont even need to learn any complicated coding langauges.

The Down Side

The only real downside to Ubiquitous in my mind is that it feels a bit too geared towards online applications run by google Now I have nothing against google, I think they have done some truly amazing things. But I cant help but feel you wont be able to take full advantage of the ubiquitous features unless you are using services such as googlemail and have access to google accounts.

Ubiquitous does also have bugs, quite a few infact, but thats what you would expect from an alpha release, but with all the support surrounding it I think these will be ironed out in no time and I can see a rapid uptake in the number of people using the service in the near future. Why not try it out and see for yourself.

I recently came across another ‘new startup’ whilst on my stumble. twitblogs a new media mash up, taking the of blogging and twittering and mashing them together. To produce, well…. a short blog, or a long twitter.

I have to be honest from my ‘mock – up’ above you can see that I am not a massive fan of this idea. My approach to this kind of thing is don’t reinvent the wheel, and definitely don’t try and  fix something that’s not broken. What worried me most about this site is that it had access to all my account info via the API, and I could log into this service even tho I had not signed up with twitblogs.

Unfortunately like so many new start ups out there twitblogs has its heart in the right place, but its just not offering something thats worth using. Twitter is great for micro blogging, and wordpress is great for blogging, anything in between is just over kill!

My content management system has been my big project at the moment, Its nearly finished, I’m hoping to have it polished and ready for demonstration on the next 2 months. It has taught me a lot of lessons, most of them the hard way, about the way in which to arrange and organize files and folders in the directory structure. Part of the reason the project has taken so long is because I have listened to my after thoughts and taken time to go back and be meticulous in my architecture. As this is what will pay dividends in my ability to maintain and modify the code in future as the system grows.

Whilst I have been on this voyage of self discovery I have found a couple of ways to better organize my information. Im not saying this is the “right way”, each to their own. This is just a method that works well for me and saves over, or under complicating things.

Site Structure

Usually when I design a website I break down the initial folders like so:

This works fine when working on small project where no more than a few pages are required but my new project has meant I have introduced a few new featured into the mix. The idea is to basically have a ‘front’ and ‘back’ end view. So this means that I can use the resources folder for both, saving on code duplication. Let me show you what I mean.

By suffixing the files with what they are, for example classes being called “class.” means that you can keep all your classes together in the folder, this same principle can be applied to absolutely anything else if you want. This is also as great as it means that you dont need to make unnecessary extra folder directories to segregate your code.

I realize to a lot of programmers and developers this would be second nature, but for the not so web savvy this is a simple effective technique to find your way around your site architecture quickly and easily. Happy Coding.

I always keep websites that motivate me under a tag called inspiration, on my delicious. This is a roundup of websites I have come accross so far this year that really have share that sentiment. They are a collection of the best in design, layout and color. I hope they will help motivate and inspire you in your next big web project.

These websites have so much going on I could spend all day trying to critique them. I think instead I would rather sit back and admire what has been achieved here. I hope you share my feeling towards this roundup.

This is a bit off topic but its something that I feel I need to get off my mind. Let me ask you a question. When was the last time, you heard a good bit of news? be it on TV, radio or online. I honestly don’t think I can recall one single political good bit of news. Even with President Obama the first black American President, a land mark event and all the press could do was shroud the entire event with the misery of the global recession, and impending potential doom which the president will face.

I am not the first to describe fatigue that this running commentary is causing. There is no escaping the severity of it all, but to have it thrust into your face every waking second of every day can be all too much. I have however come to notice a paradox in these times. Its as if consumerist marketing has taken the place of good news in modern society, as though it has become the role of the press to portray a pessimistic outlook on the world, with only consumer driven advertising to light a tiny beacon of hope and prosperity into our selfish environmentally unfriendly lives, as through we can just purchase some happiness.

The fallacy of this attitude towards society is that its this very thinking that got us into this mess. If everyone’s aspirations are to be wealthy and have expensive purchases immediately, it only ever stood to reason that massive debut would be accumulated. In truth this all boils down to greed, this instant gratification consumer driven society that has become accepted has been our very undoing. To be honest I’m not even sure how one would go about fixing it. The Tories describe Britain’s ‘broken society’, focusing on the lack of respect and lawlessness of today’s youth, but I think the problem is far more systemic, our society is rotten right to its very core, morals, standards and our very outlook on life have become so dim that its simply a natural conclusion to turn to anarchy.

I hope this post hasn’t put to much of a downer on whoever comes to read it. My advice.. do as the great man ‘Chris Akabusi’ once said, “be the change you wish to see around you!”