Working name for new project i've been working on.

Here are the links. I'm working on a website - and here are links that have helped me. I'll leave the raw urls so you can see what sites their linking to for now I will be updating, enjoy.

Entrepreneurship

The Art of Bootstrapping - He may not have done great with his Trumours venture but there are words of wisdom here.

The Lean Startup - I read good articles about internet startups for inspiration and to get me in the mood as much as I read them for there tips and lessons to take away.

Bootstrap to Retain Control - Ignoring the cheesy photo, the 8 points are actually good to take away from this page.

User Experience

Eyetrack 2004 - Findings from software tracking users eyes looking at websites.

Sign Up Form Design Patterns

Sign Up Form Design Patterns Part 2 - Ok these two mostly a survey of signup forms, what they contain, how they are displayed. To me the value here is showing me what can be done, and pointing out all the elements to consider in a signup form

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter User Guide - It really is useful

Simple jQuery with CodeIgniter Part 1 - Great simple video tutorials from a fellow Brit 

Simple jQuery with CodeIgniter Part 2 Simple jQuery with CodeIgniter Part 3 Simple jQuery with CodeIgniter Part 4 CodeIgniter Login Tutorial - CodeIgniter from scratch, hour long, login / signup video tutorial working with session.

CodeIgniter, jQuery and JSON

Outsourcing

elance.com - A great site to use but can be expensive, also watch out for the freelancers requesting 4x what the job would cost.

rentacoder.com - Horrible, horrible site but I can find value here.

It's a year and half old now, but it's a great speaker taking us back to the basics on creating a profitable internet startup. I think I'm going to watch this every morning.

The speaker is David Heinemeier Hansson; grew up in Denmark, moved to USA in 2005; creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails, partner at 37signals - you can follow him at @dhh.

Big up everyone undertaking measurable New Year’s resolutions. Here's mine:

Completing degree - Dissertation, Major Project (wikidtutorials.com).

Entrepreneurship. Doing this properly now, just putting stuff out there, not waiting for it to be perfect / full of features, just something out there that I can work on and grow is the route now. I’ll be continually developing and working on it. I have ideas floating around all time, but I’m going to concentrate on one (for now).

@jon once posted the saying: "Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't." I think of that phrase a lot.

So from now on; more doing. I don’t wont this blog just to be about talking, researching, ideas, rhetoric. I've just escrowed money for the first bit of coding on a new site now. Godspeed people.

I love logos.

Here are some lovely sites to appreciate them.

Brand New Hosts ‘opinions on corporate and identity work’. Regularly updated posts containing before and after pictures of a brands logo, some background info on the company / brand and some great comments from the readership.

Identity Works Acting as a nice directory of big brand changes, keeping track of many iterations. Contains indepth background info and analysis of the branding.

Logo Design Love Again features logo changes, good in-depth analysis, occasional design tips and offers books of logos to buy (which actually look tasty)

I recently had to do another presentation and pitch for university. I wanted my presentation to be good so I researched my technique and planned my assault on the audience. The following are key points from my findings.

So I pitched my idea – Wikidtutorials.com (coming soon), I had ten-fifteen minutes to present, with 10 minutes questions. I chose not to read from cards, some people do, and I have in the past, but you just end up reading exactly what is written on the card, making you less flexible and rigid.

Know your subject  

Sounds obvious, but knowing what you are talking about and this will give you confidence in presenting it. Knowing enough is going to help with any unexpected questions thrown at you as well.

Rehearsal  

Probably the reason I had a decent presentation. very effective, run through my presentation once in front of someone else, getting an idea of the time, questions that could be brought up. Slept (a little),  ran through the presentation out loud but to myself again, so I see a slide, and I know what to talk about. Yeah I’ve been there thinking I could make it up on the spot before, even if you know the stuff with the pressure in front of people, you'll struggle. Our brains are impressive things; run through the presentation with the slides there a few times, when it comes to the pitch, you see a slide and you'll know what to say (it will also sound less scripted and flow better than reading from something)

Key points 

Keep going over these to yourself, in sentences, so you can get them across well. Think of the important things you want to get across if you only had 1 minute to pitch, then rehearse saying them.

Gestures 

Use hand gestures, they can help you communicate better, make you look and feel more confident, helping the presentation flow better overall. Don’t stand rigid, show some passion for what you are talking about. 

Questions 

Question time at the end can be a scary thought, but it can be enjoyable, its not all critical, they might even like your idea ;) My point here - think of possible questions you may be asked and prepare answers for them 'What makes this project enough work to warrant being a third year project?' was a gem I had. 

The Zone 

The Zone may be a horrible and clichéd phrase but basically it's getting in a good state of mind, watch a film before, watch a scene from a film, listen to music,read some affirmations; anything to get you feeling positive, hyped up, good.

Slides 

Keep them short and sweet, people switch off if they see a lot of text, with 3 sentences maximum people will read. Include images, even if its just some dice to show risk (yeah I done this), but a lot better if relevant. Pictures show more than words, easier to convey info with them. If you want, write all the info you want to show them, then half it, divide by 4, then half it again. I used these slides as a very rough guide for setting out my slides, we all like something to work from.

A presenter I like is yongfook, he adds humour to his presentations and is to the point, this is a presentation of his that helped.   

Books that helped with presenting: The Oxford Union Guide to Successful Public Speaking, 

This post is written upside down (conclusion first) for interest. I’ve switched from Wordpress to Posterous. Posterous is simpler and cleaner than Wordpress. I'm liking the decreased maintenance of posterous. Wordpress has the plugins, the added functionality, but do you need it? For my purposes: no.

Wordpress the juggernaut

Wordpress is a great platform, it has a huge array of plug ins that can make Wordpress do almost everything I’ve created several wordpress blogs, each time having to download the latest version, install, change settings, database name etc. It takes longer to setup than Posterous. You have to upgrade when an platform update comes out, and then check all your plug-ins are still working with the upgrade. Wordpress has great functionality but I'm finding through using posterous; much of it is functionality i don’t need, and just bloats the process of and blogging.

Posterous the lightweight newcomer

Posterous is a hosted service (everything is stored the company’s end), meaning less stuff for the user to manage. It’s minimal and looks good out of the box; you don’t have to search for a custom theme to download and install. Emailing a post is very straightforward, send a message to post@posterous.com and seconds later it's a post on your site I like the saving of drafts with Wordpress, but this can be done with saving a draft email for posterous.

A user contributed gig review site built in php and using the last.fm API. This was for a university assignment and I went with a simple, clean visual style.

     

Click here to download:

urgigs_Website.zip (161 KB)

Tutorials everyone can use, improve and update quickly and easily