blogs

  • 24 Ways is back

    Drew McLellan's excellent 24 Ways has just started its 2007 run. Expect a great web design tip/tutorial daily for the next 24 days.

    Day 1: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

  • Extreme Makeover blog edition

    seeing as how Extreme Makeover won't answer my letters any more and refuse to even entertain the thought of making me look like George Clooney (apparently there "isn't enough money in the world"), I decided to perform an Extreme Makeover on my blog instead.

    It's still very much a work in progress, but I like how it is looking do far. I am using as few graphic elements as possible (so far, an rss icon and a form background image), and have based the layout on a modified version of Blueprint 0.5, which is an older version of a really cool css framework that I have been playing with recently. There is a bit of Jquery, and I am pulling my thoughtleader posts in through a filtered Yahoo Pipes JSON feed. My "Side Notes" column on the whole page is my 5 most recent posts tagged "Notes" on Delicious, and is also pulled in via JSON

    Speaking of Yahoo Pipes, it really is a useful tool. I built all sorts of feeds like my taking my last.fm recently listened albums and marry that up with album art and add referral links to it. In the end it cluttered up my blog, but I will probably find a way to include that all on here sooner or later.

    My new blog theme, showing the 10 column grid layout

    As I mentioned I used a modified version of Blueprint for my layout, and ended up using a 10 column grid. This image shows how the grid works. The whole blog runs on Community Server 2007, which frankly is way too large for a single blog. I hope to convert this blog to Telligent's new CMS, Graffiti, when it is finally released. Nervertheless, Telligent have done a great job with their theming tools (Chameleon), and it was much easier than designing a CS 2.1 skin. IF there is sloppiness in the XHTML and javascript, it is all my fault, and I will clean it up later, I swear probably.

  • Bolton Deventer is my hero

    Ermelo is famous for producing two of South Africa's most famous musicians, Lucky Dube and Jennifer Ferguson. According to Wikipedia it is also known for producing beans, wool, pigs, sunflower seeds, lucerne, sorghum, anthracite and coal. Ermelo's latest well known export is Bolton Deventer - one of my personal heroes, and an all round  good guy. Lately he has been involved in a blogwar with Guy Mclaren who is a less well known SEOxpert from Nelspruit. A few bloggers including Vincent Maher have even questioned whether he exists, which is ironic seeing as Bolton was working his SEO magic when most of these bloggers were still in diapers.

    Bolton Deventer, a while ago

    Bolton first helped me out in the early days of the internet, back when Google was still known as "The Google". We were struggling to get our net-site which promoted the Stellaland Agricultural College Sunday Fete listed on any of the search engines. He quickly pointed out that we didn't have enough sexy images and introduced us to his TEP program (he had not come up with the W part of W-TEP yet).

    Following his advice we placed some racy pictures of our produce on the net-site.

    We don’t get much of these stunning pairs here in Johannesburg

    It worked! Within weeks we were the number one result for "Sunday Fetes" on Inktomi, Altavista and new startup Ask Jeeves. Unfortunately the success of the site went to the committee's heads and petty squabbling and an extra marital affair led to the closure of the net-site a year or two later.

    I would heartily recommend Bolton's services to anyone wanting to know more about the mystery of SEO. He knows his stuff, prices his services fairly and is a humble and down to earth, unlike those big city cowboys who have recently attacked him so unfairly.

    Update - 16 October 2007: Bolton has announced his demise. Farewell Bolton, we will miss you 

  • tags

    Quotes of the Day - People who know their stuff

    Three quotes from my feedreader this morning that struck a chord with me:

    • Jason Fried waxes lyrical  about a new UI change on the iPhone:

      Apple recently posted an iPhone update which, among other things, adds an “iTunes” icon to the iPhone home screen.

      I love where they put it. They didn’t put it where consistency tells you to put it. That would be on the left side. They put it where context tells you to put it. On the right side right above the iPod icon. Even the icon’s arrow points right down to the iPod.

      iPhone: Context over consistency - (37signals)

    • Jason Calacanis ponders the wisdom of building applications inside closed systems:

      Does anyone know a business that has grown from Facebook into a real non-Facebook dependent business yet? I think MySpace has built one third party business in Slide.com right? Oh yeah, and Photobucket which MySpace bought. Building inside closed ecosystems is very, very dangerous.... be careful.

      Random Thoughts over some White Tea with Honey

    • Erik Hersman says there is a lot of value in owning detailed hyperlocal data

      One last point worth mentioning is to try and be the owner of the data that you collect for your application. If you are creating a local shopping/pricing site, then try to create the best database of business information, location and ownership in the area. This data is valuable and can be licensed to others, or made available through an API that brings you more traffic or revenue.

      This point can’t be driven home enough. There is very little data/content on Africa available on the web. Whoever captures and creates a database of that information will have an incredibly lucrative product. By the way, this isn’t always easy to do, but then if it was it would already have been done. .

      3 Localized Ideas for African Web Developers

  • tags

    Sponsored Blogging with Money Talks

    Vincent Maher just launched a new personal finance blog called Money Talks. Normally a new blog would not be newsworthy but what makes this special is that Virgin Money are sponsoring the blog. As far as I know this is the first time that a high profile SA blogger and a major corporation have linked up in this way - hopefully this is an indication that traditional organisations are beginning to understand the concepts behind social media and the value that a reputable blogger like Vincent can bring to a brand.

    The reputable blogger part is important. A lot of companies are building blogs that contain little more than advertorials written by PR shills. Credibility and independence are paramount, and Vincent has the freedom to write about whatever he wants:

    The point of this blog is to provide information about personal finance issues and banking in general in a way that makes sense to people who aren’t accountants.  That’s going to be tough.  I have license to criticize Virgin Money, and very few limits on what I can say as long as it makes sense, is true and, to some degree, is constructive.

    I am not surprised that a progressive company like Virgin Money is breaking new ground like this. They have shaken up the credit card business here with their excellent offering (5% interest on credit balances, really low fees). Congratulations Virgin and Vincent

    Money Talks, with Vincent Maher and Virgin Money


Hi, I'm Jaxon Rice. By day I run a Johannesburg based web company called Soup and by night I am the frontman of the Diesel Whores. This is my personal blog. more...

Previous Posts

Sponsored Blogging with Money Talks
02 Apr 07 | 3,450 Views
Bolton Deventer is my hero
12 Oct 07 | 284 Views
Quotes of the Day - People who know their stuff
02 Oct 07 | 228 Views
Extreme Makeover blog edition
24 Nov 07 | 0 Views
24 Ways is back
01 Dec 07 | 0 Views
24 Ways is back
01 Dec 07 | 0 Comments
Extreme Makeover blog edition
24 Nov 07 | 4 Comments
Bolton Deventer is my hero
12 Oct 07 | 5 Comments
Quotes of the Day - People who know their stuff
02 Oct 07 | 0 Comments
Sponsored Blogging with Money Talks
02 Apr 07 | 4 Comments
Bolton Deventer is my hero
12 Oct 07 | 5 Comments
Extreme Makeover blog edition
24 Nov 07 | 4 Comments
Sponsored Blogging with Money Talks
02 Apr 07 | 4 Comments
Quotes of the Day - People who know their stuff
02 Oct 07 | 0 Comments
24 Ways is back
01 Dec 07 | 0 Comments

Thought Leader

The latest posts from my weekly sporadic column at Thoughtleader.co.za

Side Notes

Interesting finds, articles and other web ephemera