I’m very pleased to share version 2.5 of Social with you. Brought to you by our good friends at MailChimp (see their blog post), Social is a…
Fellow Colorado web geeks, I made you a t-shirt. The code that comprises the white stripe is a full, working HTML page with canvas code that draws…
It’s been very interesting to me to see how some folks are re-evaluating their work/life balance in the wake of reading Isaacson’s Steve…
I’ve already professed my love for Paper1, and one of my primary usages is for wireframing UX models. I used it for a few of the improvments we added in Social 2.5, and thought it might be fun to share a couple of them here. One of the biggest changes we made was an overhaul…
I’ve got an idea… I love it when I get a note like this from internet superhero Dave Pell. It normally means I’m going to get a chance to help build something I’m going to love. Our latest project together is Delivereads. You may have read about it already on Daring Fireball, Gizmodo or the…
When people ask me what we do at Crowd Favorite, I tell them “we build cool stuff on the web”. One of the latest examples of this is FantasyGrinder: an application and web service that creates fun, meaningful game recaps from weekly fantasy sports matchups. The system is pretty sophisticated. It’s a web application that…
RedMonk has launched their first product: RedMonk Analytics. The basic premise is to use the data inherent in the activity on the RedMonk web properties to expose interesting trends. Read all about it in Steve’s blog post. As Steve says, this is a project that is only going to get more interesting with time. One…
MailChimp has released a great new WordPress plugin: Analytics360°. This plugin creates a reporting dashboard for your MailChimp and Google Analytics right within your WordPress admin interface. Take a look at the post about the plugin on MailChimp’s blog, which includes a very cool video. It’s pretty slick, and useful – though I may be…
Steve O’Grady of RedMonk announced the Progressive License WordPress plugin at WordCamp San Francisco. Progressive License is similar to other plugins that allow you to easily put a license on your content, but it brings a little twist: the ability to change the license applied to the content as the content ages. Steve explains: In…
JabberWerx AJAX has hit the streets! JabberWerx AJAX is a set of thin client JavaScript libraries that can be easily embedded into existing web sites and web applications to add rich push functionality (chat, live content updates, etc.) to them. There are easy to drop in bits for one to one chat (tabbed), group chat…
There’s a new and improved Lijit WordPress plugin available for download. This version is one that my company, Crowd Favorite, had the pleasure of helping build. The new plugin makes it easy for you to enable Lijit search from the default WordPress search box, or you can add in the full Lijit widget wijit if…
Addictomatic is sporting a shiny new suit today. The overall look has been updated with a great new design from Bryan Bell, and a number of little features have been added and minor tweaks made since the initial launch. I’ve got a few more screenshots here, but it’s a lot more fun to just go…
PhoneFactor is a WordPress plugin that provides an additional layer of security when logging in to your WordPress site. It’s a pretty cool system. When you log in to your WordPress blog with PhoneFactor enabled, you receive a phone call asking you to press # to authorize. When you do so, you are logged in.…
Last fall Crowd Favorite had the opportunity to work with OpenedHand1 to redesign their web site. Their site is powered by WordPress and we did the design and created some custom theme features for them. This was a fairly straightforward build. We created several different designs, went through a few revisions, detailed the custom features…
Over the last few months, Crowd Favorite has had the privilege of working with Dave Pell to create a new search service: Addictomatic Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or…
Last fall, Crowd Favorite had the opportunity to build a WordPress plugin for VodPod. This was a fun project. We used the VodPod API and built some shortcodes and template tags for WordPress that make it easy to put a VodPod video player into a WordPress post, page or theme. The VodPod team then combined…
Over the last couple of weeks we at Crowd Favorite have had the pleasure of working with the good folks at TechCrunch to help get the new CrunchGear site design up and running (read about it on CrunchGear and TechCrunch). The designers at ACS did the majority of the new design work1, then we helped…
Over the last few months Crowd Favorite has had the opportunity to work with some great people at Yahoo! to create a rather unique WordPress plugin: Yahoo! Shortcuts. This is probably the most ambitious plugin I’ve helped build, and I think it will be really useful for a number of bloggers out there. Basically it…
I’m very pleased to announce that ShareThis 2.0 is now available! This new version has a ton of great features, including: A new WordPress plugin. WordPress users can download the new plugin here. Support for non-WordPress platforms. This was by far the #1 requested feature, and you can use the ShareThis widget for other blogging…
Crowd Favorite has had the opportunity to work with Answers.com this fall on AnswerLinks, a new WordPress plugin. Answerlinks talks to an API at Answers.com and auto-suggests links to definitions and more on Answers.com for terms in your blog post. Then you can choose to add the links you want; very simple and easy. After…
One of the challenges of renaming King Design to Crowd Favorite was how exactly to handle transitioning from kingdesign.net to the new crowdfavorite.net web site. I think I’ve come up with a reasonable solution that covers both people and search engines. It was important to me not to create a jarring or confusing experience for…
Yesterday evening All Things Digital, a new home for Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and John Paczkowski was unleashed on the internet. I’ve been working on this for the past month and a half, and it’s been a real whirlwind project. When we got the contract to build the site using WordPress, we were warned that…
The WordPress category system does a great job for most people, however if you have over 1200 categories like Dave Powers’ New Music Nation web site, the standard admin screens for WordPress categories just aren’t going to cut it for you. Dave got in touch with me and explained the problems he was having. They…
Crossing the line between favors and actually doing paid contract work for a friend can be tough decision. Once money and deliverables get involved, it can definitely introduce new issues and points of contention to your friendship. Before you agree to do the work, you better be darn sure you can deliver. Steve O’Grady and…
Note: This is the first in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. So now that the new site is live and I’ve had a chance to fix most of the re-launch related bugs, it’s time to share a little about the process that went into building this version of the site.…
My last project for Eric was building a system for him to run a weekly photo competition on Wetpixel.com. This turned out to be a bit larger project than we thought, but we also added a bit more to the system than we’d originally planned. Using the admin interface, Eric and the other Wetpixel admins…
A few weeks ago I helped Eric convert wetpixel.com from a PostNuke/phpBB driven site to an Expression Engine (EE)/Invision Power Board (IPB) driven site. Wetpixel is a community web site for underwater digital photographers, The new site is now live, feel free to go poke around then come back to read the rest. Welcome back.…
I’m very pleased with the new King Design web site – this is a good thing since I’ve been working on it for months now. Visually, I believe it accomplishes my twin goals of simple professionalism and ease of use/navigation. There are a ton of new systems in place on the new site, so please…