Work on the Omada Design Group site is coming along pretty well. The “Interiors” section is mostly up and running. I’d say that we’re at version 0.6 of the site right now. The Interior Design section needs a little more fleshing out still, and then I can get to work on the Web & Graphic Design section. The Photography section will stay undeveloped until our friend Matt Frise decides what his photo setup will be.
I’m hosting the site with Bluehost, who has some very generous terms. So far their service has been good, but I haven’t had any problems that need solving either! But I mention it because they allow you to host 6 domains on one site. For a mere $10/year, I could be the proud owner of something like mattisacrazygeek.com for my blog. And I could tweak things with infinite power, pleasure, and the like. Muhahaha. So, whaddya think? Should I do it? We’ll see…
We’ll stay on tech-related things here for a moment. One of the joys of Firefox is that is has Extensions. These are better than the toolbars that many people are familiar with in Internet Explorer, especially because they don’t take up half of your screen. No, extensions add little extra bits of ooey-gooey functionality that make me excited. I have more extensions than most people would probably have use for, but here’s a few you should consider of you’re running Firefox and have never heard of Extensions before this.
1. Adblock Plus. The Internet is getting worse and worse for ads all the time. And seriously, there’s some seizure-inducing animated gifs out there. Stop the pain and soul-sucking cesspool that is advertising by installing this extension. It includes a self-updating list of common advertising sites and should keep you relatively ad free on the Web. I cringe in horror every time I use IE because of the ads I get inundated with.
2. Fasterfox. I recently installed this, and it really makes things go quite a bit faster by tweaking some of the ways in which your browser communicates with web servers. The default settings are a happy medium between people on modems and people with high speed, but Fasterfox tweaks things out specifically for those with high speed connections. You’ll notice a difference!
3. Web Developer Toolbar. If you develop web pages, you need this extension. I can’t emphasize enough that you need it. If you don’t develop web pages, move right along.
4. CustomizeGoogle. Do you use Google’s services (Gmail, Search, etc.) every day? I do, and I like adding this extension, especially because it has the option of disabling the ads in google’s search results and Gmail pages.
5. coComment. This extension helps you to easily keep track of comments that you make on other people’s blogs. It’s what enables me to have my “Recent Comments” section in my sidebar.
And the last two are very nice for me, but at the bottom because of their more nerdy nature.
6. Greasemonkey. A deceptively simple concept: it allows you to add scripts to pages of your choosing. This allows for very powerful customization of websites to suit your desires. Even better, people share the scripts that they’ve made over at userscripts.org. For instance, I use a script to help me to tag my posts and link them to del.icio.us, giving me the “Tags” section in my sidebar.
7. Stylish. This is the newest extension I have, and one of my favorite. It allows you to add custom CSS to any website, and it has a corresponding site (like Greasemonkey) called usersstyles.org where people share tweaks and changes they’ve made to the look and feel of various websites. I’m currently using a tweaked style for Google Reader that makes it take up the whole screen, giving you more viewing area for your feeds.
And finally, I’ll recommend that anybody who uses Firefox should use the Qute theme. It changes your Firefox icons to a much more attractive set in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of the original set.
Ah, now if only life was this cutomizable and filled with instant gratification! Wait, maybe this is why the real world is a scary, unpredictable place to me…
4 responses to “This, That, and the Other Thing”
Aside from still recommending that yo check out Opera, I also suggest a faovrite extension of mine: Tamper Data. Tamper Data basically allows you to modify the HTTP headers that your browser tranamits whenever you send data back to a website. It’s really rather diabolical, you can mess with all the forms, all the hidden data.
I like your guys’ website, BTW, but could I suggest a change or two? Under Interior Design->Main you might want to change the first paragraph so that it doesn’t sound like socialist propaganda. “…good design should not be reserved for the welathy alone.” I understand the sentiment you’re getting at, but it really has that ring to it, like it’s something out of a Marxist textbook. Furthermore, it’s probably bad marketing; everyone lkes to save money, but no-one likes to admit that they’re not ‘the wealthy’.
Just for the sake of consistancy, you might to get rid of the ‘Contact’ bullet on the side of that page as well, or have it link to the same page as the ‘Contact’ at the top of the page.
Cheers for the feedback and suggestions Trav. While I don’t think that the first paragraph sounds like propaganda, I do think that it may imply that if you are our client, you are poor. That would probably be called “bad marketing.”
And yeah, consistency on the contact thing needs help. We have the sub pages for now because each section will theoretically have different people involved and it might be better to have more specific contact info there.
On Instant Gratification: I blame the Internet/computers for my complete lack of patience with anything that doesn’t arrive exactly when I plan to have it arrive. =)
Cam: yup.