This whole “I follow you, you follow me” mentality on Twitter has bothered me for a while. Basically, it goes like this: if someone follows you on Twitter, it’s “rude” not to follow them back. This is nonsense. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- Interest Factor – You should follow someone on Twitter because you’re interested in what they have to say. People should follow you on Twitter because they’re interested in what you have to say. Period.
- Spam Factor – A lot of your new followers are probably spammers just waiting for you to take the bait and follow them back. Then they’ll fill up your DM box with teeth whitening offers and phishing links.
- Fake Ego Boost – If one of your followers is also following 50,000 other people, chances are they aren’t paying attention to anything you say. They might use a program like TweetDeck to filter a small list of tweets they actually do want to see. Who cares if someone follows you if they don’t even read what you have to say?
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Every Friday on Twitter, users on Twitter recommend other people to follow using the #followfriday hashtag. This sounds nice in theory, it gives tweeters a chance to suggest and find other cool people to follow.
Unfortunately, some people do it so, so wrong. Do you make these mistakes?
List a bunch of people without any context – This is when you tweet something like the following:
#followfriday @arandomperson @totallyunrelatedperson @someotherguy @someothergal @whocares @nooneispayingattentionanymore
What’s the problem? There’s no context. Noone knows why you’re suggesting these people to follow. Who are they? What do they do?
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First off, let’s get this straight. I LOVE SCREENR, and I would probably pay for it if it wasn’t already free. It is one of my favorite Twitter apps. I used to use Camtasia for making screencasts, and while that’s probably better for more advanced screencasting techniques, I prefer to use Screenr now.
Why? Because most of my videos were less than five minutes anyway (Screenr’s time limit), I never used any of those previously-mentioned advanced screencast techniques available, and most importantly, it’s crazy-easy to use. Just record and upload, nothing too fancy. And it’s all web-based, no software to download.
At the present time, there are no paid options for Screenr. Everything is completely free, but there are some limits. It only makes sense to have some paid features/upgrades to remove these limits. Here are my ideas:
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Say bye bye to the Simply Minimal theme, and say hello to this new hand-drawn-style blog design on Leland.info. It was designed by Keith Donaldson (including all the custom drawings and icons). It also uses the Pointy font, designed by Pointy Design, for the headings rendered through Cufon. I, of course, coded the design into the WordPress theme you now see on the site.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been a fan of hand-drawn-style designs lately. After seeing Keith’s hand-drawn icon set (previously linked) I thought I would contact him about making a minimal hand-drawn-style blog design for Leland.info. I think it turned out pretty nice.
By the way, Keith has also designed a number of themes for Theme Lab, including Cool Stripes, Photabulous, and Bravissimo (XHTML/CSS only).
Maybe if enough people like it, I could create a generic version of the theme for release. Love it or hate it? Let me know in the comments. It’s also a work in progress, you may see me adding/removing different things over time.
And yes, I know the social bookmarking icons below the posts don’t work. Do people actually use those anymore? Clicking social bookmarking icons, not the actual social bookmarking sites.
I recently came across a site called Clients From Hell and I’m hooked. The site describes itself as:
A collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers.
Although I’ve never done any freelance design work myself, a lot of these horror stories sound all too familiar, since I do freelance web coding and consulting.
Pretty much all of the quotes on their are priceless, but here are a few of my personal favorites.
An animation budget of $1200 for a movie like “Finding Nema” – Link
“The unicorns don’t look realistic enough.” – Link
“Can you make the blue match the color of the sky right now?” – Link
This one hit a little too close to home, sounds like a lot of emails I get from Custom Theme – Link
I browse it every now and then for a good laugh. I know it’s funny but try not to get hooked, it can be pretty distracting.
