Shameless Self-promotion
This blog really isn’t about me, I know. But I still can’t resist tooting my horn a little, once in a while. I hope it’s not too much of a turn-off.
For me…
A little web app that I designed made it to Mashable and I just have to brag a teeny tiny bit. I’m quite proud of Wine Labels. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there very quickly.
I have to say I had a real blast working with the folks behind it, Gary Vaynerchuk (of Wine Library TV fame) and his right-hand man (and my good friend) Erik Kastner. Erik convinced me to take on a little freelance work, and I’m so glad I did.
There are other Gary/Erik/Amy collaborations in the works and I’ll mention them here when they debut.
And for you…
Slash7 is one of my big obsessions for 2007, as you regulars have probably noticed. Even when I’m not working on Slash7 stuff, I’m thinking how it could become Slash7 stuff. (So if you’re not subscribed yet, you really should.)
Consequently, even when I’m off doing freelance work after hours instead of writing or creating cheat sheets, I’ve been thinking about how to turn this fertile work into new content for Slash7.
I figured out a way. I can’t talk about it just yet, but it’s gonna be awesome. I will say that it involves massive amounts of hard drive space. Discuss amongst yourselves ;)
More for you…
To round off the me-centric post, some things completely unrelated to yours truly. A few links I bet you’ll like:
- The Wii Help Cat: A lesson in interaction design — I’m constantly fascinated by anything that links gaming theory and UI design and this is practically the piece de resistance. Plus I love my Wii. And the phrase “Help Cat” is cool.
- Job Pile - aggregates many of the popular job boards
- Hamlet in Cat Head Theater - Zany Hamlet with animated Flash kitty heads, in the style of Masterpiece Theater. No real redeeming value, but… Yes. Yes. Oh yes.
- The Get Human Project - A community web site dedicated to helping people get straight to real, live humans when calling customer service lines. I haven’t really used it, but its mere existence (and popularity) says something about the modern business ethics. Loud and clear.
- Malin + Goetz - High-falutin body products (not just variations on a theme re: my last post about Lush). The last hotel I stayed at in NYC had these as the complimentary toiletries. I’m not so taken with the body washes or shampoo, but I can definitely say that the $10 peppermint soap resulted in the best effin shower EVER. Really. I’ve had some great soap, I’ve made my own soap, but this soap practically left me speechless. (And, obliquely, this can also be taken as commentary on how to get free marketing for your products. I’m practically swooning thinking of that soap. And I’m not generally a girl crazy for bath products.)
Amy,
Been following your blog for a while and really enjoy reading your postings and cheat sheets. In fact I even plugged you on my blog recently :p for whatever thats worth :)
I really like what you have done over at Mashable. I work for a company that recently held a Mashup competition trying to see how developers could take our open API's and mash them together with others in order to build compelling new services or products. The responses and entries we received were excellent.
You can read a bit about it here, and were running the competition again this year ... http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition/
Why not see if your interested in entering? I really like your work and I'd love to see what you could come up with.
Anyway keep up the excellent work, Amy. I promise I'll stop lurking on here and actually start contributing a bit more.
cheers Nadeem
!! Very very cool!
It's been a joy working with you on these project. I think the next one (gd) is gonna be even bigger then Labels!
Agreed... this is a great blog, partly because of the content, but mostly because of the great writing.
Please keep up the good work!
@Nadeem: Thanks for commenting! Glad to see you lurkers come out of the woodwork. :) I have to clarify, though -- I didn't do Mashable.com. I wish! I helped Erik build Wine Labels (http://labels.winelibrary.com/), a much smaller affair :)
Nevertheless, the contest sounds intriguing, and I will definitely check it out.
@Erik - I think you might need to lay off the punctuation juice, buddy ;)
@Scott, thank you!! :)
Hi,
regarding Wine Labels: I don't quite get the purpose of the site. Either that or I don't get why this is important... Why would I be interested in in scanning the label off a wine bottle and put it online?
Apart from that, keep on rocking -- you're great!
bye, Winsmith aka Daniel
Hey Amy I saw on your info thing that you're from Maryland. Are there any good Rails groups in Maryland/Northern VA that you're aware of/attend?
@Winsmith: Apparently lots of people collect wine labels, like antique fruit crate labels or stamps or postcards. Also, I personally think the labels are interesting from a design perspective, just like a couple blogs I have in my RSS reader which are devoted only to book covers or other narrow categories.
Also, the labels themselves don't come from the users, but from Wine Library's massive database of over 10,000 digitized labels. By creating the Wine Labels site, WL is allowing anyone who wants to write about wine to take advantage of WL's massive DB... and bandwidth. And that's pretty cool.
@Andy, there's NoVaRUG, but I don't get to it, too far away. I live in Greenbelt, MD, so it's theoretically not that long a drive, but the meetings always mean I'd have to drive there right at rush hour... no thanks.
If there was something closer to me, I'd be excited to attend, but I have no time to organize a RUG on top of everything else :)
Amy, Hi Amy, thanks for the response, it's ok I know you didn't do the whole of mashable.com but hey we both know you could have ;-)
Do check out the contest I think you have a great eye for UI design and I'd be intrigued to see what you could come up with.
cheers Nad
Hey Amy, please pardon the aside.
When reading your post I was reminded of something -- it would be really interesting to see the designer-side of this, if you have any references: Do you have any tips on user interface design in general?
I read something about flex the other day, the guy from adobe came to the point in his tutorial where he used a tabbed interface. He stopped to say, basically "...and at this point, it would be good to bring in a user interface specialist to refactor the tabbed interface into a more functional design." -- well, something like that.
I realized I usually design very modular interfaces, try to make all the options available all the time: tabbed interfaces are my friends. :) And I must not know enough about user interface design so, if you have any wisdom about it, I'd love to hear it.