Not exactly, but close.  Google is now hosting  “millions” of images from the archives of LIFE magazine, the vast majority of which were never before published.  The best part: the scans are wallpaper-makingly ginormously huge.   Some of them suffer from some halftone issues, but hey, what do you expect?

Obviously, there’s no Creative Commons license on these images, so keep these out of your next car commercial, but they’re a great source of design inspiration. It’s great to see the mistakes too—the bad exposures and soft-focuses that give these photos some humanity (and make you think twice about deleting your bad photos).

Here are some of my favorites (There’s a NASA-overload in this list, but anyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised):

[Google/Life Magazine Image Search]

[Show as slideshow]

If you want to see this widget in action, check out the bottom of the sidebar on this page.

There are lots of ways to have an RSS feed display in your sidebar, but I think the best and most flexible is based on a great NETTUTS tutorial by Jeffery Way that uses PHP to parse the feed. This method takes an RSS feed and uses PHP to create an unordered list from the post titles, which is easily styleable to fit the rest of your blog.

Adding the Code

I can’t explain how it works nearly as well as Jeffery has, but here’s the gist:

Step 1: Add the following code to your functions.php file (if you’re using Wordpress):

function getFeed($feed_url) {

$content = file_get_contents($feed_url);
$x = new SimpleXmlElement($content);

echo “<ul>”;

foreach($x->channel->item as $entry) {
echo “<li><a href=’$entry->link’ title=’$entry->title’>” . $entry->title . “</a></li>”;
}
echo “</ul>”;
}

Step 2: In your sidebar (or wherever you want the feed to appear) add the following code:

<?php getFeed(“http://example.com/feed.rss”); ?>

where you substitute in the RSS feed of your choice. At this point you should have an unordered list (<ul>) of the posts in your feed.

Getting Your Feed

How do you find your LaterThis feed? Easy.  Login to your LaterThis account. In the top-left corner of the screen, you’ll see something like this:

Place your cursor over the RSS icon, and your custom feed url will appear in your browser’s status bar, like so:

If you can’t find it, the feed will be formatted like this: http://laterthis.com/username/links/feed.rss.

After all this, you may want to add in a bit of CSS for styling, although your blog theme will most likely already have styling for unordered lists. Go ahead and substitute your new LaterThis feed in your sidebar PHP:

<?php getFeed(“http://laterthis.com/username/links/feed.rss”); ?>

Add Some Styling

For this blog, I added some additional styling to make the bookmarks stand out a little from the rest of the sidebar.  After I enclosed the PHP code in a <div> with id=”laterthis,” I added the following CSS:

#laterthis ul {list-style-type:disc;}

#laterthis ul li {padding-bottom:20px;}

#laterthis {height:550px;overflow:auto; width:250px;background:#efefef; padding:20px;}

The first two lines add a disc (dot) to each post title in the list and ensure that there’s ample padding (20px) between each item. The third line establishes a box with a light grey background around the widget.

Since I did not want all  items in the feed to display at once, I gave the <div> a height of 550px and set overflow:auto so that the box would have a vertical scroll bar.  I assume there’s a way in the PHP function to only fetch the first x number of items in the feed, but this way, users can scroll down if they’re interested.

Thanks guys!

via WireToTheEar

Never mind that this album is completely great.  From the titles written in one of those old push-pin on velvet signs to the delicately laid out “letter to science,” the artwork is one of my favorites from this year.

[Show as slideshow]

Update: Here’s a song from the album:

Google Translator

According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to Google Translate, which I thought would be the best bet, but I’m still missing a crucial piece of information: I have no idea what language this is in.  I tried with no luck choosing the ‘Romanian’ or ‘Bulgarian’ options. There was a ‘Detect Language’ option (hidden) at the top of the list, which revealed that the page is written in Hungarian, but I got the error message  “We are not yet able to translate from Hungarian into English.” Fair enough.

I Googled “Hungarian to English webpage translator” and found Webforditas.hu, which did exactly what I want, but the results were less than stellar:

Me getting to the title page is due for this. I wrote to them Rifflet.com -ról, which Piköphöz is similarly, Drupalra is being built and affords the opportunity to the submission of musical ideas. Aries was in such a way with him though that he should be able to make this. And he had truth. It wrote an article about an idea (refers to me in this), and accomplished the application under some days (see it on the title page the newest riffletek shorts!).

Um, Yeah.

I think it’s safe to assume that online translation may be one of the final frontiers in web design.  Not everything is gonna translate perfectly, but come on–that just sucked.

Here’s an interesting statistic: Of the top 20 countries with the most Internet users, the three with the biggest increase in users over the last eight years are Pakistan, Vietnam and Iran, each of whom has around a 10,000% (seriously) increase in users between 2000 and 2008.  I would imagine a few of these folks will be making some websites, or at the very lest, blogging, making Facebook accounts or uploading some photos.

The Next Step

Obviously, translation apps are not where they need to be.  Or maybe, FREE translation apps are not where they need to be.  In that case, this seems like a job for the open-source community.  Where else are you going to find thousands of testers and programmers, all willing to work for very little other than the knowledge that they’re helping lots of people, and who already speak hundreds of different languages?

Drupal, an open-source CMS, has been working on the problem for some time.  Drupal allows sites to install multiple languages, but these, for the most part, are predifined terms and not on-the-fly translations, like we really need.

So, got any good ways to translate from Hungarian to English?  Lemme know.  If I get an actual translation, I’ll post it.

I initially installed Drupal 6.2 because GoDaddy, our hosting company, offered it as part of their 1-Click installation program.  If you’re not familiar, here’s how it works: instead of going to Drupal’s site, downloading the latest version, setting up a mysql database, uploading the files and running the installer script,  you can just tell Godaddy to install Drupal and let you know when it’s ready.  It’s nice, although to be honest, doing it the hard way only takes about 5-10 minutes.

So Drupal 6 was looking great until I went to download the Audio Module, which was to be the most important part of the site.  There is no stable version for Drupal 6. (There’s a development version, but it’s not recommended for use yet.)  No problem; I can just use the one for Drupal 5.  Not so fast. Drupal modules are not backwards compatible. Unfortunately, themes are the same way,and there aren’t exactly a ton of them for Drupal 6 yet (although the number is growing).

So that sucked. I had Godaddy uninstall Drupal 6 and I went back to Drupal.org and downloaded version 5.7 and got it running.  Now to pick a theme. After some looking around on Drupal.org I settled on one called, appropriately enough, Internet Music, which I liked for a couple of reasons:

• Fixed-Width. I think fluid-width layouts make for some ridiculously oversize lines that just plain suck to read on a big monitor.
• Two Columns. I’m not a fan of the left and right sidebars, although I do like the three column layouts with the content on one side and the sidebars next to each other.
• Nice Color Scheme. This site is supposed to be about all different kinds of music, so I didn’t want something that was too far in one direction or made the site look too techno-ey or rockin’, for instance. Think Flickr.

Note: if we had been building this site for a client, or if we had known at the beginning how big a project this was going to be, we probably would have built something from scratch.  But we didn’t. Sue us.

With the theme in place, it’s time for some basic customization. After heading to Administer>Site Building>Themes, I chose the Internet Music theme and clicked on configuration, which allowed me to upload a logo graphic directly to the site. I also had the option to add the site slogan and mission statement.   In this case the slogan, “home for unfinished songs,” was built into the logo .gif, so I left it out.  Probably not the smartest idea from a search engine standpoint, but we made up for it later on.

The Internet Explorer Problem

I like the Internet Music theme a lot, but it has its share of browser compatibility issues, which were made worse with my screwups tailoring for Rifflet.  Specifically, it looks crappy in IE.  Text was overflowing boxes, and perhaps dumbest of all, the rounded corners were made with the -moz CSS property instead of, um, any other way of making rounded corners.  I wasted way too much time trying to fix this particular issue and wound up settling for a giant cheat: IE7-.js, a javascript library designed to make IE work like Firefox and everybody else.  Not the smoothest fix, and I’m sure it slows the site down on IE, but it worked, and the stats eventually showed that most  Rifflet visitors weren’t using IE anyway.

Modules-Making Stuff Do Stuff

I already talked about the Audio module, which is the core element of Rifflet.  Next, I wanted to add some more features that would allow users to upload more information about their music and maybe share it with some other people.   Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

• Tagadelic:The biggest part of the site is searching through mountains of user-submitted rifflets to find something specific.  Tagadelic allows uploaders to tag their own music and listeners to tag the music they find.  The more tagging gets done, the better the search works, and the less work I have to do, which is awesome.
• Favorite Nodes: I wanted people to have a reason to register and build a profile.  With this module, users get a ‘Save to Favorites’ link under each rifflet that allows them to build lists and find stuff they like faster.
• Fivestar: A cool way of adding an ajax-based rating system to each rifflet.  You just listen (or not) and click how many stars you think a song deserves.  Like writing for Spin, with none of the guilt.
• Invite: An easy way of passing Rifflet along to a friend.  You click ‘Invite a Friend’ in the main menu and get a form to introduce Rifflet to some dude who is probably not so thrilled to get spam emails from you.
• SimpleMenu: Drupal sites can sometimes get information overload in the form of lots of menu items in multiple menus, expecially if you’re an admin.  SimpleMenu puts most of the menu stuff (you can control how much) in a nice javascript drop-down menu at the top of the screen, where it can hide away when you’re not using it.

There are lots more coming in Part 3.  And, I’ll write about promoting the site and what getting an interview on Gizmodo can do for your hit count.

Bonus: I also bought the greatest thing ever–a little bound notebook featuring a ’70s drawing of the Mercury spacecraft.

Nice one.

5. Pulp Fiction in Typography

The blood spatter is precious.

4. Typolution

Those trees are amazing.

3. Roots

An amazing, slow-growing plant made from type.

2. Trainspotting Typography

I wish that previously kickass song hadn’t been ruined by 500,000 cruise commercials.

1) Typography Motion Video “Conscious”

Remember this one the next time your After Effects comp is getting too many layers.

Bonus: A great type-based music video we’ve mentioned before.

There are two things I don’t like about doing invoices this way:

1. All the information is on someone else’s server, which could be a problem if your chosen service went away or became otherwise unavailable.
2. I just don’t wanna pay for it. Isn’t there an open-source alternative? (Isn’t there always?)

Heres the answer: BambooInvoice is a well designed, very easy to use program that does exactly what you need it to do, and lets you do it on your server.

Installation

Getting BambooInvoice (BI) up and running was a little tricky, but that had more to do with our hosting provider, Godaddy, than the program (see below). Luckily the forums on the BambooInvoice website quickly provided a solution, and my answer even came directly from Derek Allard, the programmer/designer behind BI. For the record, installation involves creating a mySQL database and modifying config.php and database.php files to show the correct path to the BI installation. Once I got around the stupid Page Not Found error caused by Godaddy, it was all grilled cheese and chicken strips.

killing trees

BambooInvoice is stupid easy to use. It would be great if you could upload your company logo through the program (you have to FTP-it into an /images folder), but other than that, the interface is well thought out and easy to learn. There are even nice charts and reports to track your invoices over time. When you’re done making the invoice, BI lets you print it, export a .pdf or e-mail it directly to your client (So that 30 days later they can pretend they never got it. I’m kidding. Sort of.) Click on the image at left to see a sample invoice.

My only complaint is that you can only have one login account. It’d be nice if we could have separate logins for memory-sake, but it’s not a big deal.

Go get it

BambooInvoice does exactly what we need it to do, without having to pay a monthly fee or surrender our data. Go get it right now.

EDIT: The latest post on Derek Allard’s blog reveals that among other things, one of the changes in the next release will be a custom logo upload. So there.

SECRET FIX: SO YOU GOT GODADDY?

If you use Godaddy for your hosting, when you install BI, you’re going to get a 404:Page Not Found error when you run the installer. After you make sure you’re running PHP5, which BI requires, open up application/config/config.php and correct the following lines:

$config['index_page'] = “index.php?”;
$config['uri_protocol'] = “QUERY_STRING”;

Easy. Thanks again to the BambooInvoice community for solving my problem so quickly.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to see the (in-progress) site, head to Rifflet.com.

So I need a CMS

My first inclination was to use Wordpress, by far my favorite, and pretty much the only one I have a lot of experience with. I’ve done a couple sites in Joomla, but I thought the back-end was terrible and most of the (free) templates were tough to customize and were giant, table-filled messes. (Feel free to argue in the comments–I know Joomla’s pretty popular.)

Jamroom

I also looked around for a dedicated MP3-related CMS. The first one I found was the not-open-source Jamroom. Jamroom is a great program for creating band and artist community sites, but it was too much for what I want to do. It’s basically a myspace-in-a-box site for bands. The free version allows up to 5 profiles, and you can buy a license to host 25, 100 or unlimited profiles. It was easy to use and install, but I want my site to focus on the sharing unfinished songs, not a place to promote your band and sell albums.

Jinzora is another interesting option, but again, it seems tough to customize. It is made to be a streaming media server with lots of ways to organize your content, and there’s a smiling stock-photo girl on the website, so it must be good.

Next stop: Pligg

Back to the free stuff. If you don’t know, Pligg is the open source version of Digg. Install it, and there it is: a complete Digg clone with vote up/down links, just waiting for your clever blog post about the 50 best Facebook apps. I briefly thought this was the way to go–the emphasis is on the content itself, not the content creator (like Jamroom) and people can vote on the best songs to go on the front page. Unfortunately, according to the Pligg forums, there’s no way for users to upload audio files. Instead they’d have to link to files on a different server, which kind of defeats the point. And really, who only wants to hear the songs that have been voted most popular?

Why not Wordpress again?

I probably could have. Wordpress makes a great CMS, but in my opinion, it’s not so good as the basis for a community site with lots of uses. There are some exceptions, like OpenDesigns.org, but I’m guessing there’s been a lot of work done beyond the normal WP installation, and I am definitely not a programmer. Wordpress does allow audio uploads and playback, but as it is a blog engine, I think Wordpress, in its native form, is better suited to a small group of writers and a large group of front-end users.

On to Drupal

I’ve heard great things about Drupal, but never had a chance to try it. Like Joomla and Wordpress, it has a huge user base and a thriving community. It also has a number of free themes available, and tons of plug-ins (Drupal calls them “modules”) to add functions to your site. One of these is the entire key to making the whole site possible: the Audio module.

It doesn’t have a very exciting name, but the Audio module lets Drupal users upload audio files for public viewing and even includes an inline flash player to play the files without downloading them (assuming the mp3 file is encoded at 44khz, which kind of sucks). It can even read ID3 tag data from the file to automatically read the artist and title information. This seems like to way to go.

I’ll have more in Part 2 about customizing my Drupal theme and setting up the site.

Smartphones and unlimited data plans are getting super cheap–I won’t tell you how much I overpaid for the Blackjack over there about a year ago, but it arrived at the photoshoot in a hovercraft made out of golden baby seals. I understand however, it would get annoying if you just skim your news and don’t want to wait for the whole thing to load.

Somebody gets it right

There is one (two, actually) news source that solves this problem. The New York Times mobile site has a simple menu at the bottom of the page with an option to ‘set single page as default.‘ That’s all there is to it. The next time you load an article, at the bottom of the page you’ll see ‘multiple pages‘ so you can return to the old way. For the record, the Chicago Tribune mobile site and the accompanying ChicagoSports.com work the same way. Just give me the option. That’s all I ask.

One More Thing

How about when non-mobile sites make you click through fifty ‘more’ links to read an entire article? (Never mind that you’ve already done it once on this post.) I assume they do this as a way of artificially increasing clicks for advertising purposes, but I’ve read Top 10 lists that make you click ‘more’ after…every…entry. And, if you happen to be trying to read it on a mobile phone, you have to scroll past all the header/navigation/ads every time to get to the next entry.

Useability isn’t complicated

But it is hard. Remember the first time you used iTunes? It’s impossible to figure out how to get your damn Justin Timberlake album from your computer to your ipod, because it’s just so simple. I didn’t realize you could drag that crap to where you want it to go. It’s a matter of approaching a site with fresh eyes, which often means finding people that haven’t been involved in the project. I’m sure if I was designing the Times mobile site, and I never wanted to view a story as a single page, adding such a feature would be pretty down on the list. Somebody else would see it as a site’s biggest problem. If the Paper of Record, which is not exactly known for its cutting edge design, can make a great, useable site, I think we can too.

P.S. If you don’t want to feel old, don’t look at the birthdates. One of these guys was born in the nineties. I’m gonna go do some situps. No I’m not.

If you’re interested, here’s Pitchfork’s review of the album (7.8).

I opened my e-mail this morning to find this gem. I know making fun of people’s names isn’t all that funny, but come on.

This comes from a real-live computer software company’s website. And I know that I’m not making the funny up here, because it was covered up with a de-cocked version several hours later.

Even worse, this clipart was supposed to indicate a friendly merger of two companies. Not counting the aired out sausage, is there anything friendly (or at least not hostile) about the posture of these two guys?

• It overwrites your IE7 installation. Not a big deal, and it does include a giant “Emulate IE7″ button in the toolbar that (supposedly) will let you test and surf 2006-style.
• The default page is AOL’s homepage, which ironically loads with all kinds of screwed-up CSS rendering.
• General interface seems to be about the same as IE7.
• Web Slices look interesting. Basically, when you are designing a page, you designate a particular area with a specific div id and class. When people visit the page, they can take the area you’ve designated and save it to their toolbar, where it functions like an RSS feed. Web slices can be set to have expiration dates, so they won’t hang around when they’re no longer needed (imagine you have a web slice containing information on an upcoming event). Get more details from Microsoft.
• Automatic Crash Recovery. Finally. Obviously, Firefox has had this for some time now.
• Developer Tools. The button bar on the right side of the screen contains a “developer tools” button that opens up a small window with some interesting visual ways of dissecting HTML and CSS (like drawing highlight bars around only relatively positioned divs, for instance), although I still prefer the all-in-one-window method of the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Nonetheless, I like it.

Not too bad, all in all. I did have a hard time figuring out how to use the web slices, however. It’s easy to “get” a slice–there’s a link on the IE8 homepage to a slice from MSNBC, but it’s hard to figure out how to use it–the slices are not displayed with the RSS feeds. Like I said earlier, there’s going to be a lot more finalizing done, I’m sure. It is a cool idea, though, and whether or not it becomes popular, it’s an indication of where the Internet is going: small bits of exactly what you want delivered straight to your lap. Eventually, you won’t even have to visit websites at all. Crap. I’m going back to bagging groceries, aren’t I.

Download IE8 Beta from Microsoft.

There’s probably not much demand for this kind of stock, but it’s cool to look at, and you never know when you can use it for some unorthodox purposes (website navigation, anyone?) Bassboy.com has put together a five-disc library of photos, brochure scans, and schematics for hundreds of old tape recorders, stereos, amplifiers, and other old-timey stuff. Each disc costs around $30, and they each have variations of open-reel-tape-inspired disc art. (Side note:Why isn’t anyone making blank discs like this? I’d buy them by the pantload.)

As an extra bonus, think of all the dirty ’70s things your parents total strangers did while listing to Paul Anka records on these things. Explain.

e stuck with our new spaceman (person?) theme and redesigned our cards for the third time in as many hours, it seems like. For those of you who are interested in such things, we had them printed at 48HourPrint.com with rounded corners and the nice-to-the-touch matte dull finish on both sides. Whatcha think? (Special thanks to Griffin Crowdson for loaning us the space helmet.)

Opcion also lets you preview fonts that are not yet installed and lets you save a list of favorite fonts for quick recall. The only thing missing is a way to to see extended character sets, but that’s not really the point of this program anyway.

One final thing that gets a little annoying: Opcion was written in 2004, so it can’t be blamed, but every time I open it up in Vista, I get a warning message telling me that an “unauthorized program is trying to access my computer.” Honestly, this is more of a kavetch about Vista, but you’ve been warned.

Sadly, I was pretty much totally wrong.

I didn’t get the downgrade, but it wasn’t my choice: I got a refurbished HP Pavilion laptop ($600 from buy.com - I recommend it if you’re in the market) that came with Vista Home Premium. Fortunately, my cheapness got in the way of my desire to jump on a Vista-hating bandwagon. Here’s a summary of what I like:

• It Looks Nice By Default. Design trends have changed a little in the years since XP. The default glassy dark color scheme is classy and understated and has some visual depth, like you’d imagine computers in The Year 2008 should look like. (Although I wonder what it would have looked like if Microsoft didn’t have OS X to cheat off on the interface test.)
• Same-Day Search Results. Have you ever searched for a file on XP? If it isn’t on the desktop, you might as well go order a pizza. Vista’s searches are quick, as if some sort of computer is searching through some sort of database of information.
• Not so Crashy. Programs are gonna crash, but its what the OS does with a crashed program that can make all the difference. If Photoshop freezes up, but the OS can shut it down right away without hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete 50 times, I’m ok with that.
• Desktop Widgets. I’m sure I’ll get tired of them, and they’re a total ripoff of Mac OS X (and not done as well, either), but whatever. I like having the retro ’60s clock. What purpose does that serve again?
• More Compatible Than It Gets Credit For. It saw my wireless router and hooked up right away, even though the router was made pre-Vista and the manufacturer (Belkin) said it would be a crap shoot if it worked or not.
• Easy to Install Fonts. Microsoft added an “install” option when you right-click on font file, so you don’t have to dig until you find the Fonts directory. Sounds lame, but it saves time. Sad Fact: I’ve actually downloaded fonts and been too lazy to install them.

So if Vista is so awesome, why isn’t anyone buying it? How come Vista’s first two months barely beat XP’s first two, even though there’s about elevendy billion more computers on Planet Earth than in 2001? Here’s my theory: It’s because XP SP2 doesn’t suck. That’s why I didn’t want to upgrade. XP is solid. Windows 98, the OS most people replaced with XP, did suck. It crashed all the time. People wanted to replace it as soon as possible. But XP works. I spent hours on it everyday, and it’s not perfect, but it’s unobtrusive enough to not make me hate it, and isn’t that all you can ask for in an operating system?

There is still some weirdness. About 5% of the time, when I turn the computer on, the desktop photo is gone. Going to the “Personalize Appearance and Sounds” screen (Why did they change it from “Desktop Settings”?) brings it back. Maybe it’s just me. Apparently, when Vista SP1 comes out, this same “feature” is supposed to be one of the ways that Microsoft bugs you to death for having a stolen copy of Vista. It could be a lot worse.

I also Super Hate the ugly new Office Suite (Trial), and the lame-ass Works suite that can’t even open some Word files. All problems easily fixed with OpenOffice.

Other than that, there’s not much going wrong with it, and I’ve used this computer a lot in the month I’ve had it, and I’ve logged a lot of hours on various Adobe CS3 apps, which all seem to run with alarming smoothness.

So no one wanted to hate Vista more than me, but my unscientific, anecdotal evidence can’t be wrong…right? Maybe it’ll make me want to change my desktop wallpaper more often.