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datadirt Geek Supplies: Background-Template for formspring

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Foursquare.com is getting gold: hype-searching geeks are moving on, and these days their favorite URL is formspring.me: it's a really simple q-and-a platform – kind of like Twitter, but without the 140 character limit. The service lacks a lot features, it's still in a pretty early stage, which didn't keep me from registering though: formspring.me/datadirt.

formspring.meThe setup just takes a minute: like on Twitter, there's the avatar pic, the homepage URL, a short description and that's it. When it comes to eye candy, formspring.me offers a couple of templates, but the more brand-aware user can also upload their own background pic – now in 2 minutes, because I've compiled a Photoshop-template that speeds up the process of creating a custom formspring template a lot. Read more

We’re in the middle of a re-vamp here!

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Thanks for your patience, I finally found time yesterday to finish my new blog-template. To me, this is much more than just some graphical brush-up: my aim was to closely integrate my “non-datadirt” social web activities, to unclutter the design and to build a lean, xhmtl-valid and fast-loading template suitable for videos as well as for longer essays. The result you're browsing now is far from finished, there are still some details which await tweaking.

For now I just wanna thank all coders, geeks and programmers out there: since I'm using wordpress (and that would be a couple years by now), browsing the plugin repository for new add-ons is like shopping in a free gadget story. I really admire those folks who turn a brilliant idea into a great and easy-to-use plugin! datadirt is not just the result of my own work, and I'm well aware that I'm standing on the shoulders of web 2.0 giants. I'll try to give something back by reviewing some of these great plug-ins. And I wanna send out a very special THANK YOU SO MUCH! to Matt Mullenweg and the whole WordPress Crew and to all fellow bloggers from whom I learned so much – especially Jeremy Shoemaker for his great and inspiring postings and his insights on the web.

btw: This was really a hard one for me: I'm not a designer, and usually I'd simply hire a specialist for this delicate task, but since this is my own blog, I wanted ultimated control over the code (that's a real time-saver when you constantly add some bells and whistles) which meant that I had to do this myself. Frankly, I'm quite happy with the (temporary) results, and of course I'm very eager on your opinions. So pls let me know what you think about datenschmutz 3.0.

Weekly Blogistan Round-Up no. 02/2009

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tweetbacksNothing like listening to old-school dubstep mixes and surfing the net on a lazy Sunday afternoon – even though I have to admit that turning up the music is kind of my only option right now, since the new Samsung LCD screen I bought yesterday experiences some kind of identity crisis, confusing itself with some kind of alien sound-device by producing a constant annoying noise. But enough complaining, let's turn our heads and look back on the 7 deadly sins of online-marketing compiled by Shoemoney.

Include the twitter juice!

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to include tweets about your postings directly into the comment thread? tweetbacks by Smashing Magazine does just that:

This plug-in imports tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.

The implementation requires a bit of template-fiddling, but the explanations outlines the necessary changes very well.

One for the Lohas

“My paper shredder cuts 100 sheets per minute!” “Mine only cuts 0,02 sheets per minute, but it's hamster powered!” This fictional dialogue could soon become office reality, as London design consultant Tom Ballhatchet invented the prototype of a “Hamster Powered Paper Shredder”: it takes the little fellow about three quarters of an hour to tear one DIN A4 sheet to pieces, which then become his bedding – the Lauging Squid knows more.

Mind the Tweet?

In the last week, Twitter's security loopholes have been discussed everywhere: tweeters are used to performance problems (“fail-whale”), but the recent hacks of popular accounts, among them Britney Spears and Barack Obama, created awareness for the basic problem: there is no Twitter API, most 3rd party mash-ups require you to gladly hand over your login to some total stranger. Nick O'Neill posted some interesting thoughts on allfacebook.com:

Why would developers build for a platform that has only a few million users when they can build identical tools for over 140 or 150 million users? Yes, Facebook can keep the statuses private, and all comment replies as well and they