Heard about Zerply yet? No? Follow the link and read the little bit they have there on the home page. You have to be invited to be a member, so I am giving away one invite to it. Leave a comment on this post, or on any other post (relevant to the topic of course) and I will pick the winner on Thursday. The winner of my previous give away is not eligible to win the invite for Zerply.

“Zerply is a professional network built around people who love what they do. We believe that professional networking can be done differently.”

Yes, it is another social network site, kind of like a LinkedIn type thing, but a lot more clean, and a lot easier to use. Here is my page on zerply, so you can see what it looks like. Why would you create a profile at Zerply? Well, besides helping you connect to other people, I like the look of it. I would much prefer to give someone a link to this page than to my LinkedIn page. It has all of my social and website links, descriptsions, and a little bio. Basically a clutter free profile page that gets across everything that is important.

You can upload an image (I chose my logo), and choose from a few different templates. Al-in-all I am very impressed with the ease of use of Zerply. I had my profile up and running in a matter of minutes, ready to be distributed to whoever I want.

Comment and get an invite, now!

Coupon Code: webmachine

Let’s start with Paprika. I know in my post “Creating your own web dev tool kit – Part III: Apps that help” I told you about todotweet.com. It is still a great little twitter app, but I have found that Paprika suits me better. It is just another little note taker type thing that lets me create projects with to do lists in them.

As you can see from this little screen I have a project name of The Web Machine, an h1 tag that is the Things to do…, 3 tags (Design, Coding, and Articles), and something to do under each. Paprika is so easy to use, and along with the base amount of features that I want, I’ve made it my new to do list app. You do have to create an account, which is also stupid easy (like 4 fields to enter), after which they give you your own url. Login, and you are off.

You want to create a tag called Awesome? Type #Awesome. Thats it! Want to create a check box to do list? For each item you type in put a dash in front of it, followed by a space. The calander icon pops up when you type in a date. Want something bold, surround it with *.

Now a lot of you are probably saying “But what about that other app rememberthemilk.com?” Ya, I know you can have crap emailed, IM’d, tweeted and facebooked or whatever it does, and I did try it. Guess what I found out? I don’t need any of that crap. It’s over complicated, at least for me. I just need a basic list app with the exact features Paprika offers, so I stop wasting paper, which I can’t remember where I put half the time. Check it out, and get organized.

MicroData – it’s data that is…micro?

I’m not going to claim that I know anything about MicroData. There is just to little information in the way of clear explanations on what it does. I mean in layman’s terms, not technical jargon crap. The closest I came to actually understanding it, came from Nettuts’ article HTML5 Microdata: Welcome to the Machine. I’ll quote John Cox, the author of that article:

“…Microdata is a subset of making a document have meaning to machines, just as it has meaning to a reader of the document.” and “We can now provide context from our HTML to give better search results.”

All you really do is add attributes to an element (like a div or a span) that holds the relevant information. I added some to my footer last night, so I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person">
<span itemprop="name">Jeremy Carlson</span> - <span itemprop="title">Web Designer/Developer</span>
</div>

As you can see all I’m adding are these new attributes. It shows up the same in the browser, which you can see in my footer below, but apparently gives more context for searching. Now, I don’t know if this actually helps in a regular Google search or not, but I am going to guess that it does. Once you have your Microdata added, you can then check the results here. This is what my results looked like:

If you want to read more about Microdata, check the link above to the Nettuts article, and go here.

Enough crap…give me something I can use already!

Small rant now, so feel free to disregard this. It’s really about several things. I used to not care about list articles. Some I thought were useful, but it seems lately that it is getting close to absurd. Enough of the 30 Best Designed Websites in Poland crap. I really don’t have time to care about articles like these. I want you to actually teach or show me something I didn’t know. I’m not what you call an “elite” blog, but I do try to show you guys something new or how to solve a problem with every post. I feel that in the past month, the quality of articles posted on the major design/developer blogs we all go to has diminished. You want to actually inpsire me? Write some awesome new tutorials on getting started with Ruby, cool jQuery that is NOT about a plugin, CSS that doesn’t just work in webkit browsers, and things relevant to actual development.

Second part of rant coming…..oooohhh, now! FREE icons, background images, fonts….whatever resource the blog of the day is handing out. Free to me means I can do whatever the hell I want with what you are giving away. How many of you actually look at the license that those fonts or especially those icons we all love? I’m guessing very few of you. Most of those awesome icons, say from SmashingMagazine.com, are ONLY for personal use, and on top of that, you MUST provide an attribution link to the person who created it! Screw that! Do you know how many links we would all have on our pages? That is why I generally create my own, or find ones that are actually…what’s the word…oh ya…FREE!

If I have to attribute the creator, it is not free to me. They are letting me borrow it. It is like renting a car that has a bumper sticker from the company renting the car to you. I don’t want that crap all over my sites. PLUS…I can’t use it for ANY of my freelance sites, or for work for that matter, because they aren’t personal sites! COMPLETELY USESLESS ICONS AND FONTS!

Whew…I’m glad I got that off my chest. I know I feel better, how about you?

Coupon Code: webmachine

$('#container a').replaceWith('<a href="/pageOne.html">Page One</a>');

And to make it even better, it is extremely easy to get things up and running. I tried out the Tabs – UI Tool, and the Tooltip (which you will see on the second pane). I have created a demo just to show you how easy it really is. They have demos of all of their tools on their site, with really easy to follow instructions for each to get them going. Go to the link above to check out all that it has available. But just to show you how freakin’ simple it is, here is a demo I did with the Tabs tool…took me less than 5 minutes.

Click here for the demo.

Take a look at the source code of my demo, and you can see what it consists of. You could literally copy the entire source, and it would work for you right now (exluding the tooltip png, which they provide in a zip file!). They provided the basic css, and the basic jQuery functions to get it going. You just need to include the jQuery js file, and their tools.min.js file. After doing just this basic demo, I am all about this awesome set of tools, and I can’t wait to start using them in some projects. Plus you can radically customize the css. They just had the base styles there, and I didn’t do anything to them. I’m already thinking of what I can do with it.

So take a look at them, and let me know what you think. I can honestly say, I was beyond surprised at what I found. hats of to the creators.

Coupon Code: webmachine

$('.sideContainer').empty();

I know this is not starting off well, but for some reason I had much higher expectations. A dumbed down version of Evernote. What is it though? Literally a notepad that saves all your notes in one place. There only 4 buttons: + (add a group), – (delete a group), Add code, and Add note. No copy buttons, or tags….nothing. But again, if you have nothing else, this would do the trick. Just don’t look for any bells and whistles.

So check out Color Scheme Designer, and try it out. Very easy to use, and extremely well done.

The crows that are flying around, plus the background, are all done using this plugin. The crows are 3 images on 1 sprite, animated in order. Really digging this, and I can already think of a few sites that I’ve done for work that I could have used this on.

Anyway, I saw this today while looking at a WordPress theme over at themeforest.net. I was reluctant to share this with you all, because I don’t think many know about this cool piece of flash. But…here it is.

CU3ER

What is this you ask? Watch the demo. It does crazy transformations to whatever images you want, which you list in the xml file. This thing is FREAKIN’ easy to use. Check it out.

First up, Netvibes. A very awesome rss reader that is fully customizable. Trust me, you’ll love it.

http://www.netvibes.com

And Evernote for the second. A very awesome note taking program that lets you sort notes into different notebooks, search things by tags, sync your desktop version with your online one. What is really cool with this is, if you have 2 computers, say a work and a home comp, take notes on the one at work, click sync. Go home start up Evernote at home, and click sync. And wallah, same notes appear. Great for lots of stuff.

http://evernote.com/