Doing research for a pitch I found the USDA National Nutrient Database.  I haven’t found an elegant API for it, but at the very least you could use curl and screen scrape what you need.  But wow, it’s deep.  A great resource for providing data for a health related site.  It looks like you can download the database whole and implement it locally.

Jeff passed this around earlier this month, showing a practical use of augmented reality that was handled very elegantly by AKQA.  This isn’t flash, but shows another huge leap for this emerging technology:

We’re planning on using Cufón to a larger extent than we have before on our build for Gregory, which has to be localized in a number of languages.  Using a text replacer for the designed text will allow us to localize text without rendering out new gifs and pngs for every language and whenever copy changes.  Not knowing how fast Cufón could render when given a lot of text, I put a test together.  PHP renders out a bunch of random text in blocks ranging from 10 characters to 1,000,000 characters.  Then Cufón goes to task on each, in sequence.  JS tells  you how long it takes.  Try it out here, but be advised it can crash your browser.

Here are the results of my very non-scientific test:

At 100,000 characters, FF3 threw “A script is running slow, blah blah” messages.  IE7 just crashed.  Safari 4 hung in there till 1,000,000 but then it gave up.  It looks like Apple’s claims about Safari 4’s speed have some truth.  I didn’t test any of the past generation of browsers, I may go back and add them later.

It looks like Cufón works perfectly fine on a page where it’s converting a thousand characters or less.  But it shouldn’t be used to convert the majority of the body copy of a page.  That’s perfectly acceptable to me.

Campaign Monitor, who we use for our mailing list, recently put up this great post about the effectiveness of banners they ran.  They provide real numbers on conversions for each of the banners and landing pages they built.  And it’s interesting to see which ads provided the greatest conversions.  So far they’ve recovered 25% of the cost.

Check it out: Promoting your product or service with banner ads – is it worth it?

As of lately I’ve really been meaning to explore Photoshop CS4’s 3D tools. After researching the programs new native 3D tools, they seem to be much more powerful than I had initially imagined. I also was really impressed with Adobe’s latest promotional site “Meet Dweezlbug” where artists Genevieve Gauckler and Erick Natzke created a beautiful creature using the suites new tools. The site features a brief breakdown on all the tools and techinques used such as the new native 3D tools, adjustments, 3D layers and also a bunch of new flash tools and techinques.

I love it all!

Enjoy!

We use MAMP PRO as our local environment when we do LAMP work.  Here’s how to set it up using DynDNS so that you can provide web accessible urls to your vhosts.  This is handy to share with clients or coworkers in other offices but also for using web apps like Litmus (which was the situation I was in today).

1) Create a free account at dyndns.com.  Once you’ve activated your account, go here to create your domains.  Name them whatever you want and use the auto detected IP address.  Go through the add to cart hoops, but it will be free.

2) Setup port forwarding in your router.  You may not need to this, but I’m guessing most would and it’s the most confusing part IMO.  We have an Airport Extreme and the configuration is below.  10.0.1.201 is the local IP of my computer on our network.  I’m port 80 externally to my local port 80.

3) Setup MAMP.  Last step, go into MAMP and add the domain you created in DynDNS as an alias of your vhost.  This isn’t super documented but I saw the tip here.  It should all be humming now.  Now you can go to whatever.hobby-site.org and the request will travel down to your local box.

While busy working away on creative for Gregory’s 2009 product launches, and in desperate need of some seriously great photos, we needed to find someone who shared our vision and could deliver the exact imagery we needed. Enter über talented photographer Tim Kemple. We spent the last week hopping around Northern California with Tim and an incredible group of talent including the amazing climbing machine Joe Kinder. From Grass Lake in Tahoe to Bolinas and the Bay, Tim captured an amazing set of photos we literally cannot wait to unveil.

We have recently been using Cufón on some of our recent projects, most noticeably version 3 of our own site as well as Mering Carson, replacing sIFR which worked but was resource heavy as well as a cumbersome task of creating fonts.

This has opened a lot of creative freedom for our creatives, knowing they can use a font and to see it exactly the same from design in comparison to the build. I would have to say this makes Jeff’s and Demetre’s job a lot easier.

The nice thing about Cufón is it’s still SEO friendly as well as very lightweight compared to the flash solution that has been the de-facto method of typography treatment for the web, sIFR.

One downfall of Cufón is you can’t select text, although sometimes you get lucky, it just isn’t supported. You might be thinking, oh no?! But hopefully in later builds this won’t be a problem, and it will be the most “usable” solution. What are your thoughts?

We use Google Apps for our internal mail.  Not sure why this never came up earlier, but with the server configuration we had, it was not allowing our server generated mail to be sent from PHP’s mail().  BKWLD is hosted by (MT) and their support provided this answer:

1.  Turn mail off for the server from Plesk
2.  Remove domain from your /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts file.
3.  Remove domain from  your /var/qmail/control/virtualdomains file. (This step wasn’t actually needed, but it is necessary if the domain exists in this file).

Hopefully will be of use to someone else, regardless of your host.

Update: Added the link Chris Parsons provided in the comments