August 2009 Archives

With the massive uptake in URL shortening – thanks to Twitter, no doubt – there has been some debate about whether it’s a good idea to rely on a third party to condense your precious URLs. The site could go down, or the service’s very existence could be in doubt (such as tr.im).

What, then, to do? You can create your own. There are various plugins for Wordpress, and now Shaun Inman has released a free PHP and MySQL solution called “Lessn” (geddit?). Completely free, and you’re not relying on a third party that might just vanish, taking all of your sweet lolcat links with it.

Scripting maestro Lloyd Alvarez has relaunched his site for all things After Effects, aescripts.com. The new system looks set to become After Effects’ de facto repository for scripts, and implements a “suggested donation” feature so that the scriptwriters can (hopefully) get compensated for their hard work. I’m delighted that Lloyd has offered to host Ease and Wizz over there, so the download link will be over at http://aescripts.com/ease-and-wizz/, but I’ll continue to mirror the content on ianhaigh.com so that all the old links don’t get broken.

Also, check out this intro video I made for Ease and Wizz. I just can’t get enough of that Dr Strangelove type.

Another nice bit of information visualisation from the NY Times: How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Via kottke.org.

From information aesthetics:

Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that dynamically visualizes secure text-field values using ambient color bars.

Meaning: as you type, you see three little colour bars that are unique to your password. You get to confirm whether you’ve typed it correctly (by remembering your unique colour combo) while the password is still hidden.

More information and a live demo here.