June 12, 2008

Favpico’s gettin’ easier

Yeah, a pico upgrade: durring server change we have finally made registration on Favpico independent. Now, you can register directly on the site.

March 27, 2008

Events online

Finally, the third installment in our site-in-a-week series is online, stretching the definition of a week somewhat as we published it 15 (fifteen) days after the work started. We did lose about 5 days of productive time due to Bootstrap and Easter, but even taking that into account we still clearly chose something that did not fit within the boundaries we set for the series. Either too much features or too much polish.

Anyway, it’s done and alive now.

The site is called oiola.com and helps you organize an event. At this moment this means it lets you:

• create a page with all the details: when, where and what is going to happen, complete with a map,
• gather registrations from people who would like to attend; you choose whether registration is optional, required or required-and-accepted-by-you (so that you can limit the number of attendees, if that is what you need),
• insert a widget with event details and registration form on your web page, to make it easier for attendees.

Of course, we want to improve and extend the site, so we would be happy to hear your opinions about what it should look like. Also, the site is public, but accounts are not — we are in the testing stage, so if you would like to give the site a try contact us to sign up.

The site is only in Polish right now.

February 28, 2008

Webcomics Pot

News from the past, #2: WebComicsPot.

If you ever tried to publish a webcomic you will know that, once you’re done drawing, inking, painting, scanning, selecting, retouching and saving final, beautiful versions of your files there is one more step left: create a website that is easy to use, easy to update, looks good, displays your news, contact details and allows people to comment on your work. That’s what WebComicsPot is for. And it’s multilingual, too

That was the second of our one-week projects, created at the beginning of this month. It was fun, even though we missed the deadline by three days (then again, we started with five days of delay, so we regained a bit).

Just like in favpico we tried to make the site as simple as possible: you provide a list of URLs pointing to your images and WCP does the rest for you. The only requirement is that each URL must contain a date (YYYY-MM-DD) so that we know when to show which page. You can also customize your site by adding your own HTML code in the sidebar and your own CSS code in the header.

It is also our first site to support (only) OpenId — we have much too many passwords already and don’t want to create more.

To wrap it up: it was a very educational experiment. We already got some great feedback on using the site and the reactions are so positive that we want to put more time into it

And next month, well, we will most probably create something more complex. Stay tuned.

February 21, 2008

Favpico

A minimal portfolio, visit card, favatar or… Apple pixel-art?

A nano-CMS: just links with automagically downloaded favicons. Pick a name, type in a list of URLs and voila, a new page is born.

It was aslo our first experiment in fast site building: we gave ourselves a week to build the site.

How do I include a Favpage on my blog or webpage?

Use this HTML snippet, replacing page-name with the path to your Favpico page:

<iframe width="130px" height="150px" scrolling="no" src="http://favpico.com/name/"> </iframe> You can also set background color adding a bgcolor parameter to the source address:

src="http://favpico.com/name/?bgcolor=red"

or, alternatively, using the hex syntax with “_” instead of “#”:

src="http://favpico.com/name/?bgcolor=_0099ee"

February 21, 2008

Startups, Ideas, Solutions

BinaryLifeForms is a small European develop-tank created by software developer Marcin Kaszyński together with designer and artist Jan Kłosowski.

Our mission is to develop simple web solutions for simple ideas. Inspired by Kloonigames we’ve decided to create a new web project during the first week of every month. This blog will contain information about these projects.

Before we started in January 2008 we had been developing a very complex and absorbing project Planemoo. With our growing experience we’ve decided to completely rebuild this idea and split it into its core (which will still take a lot of time) and smaller parts that will most likely make it into some of our one-week projects.

Our first projects are already online: Favpico (created in January) and WebComicsPot (February). We will write more about them here soon.

We will be happy to read any feedback on our projects, so subscribe to our blog and post your opinions about our work. Thanks!