A very productive May so far - two sites finished and launched, two new clients with signed contracts for mid-sized projects, several new hosting clients, and my business site now has a pagerank of 6.  I got a Blackberry this week and am now wondering why I waited so long. And I’m be going to the WebVisions conference in Portland in two weeks.

http://twistori.com

You can’t post on it though - it’s compiled from Twitter posts and they use Summize to pull out the relevant words.

The hand-drawn clock from Yugo Nakamura - I read an article about him last night and am looking more deeply into his web/visual work. I found it interesting that his background is in landscape design!

An inspiring look at some really cool pixel-based designs.

These were taken at Fossil Creek Regional Open Space and Running Deer Natural Area in Fort Collins. All were taken with my new 170-300mm lens (equivalent of 340-600mm on my Olympus E-510).

Found a nice color tool this morning - it extracts multiple color palettes from any image you upload or from a random image it pulls from Flickr.

I finally got my first Blackberry - a Curve 8320 Titanium. It came in the mail today and I left it in the box because I knew once I got it out that would be the end of work for the day.

I got it for one reason - so I can catch emails while out at meetings. Some days, like last Thursday, I spend 4-5 hours away at client or networking meetings, and being able to quickly respond to an important email is critical sometimes. I figure if it gets me just one additional hour of work per month, it’s earned its keep.

I’m excited to see what it can do…

Having a bit of a conflict with a client at the tail end of a long, long project today… Part of the issue is that this client is upset about how much review and copyediting he’s had to do.

I’ve found that the majority of clients, probably 2/3 or more, don’t realize that they’re going to be required to provide written content to me in the course of their web design project. I’m not sure where this mistaken belief comes from, because most web sites I’ve seen have some amount of content (<sarcasm>) but as a rule the more complex or obscure their business, the less I’m going to be able to write on their behalf. I’m willing to take a stab at any topic, but I’m not a _______ (insert your favorite technical specialty here) and won’t pretend to be.

It’s important to me that content be accurate and credible (it’s important to Google too, btw). When my client is an expert in his/her field, they will write for me, whether that’s a talent of theirs or not. I can clean up bad writing, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m an authority in a complicated field with which I have little or no familiarity. It’s just not an efficient use of my time or the client’s money.