Hey people! My blog posts are often multi-faceted, and this one is no different…

First off, for anyone that’s interested, I wanted give a peek at this new website I’m working on; albeit intermittently. It’s called Laughtr (tongue firmly in cheek) and the original idea was my dad’s.

Be warned that this is very much in the bug-infested mockup stage of evolution, but hopefully you can envisage the idea - to put a smile on people’s faces by infectious laughter!

I can’t decide whether to do the back end in Drupal or write it from scratch. Leaning towards the latter. There’s a list of things to implement when I get around to it, such as encoding/downsampling with LAME, ID3 information, not to mention all the front end sound management (which is more complicated than I originally thought). There’s a bit of a right-click menu for adding/deleting laughs from the playlist but Opera stupidly doesn’t allow right-click overriding (funnily enough, IE handles it the best) - so might scrap it or go with a delayed, on-hover menu. But if you have any cool ideas for this site, please let me know!

Second facet…

A friend of mine (who works in a print shop) had a client that needed a logo for her dental clinic - 32 Dental Clinic. So I had a play around in photoshop for 10 minutes and sent it back to her. And voila, they want to use it! Came as a bit of a welcome surprise. Anyway, here’s what scored me a free dental checkup:

Calling all people who enjoy breaking things! Never had a chance to register that elusive username that someone always seemed to nab before you?

Now you can! My latest web project, another web forum, needs beta testers. So come create an account and try to break as many functions as you can, by using the old totally-unexpected-user-behaviour pattern. I’ll even give you a cookie (oh god, that was a terrible pun). Judging by the number of comments on this site, I don’t expect to get inundated but one or two people would work well.

It’s affiliated the main site, Landscaping Connections (that I didn’t build but have had the pleasure of fixing bugs in), to include a forum for people to talk about landscaping-related design and things. The backend is the wonderful, lightweight bbpress (made by the same team that created Wordpress). But bbpress is still essentially beta and I’ve heavily modified the frontend (and some of the functions and redirects) - so I’m hoping everything is rock solid. Next goal is to populate it since no-one wants to be the first person at the party…think I’ll leave that to someone else.

And now for something completely different…
I was browsing Slideshare the other day and found some really interesting presentations on there. Here’s two of them, check ‘em out:

• Light Up Your Brand - A great presentation on effective advertising, marketing products and the web’s strengths in word-of-mouth and viral. Ah, aren’t human behaviours so predictable.
• 7 Reasons why most conversations are a waste of time - Satirical but so true. Most people are so busy talking they don’t ever listen. So on that note, I’ll let you find out on your own.