I’ve been a student at Adelaide University on and off for the last 5 years. During this time, I’ve been consistently underwhelmed by the quality of imagery, editing and design that has gone into our local student magazine, On Dit. While there have been some exceptions, and the content has occasionally been fresh and interesting, the magazine’s presentation has always been a little lacking.

It’s election week again at Adelaide, and everyone knows what that means. Walking across the Hughes Plaza, trying to get to a computer room so you can desperately hammer out that last-minute tutorial paper, you’re guaranteed to be spear-tackled by no less than 5 campaigners, literally frothing at the mouth in anticipation of getting your sweet, sweet vote.

Playing around with a sketchbook doodle. There’s somewhere else I want to go with this, but I don’t have a lot of time at the moment so it’ll have to wait. I think it’d make quite a nice print. Check the full post for a larger version and a variation. Made with Photoshop and Flash.

The textures I used are from CG Textures, and are available for both personal and commercial use. It’s a great site.

I recently coded a feature into my blog that automatically displays post thumbnails using the custom fields capability in WordPress. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought, and although my initial method was a little clumsy, I’ve streamlined it using a few pointers from this Tutorial9 article.

Custom fields are a useful way to quickly add information that is common to all your posts and pages without having to re-enter it every time. They’re very flexible, and have a lot of different applications. If you’d like to read an overview of the concept, Justin Tadlock explains it pretty succinctly.

Taking my latest post as an example, before implementation of the custom field thumbnail, the entry looks like this on both the blog index and the individual post page:

I would venture to say that YouTube is probably a website most people who use the internet have found themselves at on more than one occasion. Bearing this in mind, it’s good to see them using their wide audience to help make the jobs of everyone developing for the web easier.

I’m referring of course to the large advertising banner displayed when you visit the site with an older browser, urging you to upgrade your decrepit software to a contemporary version. The browsers it suggests are:

• Firefox 3.5
• Google Chrome
• Internet Explorer 8

I’m currently working on a small-scale project for a client which is based on increasing their visibility through social media and syndication. In short, I’m linking their RSS feeds with Twitter, and providing an increased number of ways to access their existing content. A side-effect of this is the possibility of monetising their currently naked RSS feeds through the use of FeedBurner’s AdSense integration (thanks to Google’s acquisition of the service).

The services I’m using to accomplish this are: