willw.net

As the VP Marketing/Creative for the MISA Club at the Telfer School of Management, I managed the project of building a new website for MISA. After a lot of design revisions and scrapping various drafts throughout the summer, the new website is now live.

The design combines my own designs with fantastic graphics by Mark Dunkley, former VP Creative of MISA, and graphic work by Sian Davies. Since I was starting from scratch on the website, I took the opportunity to base the website on a CMS that will remain useful to MISA many years down the road. I chose WordPress for this because of the great plugins and rapid advancement of the platform. Another benefit to WordPress is the excellent iPhone apps that are available for site management on the go.

Right now the website is pretty bare, but I hope to be flushing out the many event pages soon. Have a look and let me know what you think in the comments! While you are at it, check out TelferBooks.com too (Blog post on that coming soon.)

MISA Homepage

Montreal Trip

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Google Reader added a way to share posts in a number of other services, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, they offer a way to build your own custom links right into Google Reader. Upon seeing this, I immediately thought of making an Instapaper link so I can read posts later on my iPhone.

Here is how I did it:

• In Google Reader, go to Settings and click to the Send To tab
• Hit “Create Custom Link”
• Enter a name, I used “Instapaper”
• For the URL enter this, but replace YOURUSERNAME with your username:

https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username=YOURUSERNAME&url=${url}&title=${title}

• If you have a password, put this instead (Replace with your password):

https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username=YOURUSERNAME&password=YOURPASSWORD&url=${url}&title=${title}

• You don’t have to use an image, but if you would like to, feel free to use mine:

http://www.willw.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/instapaper.png

• If it is working, a new tab will pop up with “201″ each time to send an item to Instapaper.

There are many other services that this could work for too.

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Or so TechCrunch seems to think. Reading TechCrunch for the past month I have noticed one thing, they have found a way to link to their story about Bit.ly Now almost everyday.

Bit.ly is definitely an interesting service. The company has raised $2 million to create a service that dead simple to duplicate – so they must have something up their sleeve!

The theory TechCrunch is pushing is that Bit.ly is going to create a news service to rival websites such as Digg, called Bit.ly Now. Currently they have a Twitter account called Bit.ly Now that tweets the most clicked Bit.ly link of the hour. I have been following this account for the last month and have actually found it useful. Although most of the links are irrelevant to me, I have found two things that I would have missed if it were not for Bit.ly Now.

I am very interested to see where Bit.ly goes with this concept. This month I am actually about to begin a project that will integrate with Bit.ly’s services through their API.

Stay tuned for much more on Bit.ly in the coming weeks.

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UPDATE FEB 15, 2010: It has landed, check out Meebo for iPhone!

Meebo was quick to release a webapp for the iPhone before native iPhone apps were allowed. Now that the App Store has been open for over a year, why is Meebo still a no show?

They demoed the app at the iPhone 3.0 presentation months ago (YouTube video embedded below), but have yet to release it. Meanwhile, apps like eBuddy and Nimbuzz are beating Meebo to the market with acceptable, but not great, free multi network IM applications that support push notifications.

I have been waiting over a year for this app. As a diehard user of Meebo on my PC and Mac, I really want to continue holding out for Meebo to finally release the Meebo iPhone app, but how long do they expect us to wait? At this point I am sure most iPhone users have dropped $5-$10 on an app like BeeJive or IM+ or are using the free ones like eBuddy. Either way, will there be anyone left when Meebo finally hits the App Store?

Seth Sternberg, Meebo’s CEO, said they were waiting for push notifications because they did not want to release a less than satisfactory app. Push notificaitons are here, so what is the hold up? My hope is that Meebo has recognized they are horribly late to the game and are putting in a big effort to include some innovative features that the competition are lacking.

If they don’t impress everyone when they finally release, I can’t see many people switching over to Meebo (unless they are already using Meebo on their computers like I do).

UPDATE: TheAppleBlog posted a review of a number of iPhone IM apps, although they left off my two favourites – Nimbuzz and eBuddy

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