Flavors.me

Flavors.me (or should I say Flavours.me for those of us from the British Isles), is a very simple, well designed website which enables you and me to create a sleek looking homepage with relative ease.  The whole premise is simplicity, but it's simple with a spark.  And if like me you have various online accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn etc, then Flavors.me can become the core of your online presence.  Also, for those with their own websites, it could be designed to be a striking front page for visitors to launch onto other pages.  It's almost perfect -- with the only flaw being picture uploading.  This is because once your picture is uploaded to the site it will either be too big causing it to automatically zoom in far too much into one spot (which can only be adjusted very slightly); or it will be too small and the picture won't cover all of the page.  With a limited knowledge of picture resizing and a lot of experimenting, I managed to find a width of 1450 pixels to be just about right.  

In this day and age of complicated technology, it is refreshing to see simplicity as a key feature here.  If you would like to see the end result of a Flavors.me homepage, here is the one I designed yesterday:  http://flavors.me/laowaichris 

Illustrating Twitter

Since returning home to the UK in late March, I began using the 'micro-blogging' site Twitter.  More than one year earlier I had jumped on the band wagon to see what all the fuss was about.  I was just about getting to grips with it, when after a couple of weeks, I was cut-off.  That's right, Twitter is another of the many websites to be blocked off by the Great Firewall of China.

So it wasn't until coming back to England that I had the chance to use the site again.  After much experimenting, I have found that Twitter can be a great source of real-time news.  Following friends, news agencies, people of influence, and even celebrities, allows you to have a constant stream of up-to-the-second news at your fingertips.  And with added extras such as paper.li you can have a custom-made daily newspaper created for you just from the people you follow and the subjects they link to.   That is not to say there is a fair share of pointless babble on the site, but alas, I am addicted.

There is also a powerful search function where you can search for any topic imaginable and see what people are saying about it.  It also means anybody can stumble across your Twitter feed.  It just so happened a couple of creative people came across my feed a few weeks ago when I was writing, what I thought was a throw away tweet, about the Large Hadron Collider being turned up to 11 for the first time (here is the news story if you can't remember).  They transformed this Tweet into an illustration: 

I was incredibly amused and taken aback by this.  To take one sentence and transform it into a hilarious illustration like this is the kind of creativity I am hugely enviable of.  The people behind this picture are Irkafirka, and every day they will choose one tweet out of the seemingly endless supply of 140 character messages to illustrate.  It is a lovely idea, and one which I hope will continue for a long time to come.

If you are on Twitter, or even if you aren't, then feel free to follow me for real-time drivel from yours truly:  http://twitter.com/laowaichris  And if you would like to see more tweets transformed into illustrations, then you can follow Irkafirka:  http://twitter.com/irkafirka