What does Marsellus Wallace look like?

You have probably already seen this version of the famous ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like?‘-part of the cult movie Pulp Fiction… But did you know about this one?

That’s the number one reason to have a Google Wave account, right there.

Interactive freerunning game on Youtube

You’ve probably seen those interactive Youtube games but I kinda love this one (because it let’s me be that cool guy that does those crazy moves without breaking all of his bones!)
Check it out!

I’ve said it for a long time, just didn’t quite make my point

I just finished reading an article on Drawar.com about how Smashing Magazine killed the community. I have been thinking about what you’re about to read for some time now but it never occurred to me that Smashing Magazine was one of the reasons why everything changed.

Let’s start in the beginning (because there’s a lot of things to cover here).
I’ve been reading Smashing Magazine for more than 2 years now. I started reading in their very early days as ‘Smashing Magazine’ (Before, it was a smaller online magazine with a different name).

They actually caught my eye with very very interesting articles that focussed on one topic. Every article covered ways to do things and things you shouldn’t do, in a very specific aspect of (web) design.  That content was of great value since it was on-topic and very high-end.
However Smashing Magazine’s content  not only caught my eye… Lots of people started reading it on a regular basis and subscribing to the RSS feeds. That’s when they really started making money, and therefor stopped actually writing ‘real’ articles and started going down the ‘lists‘ road. At that point, it only took me about 2 weeks to stop caring about Smashing Magazine (besides when they linked me). I still check the site every now and then, but honestly: If an article starts with a number I don’t even read the rest of the title. It’s all they’ve been doing ever since…

The worst part: Lots of other site have been doing it too, just because Smashing Magazine prove the concept works. I myself have only published 1 single post like that in the 2 years I’ve been blogging. And hell: I’m proud of it!
And the more I actually talk to other people about this issue, the more I realize the very people we write for think the same way. They don’t want a list of whatever. They want your secrets. They want to know why you did something the way you did it. They want to know why you prefer ketchup instead of mayonaise. They want a personal opinion. If they want a list, they’ll just Google whatever it is they need. Google lists everything by default anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

My latest project: Walter Ego

Some of you guys already knew, but only 2 weeks ago I finished my latest project: WALTER EGO.
Walter Ego is a Dutch rapper who happens to live in Nieuwpoort.

A few months back, Walter contacted me, and we started brainstorming about the new website. At some point he told me that I should make this website my masterpiece…

If you’d die now, this is what people should remember you for...

Well… At least expectations weren’t high, right?

A year ago I built the first edition of this website, which was pretty basic. Back then I used ColdFusion to build the administration panel. This time I built it using PHP.
I have to say that this project clearly improved my PHP skills. While I was building the backend, I was focusing on modular development, so I could reuse a lot of the written code. A lot of people suggested using the ZendFramework but since I’ve been looking into this a few times without making any progress, I just skipped that chapter (after all: we’re all bound by deadlines ) and went on developing my own framework (‘framework’ might be slightly exaggerating though). Read the rest of this entry »