Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Everything good or interesting I have found lately – loosely organised. And a photo I took recently.

Social Media and Web Design

Darren Rowse talks about how churches should use Social Media

Robin Good on Website Accessibility: How To Make Your Website Highly Accessible And Standards-Compliant. Article written by Drazen Dobrovodski.

Add Facebook Plugins to your Blog

From Digital Inspiration - Zero to a Million Users. Adam Smith and Drew Houston, founders of two successful Internet startups – Xobni and Dropbox – share secrets that helped their products win two million users in two years with mostly word-of-mouth marketing and no advertising spend.

Today I am focussed on clearing out my browser from all the interesting things sitting there. No real organisation to this post – its just a link dump.

• Smashing Magazine useful web design information
• Feeling “Blogged Out?” [10 Pro Bloggers Share Their Advice on What to Do]
• David Willersdorf’s blog
• Australian Institute of Professional Photography
• Judith wrote up the story of last weekend’s DirtFest Adventure on her blog
• My photos from the Salomon Tre-X Triathlon – I was the official photographer for the day
• Results from the DirtFest and Triathlon on the in2adventure website. I got 24th from 32 entrants in my class and 43rd overall.
• Internet Explorer 9 is coming and you can test drive it. It might even be standards compliant!
• Australian students rejoice – you can get Office 2007 with a free upgrade to Office 2010 for only $75.
• Likewise any purchases of Office 2007 now are available with a free upgrade to Office 2010.
• Judith’s team is entered in the Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney – a 100km endurance walk challenge.
• Taking photos with motion blur
• Importing text files in Excel 2007

And I will leave you with some of my best photos from the Triathlon.

I use a tag in my delicious account to identify sites that I want to share. I forgot. Here is a bunch of websites from back in January and February.

Blog and web design advice and tools from Virtual Hosting

• No More Comment Spam! 46+ Free Tools and Resources to Stop Blog Spammers
• Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

Skelliwag’s blogging advice

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.