Sociosophy

In light of boasting about Firefox’s great extensions, why not follow up with WordPress plugins that treat us right. Sociosophy isn’t the only blog we’ve stood up over the years; in fact, this is just one of the dozens of WordPress websites Sociosophy’s sponsor, Aten Studios, has created. As I’m the owner of that as well, here’s a little list of things I found that rock.

I also encourage you to leave a comment of your favorite WordPress plug-in, especially if you’re a developer of your own. We like finding new toys to play with at Sociosophy, give us things to mess with! Please?

In no particular order: (more…)

At Sociosophy we spend quite a bit of time not only using the web, but developing and designing parts of it. Part of our passion and reason for our quest is not only to find neat things on the Interwebs, but to also maintain that drive and motivation from other great ideas we witness every day in exploring new technologies, new ideas, and… you get the idea.

As Web Developers and Web Designers, we find certain things you just gotta get for your Firefox browser to extend it’s capabilities and make you that much better at doing what you do.

The assumption here is that if you’re a developer/designer, you use Firefox. Chances are if you do any web development, you either have access to, or use, more than one browser to test your work… If you don’t? Shame! Go download stuff. (more…)

So, I’m writing this post on “Most Excellent Firefox Plug-ins EVER!” and I go to send it off to be proof read, open my browser, and to my surprise? A new iGoogle layout, and it’s MUCH better.

First, the left hand navigation doo-dad. All of your widgets are presented in a neat, tidy menu for you to enjoy, and interact with. Our first notice was GMAIL, which is now a totally sweet, and integrated piece of iGoogle when you select it. So no more being thrown off your iGoogle page when you’re going to GMAIL. (more…)

I’m going to preface this video with a short review. YouTube’s compression techniques are HORRIBLE. Unless you’re willing to wait for a 1.5GB file to upload, you’re stuck hopelessly fighting the interlaced machine. It’s no wonder Aten Syndicate switched to Vimeo for client videos, if they tried to show’m their stuff on YouTube, they’d get laughed at.

Alas, YouTube’s not for that, we know, but – Integrity? Sociosophy’s switching to Vimeo as well for in-post videos. We’ll still put’m on YouTube, but still. Wow – this is ick.

My heavens! What’s this? … Really, what’s this you’re reading? A negative review about a site! I’ve only done this once before and have since re-reviewed the site I reviewed poorly and gave it a much better standing based on their improvements, let’s see how I do here.

Zeadoo. Okay, first off, if I made watercraft? I’d kick these guys all the way to the US patent office for trademark infringement, but they’re not, and I’m not, so I believe they’re safe from any seizures, lawsuits, etc. But they’re not safe from Sociosophy.

I’m very forgiving with new sites, betas, hell… I even find the good in sites that barely have any. But something about Zeadoo pissed me off, and it’s simple. Too much bull to get to your shit.

I watched the Zeadoo video, created an account – let’s face it, it looked pretty straight forward in their demo. It’s a whole other story once you’re in there though. If you’ve ever used StumbleUpon, Delicious, Magnol.ia… hell even your own Bookmarking feature in your browser, you’ll loath Zeadoo. The cumbersome and tedious process of data entry for all your bookmarks, even with a bookmarking Firefox plug in, make this site remind me of hand input data record days back at my first tech job.

Perhaps a remedy will be to allow imports of favorites from other sites, but even still, adding new ones is simply too many steps. Bad UI planning, damn it. Interacting with them via the “Dashboard” is also simply too much… My attention span on the Nowternet is about || < that short, and like I said, I’m a nice guy on the net looking for the good in sites.

Zeadoo, your logo is pretty, the concept is nice – it’s not new – but you guys have GOT to look at your market before you design something more complicated than any other solution like yours out there. Especially this late in the game.