Tales of a Designer

Finally Using Tumblr

I’ve known about Tumblr since its release, and though it seemed like an interesting service, I didn’t feel that I had a need for it at first. A few weeks ago I signed up for it and poking around the dashboard (which has a great interface) I realized that I possibly had a use for it.

I wanted a place to consolidate my activities online between my three blogs (this one, personal blog, and the Tridea blog), Twitter, and my Del.icio.us links which are imported below in the Distractions section. Aside from those, I also wanted a place to to post media that isn’t necessarily design/development related, which is what my Del.icio.us links are limited to to keep within context of the content on this site. But I also find other interesting stuff that is not always related to design, so I not only want to keep a log these things, but maybe others could find it interesting as well. Tumblr gives me the chance to do that and bring all of my interests to one location.

So I purchased a domain name to use for my Tumblr account, which is johnwphillips.com, and though I’ve only been using it for a couple days, I am liking it so far.

Do you use Tumblr? If so, how do you like it, and how do you use it?

Twitter in Plain English

If you’re like me, you’ve had quite a challenge at trying to explain Twitter to people, especially non-tech people. Well I just came across a video from Common Craft explaining Twitter. It’s a great resource when trying to explain the site, and they do a whole lot better job at explaining than I would. So, enjoy, because you might need to send this video to others…

Freelance Switch

When starting off with freelancing, I constantly scoured the web for good resources and tips to help me out in freelancing. I was so naive to the business that I needed all the help that I could get. Of course, now that I feel fairly established, I find one of the best resources I’ve ever seen.

Freelance Switch has only been around for a handful of weeks, but the amount of good content and resources that they’ve put out since they launched is really amazing. It only took reading one post of theirs to become a subscriber. And most feeds that I subscribe to, I don’t read every single post, but for this site, I find myself visiting almost daily.

a Community & Resource for freelancers of all varieties – designers, writers, programmers, illustrators, photographers …

I normally bookmark links that I find useful, but I was bookmarking so many of their posts that I figured I might as well do a quick write up about them. So if you’re a freelancer of any sort, it would be worth your time to go visit Freelance Switch. It might be one of the best resources on the web for freelancers, and being so new, there is a ton of potential for growth. You might even find a job there!