Jordi Romkema

It has been an amazing two weeks full of sun, snow and fun in Salt Lake City and Park City. Utah truly has the greatest snow on earth. We arrived back in The Netherlands early Sunday morning and it has been raining ever since, go figure! Back home to work again... I'll place the pictures of the trip on Flickr very soon, just need to sort them out first because we made around 800 of them. Probably not all of them are that interesting.

Oh and I would like to get back to the greater SLC area and stay there! So if anyone has a job offer in the area... I can only imagine: work during the week and skiing in the weekends! Ahhhh, dreams dreams dreams...

Almost time for my vacation! This time tomorrow I'll be sitting in a chair on an airplane to Atlanta and then after a quick stop-over I'm off to Salt Lake City! Two weeks of sun, snow and skiing in ski resorts such as Park City, Alta, Brighton, Solitude, Snowbasin, Powder Mountain... ah I can't wait!

So in the coming weeks I probably won't update my blog, unless the weather is terrible but hopefully that won't happen. See you in two weeks!

Oh meanwhile, Nokia Trends Lab is being held in our MTV studio's later this evening. It's an event about mobile technology where you can experience it hands-on. It's being presented by MTV, looks promising so far...

Finally the two Nickelodeon sites I mentioned earlier (See: New Nickelodeon sites to launch in 14 days...) have launched succesfully today. You can see them at www.nickelodeon.nl and www.nickelodeon.be, both sites are obviously only in Dutch. Screenshots and more information will follow... but for now, have a piece of cake:

For more pictures, check my Flickr photostream.

Nickelodeon will launch two brand new websites in February in The Netherlands and in Belgium. At nickelodeon.nl and nickelodeon.be the characters and presenters kids see on television will come to life and they can really join in on the action with the innovative new tool called the Cartoon Creator. With the Cartoon Creator the kids are the director of their own SpongeBob Squarepants cartoon. They create the cartoon, animate the actors, change the background music, create the story, in other words: The kids are in charge. Their own cartoon can be just as good as the one you see on television!

Apart from the Cartoon Creator, the website will get a more interactive and social feel. Kids want to be entertained obviously, but on the Internet they especially want to experience something, do something and share it with other kids. That's why there are lots of new options such as weblogs of the presenters, send-a-friend, a new highscore system for games, interactive photo albums, TurboNick (Nickelodeon's video-on-demand player) and the Cartoon Creator. The kids can also create their own myNick page which is a private page where they can manage their favorite Nick games and videos and will always be able to rediscover their own creations.

Also special about the new site is its launch. On February the 20th the site will go down in the morning. From 2 o' clock in the afternoon we trust on all the kids in The Netherlands and in Belgium to help get the new site live. All of the kids who will visit either nickelodeon.nl or nickelodeon.be will be able to answer questions about different Nickelodeon characters. Each correct answer will help to get closer to the end result: piece by piece puzzle pieces will appear with each amount of correct questions from all the kids. If all the puzzle pieces have appeared the site will be accessible for everyone!

Obviously the sites will have Dutch content only but I still wanted to share it because this has been my project since September 2007. Only 14 days to go!

It's easy to turn on the TV and get bombarded with ringtone commercials. I normally create my own ringtones from downloaded mp3's with Adobe Audition, but I understand that for the average phone user it's not that simple and they have to get them elsewhere. Some of you pay for your ringtones, but why pay if you can get it for free? That's probably the same thing the creators of Nakko.com thought when they launched their site. On Nakko you can download not only free ringtones but also wallpapers, movies and games.

When you are a registered member you can add stuff in your locker which you can download later on. When you download ringtones you can send it to your phone with a text message. Or you can download the ringtone to your computer first and then send it with Bluetooth or a connection cable to your phone. It seems like you can only download WMA files so I had to convert them to MP3 first for my phone, but it worked and with just a few clicks I had about 20 ringtones on my phone! Check out my profile on Nakko.

Uploading your own stuff is fairly easy and intuitive with the Nakko editor. You upload your mp3 file and then you can drag markers to the part of the song you want to create a ringtone from. I suspect the ease of uploading and downloading content attracts a lot more people in the future and Nakko will become very successful.

Today I stumbled upon the portfolio of Melissa Hie. When I first saw the entry page I wasn't really that impressed but when I clicked the "Ready, Go!" button I was hooked to this site! When you click the Go button the screen slides away and the next screen comes up. Looking under the hood, it's a pretty simple but impressive combination of CSS and Javascript that enables these slide animations from screen to screen. It's a technique that made me say to myself "Why haven't I thought of that?", which happens multiple times a day

The design is excellent, just wish there was more content. But it's a portfolio and it will obviously grow in time since Melissa Hie is a very skillful developer/designer. I added some screenshots below but it is best when you experience it yourself

Now I was already familiar with Seeqpod and Songza where you can find music with just a few clicks, but today I stumbled upon Songerize. It's basically a search engine for music, just like Seeqpod and Songza, however it has virtually no options and plays the song you are looking for automatically if it's found. Easy to use if you're looking for a song in a hurry with just one click and that's the main reason why I like it.

I thought it just said volume 1 for fun but it turns out there are more follow-ups to You Suck at Photshop. Absolutely brilliant comment: You've only been using $75 worth of Photoshop.

Oh and the ring of infinite sorrows from tutorial #4 is actually on eBay!

Web Designer Wall has an interesting article that explains how to create a gradient effect over plain text headings in CSS. The effect is really easy to recreate and works in most browsers including Internet Explorer 6. Absolutely brilliant, why haven't I thought of this?

I don't really like the style of the standard Xbox Live Gamercard. It's cool and all but I'd like to personalize it so it fits the design of my site, the standard Gamercard however does not. I searched for solutions to create my own Gamercard. I found some such as MyGamerCard where you can customize your own Gamercard but only limited to certain preconfigured styles. I figured there would be some sort of public API by Microsoft where I could just pull the data from and display it in a neat way, only to find out you have to be an official Xbox Community Developer to get access to this API. Bummer!

Then I came across Xbox Live Nation where the main developer, who has access to the official Xbox Gamercard API, created his own API which is public. With this Xbox Live Nation Gamercard API I created my own Xbox Live Gamercard and some of you have emailed me wondering how I did this. Therefore I wrote a little tutorial explaining it step-by-step so you can recreate it yourself with your own design. Read the rest... »