Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

“It’s been three weeks in the making but finally it’s arrived! Afrigator Alpha-0.2 has officially been launched on our live server so head on over to see what we’ve been up to. We really wanted this release to be a big one and I think we have achieved just that. Not only have we given you new functionality but we’ve rewritten the entire aggregator and stats system from the ground up to be slicker, more improved and to allow to create new and exciting functionality.”

If that teaser isn’t enough to get you over to Afrigator, nothing will. Justin and Stii have been working flat out for the past few weeks and the work they have done in such a short time frame is mind boggling. I am so proud to be working with these gurus on such an exciting, first of a kind African project.

Hurry on over to Afrigator and have a play. Most importantly let us know what you think of Alpha 0.2!

Read more about the new features on the Afrigator blog.

Last week I attended the “Future of Web Design” conference in Kensington, London. The event was a one day dream conference for anyone that loves web design and is passionate about the internet. It was packed full of bright, diverse designers, marketers and business mavericks. The purpose of this post is not to attempt to summarise the brilliant talks I heard, but rather to explain why I think the conference was a great success.

A good looking, usable website

The “Future of Web Design”, as the title of the conference says, was all about the future of web design and internet startups, hence the website actually marketing the event had to portray that very professionally. The website was web standards compliant, allowed for easy online purchasing of tickets, had pretty little badges that bloggers wanted to show off on their blogs, and brilliant content that gave an exact indication of who was speaking and about what. After you were registered for the event you had access to “The Lounge”, a backend website that allowed you to update your profile with exactly who you were and what work you did. You could view all the attending designers, business owners and marketers and their personal details and arrange to meet up with them at the event at a click of a button, a great social networking feature.

Once the conference was sold out you could still arrange to buy the CD that was going to be made of the event, with all the podcasts, slideshows and videos of the speakers. You wouldn’t miss a thing.

Great Location

The “Future of Web Design” conference was held in the Kensington Conference Centre. It was big and modern, in central London so easily accessible, equipped with comfy chairs, a massive projector screen, and lots of toilets.

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Finally, Flickr have launched some new functionality to their system that Flickr users have been begging for since it’s launch. Collections.

via the Flickr blog:

Today we launched what’s probably the most requested feature over the last few years: a way to categorize and organize your photo sets! In the past this feature has been referred to as “sets of sets” or “subsets”. After today, we’ll know it as “collections”.

What are collections, you ask? A collection is a container into which you can place either sets or other collections, allowing you to create a hierarchy as deep as 5 collections. You can place as many of your sets into a collection as you like, and a set can be in as many different collections as you like.

Collections get a spiffy new “mosaic” icon to represent them, like the one you see on the right. You can allow Flickr to auto-generate your collection mosaics, or you can create them yourself using any of your photos.

This means I can now have a “travels” collection, with my different travel destination sets within it. I cannot contain my excitement.

You probably don’t care one bit about what I am saying here, but for those of you Flickr Pro geeks I’m sure you’re as happy as pie. I see that Coda has discovered this already and implemented it on his Flickr page. Thanks for sharing the news with us Damien ;)

Taking a break from Photoshop I stumbled upon a gem of an article showing you exactly how to manipulate Google into giving you free music. That’s right free music. Well sort of.

All you have to do is enter this bit of code into your Google search box, change the band name between the apostrophes from “Nirvana” to whatever you are wanting and hit that enter key.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana"

You will be displayed a bunch of open indexes, including downloadable .wma and .mp3 files. Try it for yourself.

The dude who actually worked this out can be found here. I’m not responsible for any of this, I just thought I should tell you about it, so that you can frown upon it too.